Truth: Helplessness

There is a reason we wear winter coats.

There’s frost on the ground
And we’re not through October.
I know, I know
The world’s getting colder.

There is a reason we wear winter coats.

Truth: What is left for us these days?

What is there left to talk about now?
After you left me
In your Model-T-turned-SUV
That coursed through blossoming
Interstates, highway signs, overhead lights
Reeds in bloom.

What is there left to think about now?
After viruses ran amuck
From your mother and father
Across the veins where your lifeblood
Feasted on the half-life that called out to it
In green neon.

Where is there left to go now?
After your companions
Are all explored with cold steel
And miracle-machines that we saw
Tracing lines across the sky in wonder
Late at night.

There’s a pile of wood
And broken glass,
Embers flying from a long-dead fire
In the suburbs.

Kick it, stir the dormant carbon
Into some (any!) kind of motion.
But if stagnation has set in
Settle down, and
Just move on.

That’s all that’s left to say.

Deception: And I Thought I Heard A Girl Crying

Step in, slowly
The cloudy tungsten night
Still lingering

Heading home
You tell the machine
And it lurches upward.

But through the vignettes
In the crack in the door
I hear echoes from different times
Jump back
and forth
in the
elevator
shaft.

Little laughs from
Me, as a child.

With dreams out in orbit,
A self-portrait
With a camera around my
Neck.

The doors slide open
And it's the
Dim
Yellow light
Of the unfortunate
Present.

The camera slides off
My bed
As I crawl in.