Coming up the stairs
Beauty catches the last
Glint of sunlight
Highlighting without meaning
That which had been seen

Before.

So different now
From this angle
Unrecognizable

But for that old and new feeling long since
And longed for
Yet rarely seen
This side of sunrise

Sun. Rise.

Was it sunset or sunrise
vowed to no longer be cried through
And yet

Not yet.

Old fears ensnare
Spiderwebs of building hopes
Hope as fragile as the spider
And often much more deadly

So they say.

Apparitions longed for
To bring back what?
Good old days…
Now just old tattered memories
Almost certainly inaccurate then
And but a charred decoration
On a last minute Xmas gift

Just because.

Because it’s been a hard year
And harder still to find that hope
Mingled among debris at the bottom
Of a borrowed shop vac

Hope longed for
But rarely found
Not in this light
Before sunrise

Sun. Rise.

The spider undeterred by life
Imagine that
Building hope right in that place
That hope was sucked from its dimension
Once reality
But instead only heart

All these long years.

And through a broken window
At the top of the stairs
In a new old place
Was a new new memory
Of a smile posed to change

Worlds.

And eyes with the warmth of sunsets
To heal
Hearts maybe, even.

How high can the sun rise
After so many sets backwards
And how many tears can be talked out of
Before they lose all meaning too
And what meaning is needed to feel

What this all means.

At the start of another rise
Another fall
Another climb

Up the stairs.

When you take a look, make sure to steal it, it’s the only true way to see 

I’m curious too

How many pages and how many peels until you reach the end of this road

The plot is a tangle of missed sunsets and overrated rainbows

Never as interesting as in imagination, and never as simple as in our hopes 

A house or a home I will ask you, but I don’t expect an answer 

Rather than miss another sunset, perhaps this time I wait 

To see what and who and where will find me 

After the storm has cleared and the chaos has been cashed 

After all the birthday cakes in the world have been burnt to ash, ate up, spit out, or whatever other end a birthday cake can imagine 

After the life cycle of a moth, there is another day for humans

Meet me with a kiss the day after moth day, in the moonlight

Of course. 

When you take a look, make sure to steal it, it’s the only true way to see 

I’m curious too

How many pages and how many peels until you reach the end of this road

The plot is a tangle of missed sunsets and overrated rainbows

Never as interesting as in imagination, and never as simple as in our hopes 

A house or a home I will ask you, but I don’t expect an answer 

Rather than miss another sunset, perhaps this time I wait 

To see what and who and where will find me 

After the storm has cleared and the chaos has been cashed 

After all the birthday cakes in the world have been burnt to ash, ate up, spit out, or whatever other end a birthday cake can imagine 

After the life cycle of a moth, there is another day for humans

Meet me with a kiss the day after moth day, in the moonlight

Of course. 

With each passing through a wave of light a ray of weightlessness sweeps in to pick up the pieces as you breathe keep breathing as if I could command this on will as if I could call all universal forces to dismantle that which is less than a dream to me now to me lifetimes have passed between you and I and lifetimes more will lament the undoing of the majikal the mythical the mythological the path, the PAST the pathological lies we tell ourselves to wind up the puppet strings like antique windows our will to arrive to keep arriving to show up while the world shows down and rise up as the people fall fail I am flailing as I raise this one last battle cry objection to that sickening quake within surging all the anti serotonin weaponry at hand to say unto you this I am not what I was and because of you who I will be hangs in suspended animation like an old friend, resurrected.

Wanting more, I stand in awe when they call me too much 

Too much or too little

always my titles 

WANTING

Is one of many mistakes I’ve made and when I think of unbearable I think of fear and when fear appears it comes in waves 

Of nausea and regret and potential memories 

memories’ potential and the Dow jones average of estimates on what percentage of this coming year will I fill with it all 

Ratios

potential memories halted

memories’ potential to haunt impossible

to eliminate the one too many 

feelings

that ache like danger

And I’ve never understood the reason

for math

And risk versus reward was always a non question of mine until I saw it from the other side of now 

from the thaumatrope future spinning off on some Baal’s whim

I see unclearly in the distance the last stretch of a bad trip, all those potential haunts based on my own brain and if that is not fear then I don’t know any of these words like I once convinced  myself I did 

Out of use

out of time

out of patience in the effort of trying to understand the over~evaluations and the crossed off lists of WANTING and the invented answers to why me ? go in and out of focus like the tired windshield wiper blades trying their hardest inside my brain to take away that which is too much or maybe

 it’s that I’ve been too little all along 

Kindness empathy love compassion connection belief trust hope WANTING meaning…  meaningles

crossed off the to~do list with finality

While human torture chamber syntaxes haunt me and memories threaten to and every new word spoken is the threat of a memory in infancy growing only to invade me unexpectedly as I step onto the red earth under skies I thought I knew. Once. 

What words will torment me nightly in the days I haven’t seen? and when has WANTING ever gotten me anywhere 

But here…

is where I decide what potential memories I can dispense before they poison my dreams and what ones just might be worth the pain 

Then 

Amid all the lost losses a year can bring,

happiness seems a betrayal

How dare you smile, after all?

After. All. This. Pain. 

This pain that has had to mean something,

or this year has meant nothing

Lives lost, never to be found on this side of forever

How can you smile when you can’t forget?

Where do you go to start again?

Illusions abound. I wait for them. In each and every moment, I look for them

And in many of these moments it seemed that she was one…

that she was just an illusion

For amid all the lost losses, what is there left to find?

Have we not used up all human emotion, these long days that stretch into months, as days do…

until they add up to a year, and then suddenly you look 

Eyes open now, the sky is telling you that after the last credit card is maxed out, and the last mishap of 2,021 has been added up…

Well. It tells you nothing. 

The sky is still there, and it is still beautiful, and yes there are changes. 

So many changes that you just can’t see any just by looking

Like most things, change is something you have to see by feeling…

and amid all the lost losses a year can bring

This is something I now know. 

All is never as it appears, and rarely as it is understood 

and sometimes on a clear night when the sky is extra loud with its opinions on those things lost and found and the change too excruciating to feel 

You can remember how much you will never know

And how long it took you to get here fades into insignificance, when you think of how far there is to go

For amid all the lost losses there are gifts being given 

They are different for everyone

And you will know when you get one

I cannot tell you the losses will fade, some scars are deeper than others

I cannot tell you which pieces of sky will fall today, and I cannot tell you when it will be your turn to breathe in the breath of a brand new place that is the closest feeling I know to starting over 

Until now.

Amid all the lost losses, amid all the storms, amid evil deeds and things people chalk up to things that make no sense,

This is where you will find it. 

There is beauty there, and there always will be

after all is lost 

and maybe 

even after we have lost the very definition of ourselves, 

pieces remain

The pieces that lie in wait, amid all the lost losses that make up a life…

they are different for everyone.

And you will know when you get one. 

I wish that I could travel back, sometimes

to the places of my youth

Grab the lawn chairs at least

A song or two

The Piano

The sayings that I only half rememeber now

taking on all new meanings as I replace the missing words

missing voices

missing smiles I once counted on

I wish that I could see them

here…

See them and hear them and this time I will not forget

I cannot

forget

just one. more. time.

I need assurance that they were real

All of them

All of these ghosts, the good and the bad, they are here, yes?

you see them too….

It is not also always easy to see through

The Tears

The Laughter

The Mistakes

The Stories

The Misunderstandings

Because I understand now

how time warps our roads

blurs our very best maps

clouds the eyes of mere human memory

In the meantime

I will continue to mis-quote my nanny

as I sip champagne

or Busch light

from this lawn chair

I borrowed from the neighbors.

I have no answers

and I need to stop asking

questions that make no difference and reveal nothing

life bleeds

into a tie dye mixture of all the wrong ways

staining my existence

a color I can no longer see…

that which no amount of moonlit bathing

will ever take away

in this world, I am branded

cursed

and worst of all stuck

between new risks and old hurts

and betrayal and hope

and I know that somewhere

in between

is likely what I have been searching for all these long

lost

and languished years

A tunnel bears no light, until it is too late.

My time

my chains

my self-induced persecution…

Reality wanes again

out of focus and out of practice and I mourn it

we may not cross paths again

in this life

I have no answers

and only a distant smile, likely in my imagination,

to follow

Super massive black hole loneliness

My daughter tells me, “at least you are good at it.”

One day, I will seek her wisdom.

Happiness
Comes in like a tornado
And out like a slaughtered lamb
In an Easter morning confessional

Tornado ruthless happiness
Some universe’s breath of emotion
That sweeps you off your feet

Before any shelter can be sought
Before any walls put up
Before the fear catches up with the beauty and before you realize it even

Where you might end up

This happiness cyclone rages
In an orange-purple sky and in her eyes
Eyes you got so lost in that they made your own eyes blind

To the danger of finding what you’ve searched for
Sifting through happy moments and the masquerade among them

Amongst us…

The tornado passes by, leaving quietly and carefully, the opposite of its arrival

Happiness dissolves, returns to the earth or the universe, or somewhere humans are incapable of seeing

Even in imagination

It leaves behind pain, and fear, and memories meant to haunt you

As you are left. As you were.

With echoes of each dying lamb reminding you of the life that began and ended, almost simultaneously

Ensuring that you know well, after all, how difficult it can be to keep breathing