Dearly Beloved

Dearly Beloved
We are gathered here
Doing what we best love at home
But to which we never get.
Fenced in by words, crawling like ants
Across the billions of pages
That flutter through the imagination.
Fibers are zinging through my fingers,
Love in each loop.
I'm going to treasure these hours, Beloved Ones,
Wishing for a small cottage instead of
A house of hallways
Where we get lost in the maze of everyday lives.

I Wish for the Impossible

Today I wander past store fronts,
Lost in faces,
And in my own clothes.
I wish for impossible things:
Wishing, would you believe, to stroke
The throat of a unicorn?
Wishing for the touch of your fingertips on my face
Without having to remind you
How that tenderness is the highest height.

I am lost today.
My body is hurting
And my grandfather's death
Has left me on a lonely ship
Churning confusion in its wake.
It leaves me seeing faces, set like dominoes,
His as the catalyst tilting forward.
Death.
Inevitable.
I will live to see them all fall down.

--------
My grandpa died on Friday last.
A polarizing figure in our family. I'm wading through my own sorrow and wrote this while wandering.

8 Hours More

I chase that wily thief: Time
My only weapon: a butterfly net
He slips through again
My nerves screech with desire
I have a small petition, if he'll only stop to listen
Four more for the day
Four more for the night
Just eight more hours to stretch each day
An infinite gift from such a small change
At nightfall, head nodding as I slump toward slumber,
I feel that dull indigestion of halted progression.
Eight more, please, to help me rule what is mine.

Remember Me in Fondness

I am a life-sized, cardboard stand-up.
Place me in the room sometime and speak of me aprés mort.
I hope your words are kind.
I hope you remember that I was kind and that,
At one time,
I fit in your world like a puzzle piece.
Do you speak of me, with a twinkle in your eye,
To your sister-in-law?
Do you think of me at all?
All those summers.
All those hand-worked secrets that took days
To divulge.
Not a day goes by, for me.
The one hearing the dial tone,
Seeing the empty mail box.
I think of you.

There are Times

There are times
When the soul
Settles, drifts into the depths
The colored like the impenetrable blues
Of an oceanic trench.

There is nothing to buoy it up
Pursuits seem empty
Things accomplished
Echo.
Hollow victories.

I can see the light shimmering on the surface
There is hope to be seen
All is not lost.
For now though, nothing propels me upward
Even the tides have no power to press me back and forth.