280218A
-----------
Sweeping up the pieces
of broken concentration,
passing restless time.
Feeling as if I missed it all,
the way someone is feeling
who missed the last train,
on the last day,
at the last station.
I never really understood
those strange waves goodbye,
returning the status quo
to everyone being strangers.
That way the job seems done:
a handful of dirt,
on the face of a coffin,
being the way it all goes down.
Maybe the only real words
are inscriptions on monuments,
providing misleading histories,
that no one needs to question,
or remember.
Disavow any knowledge,
about everyone being caught
and captured somewhere.
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280218B
-----------
We only feel our own loss,
when no one else feels a thing.
We like to make believe
that we are not completely alone.
Marks on the walls of a cave,
where our shadows danced.
Does anything see light of day
out of that much darkness?
We think we know,
but it comes to nothing much.
Identities are candy hearts,
that melt away in the rain.
Something seemed as important,
as details sometimes do
until a chance interruption,
breaks the rhythms of habit.
The preamble done,
there is no agreement on the body,
lacunae and erasures
seem all that is left.
It is never what was wanted,
but it was what you got.
Chalk it up to playing games
you never learned to play.
For some love is that way,
becoming a bad word,
they do not want to talk about:
disputing new definitions.
-------------------------------
280218C
------------
Never felt as scattered,
to the four winds,
missing so many unknown parts.
Never felt so blown away
in nights that seem to last for days.
Too many categories of wanting
to attempt a definitive catalogue
amid miscellaneous attempts
to put it all aside,
while learning to fail.
Regretting not spending
more on trivial pursuits,
to not feel squandered
by what took the time,
to wear it all out.
A bad way to go,
to wherever one is going to.
The destinations all feel wrong,
and following direction,
means falling off the map.
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280218D
------------
Is this the final funk
to end all funks ?
Nothing popular,
that you would want to take home
from where you found it.
The way you might take on
some sort of stray.
Where I came from
someone might have,
but not here:
not anymore.
Here everything is sanitized,
and scrubbed,
until it becomes shiny.
That is where it ends for me,
but at least that is honest
and without expectations.
Let's get away,
from each other,
forgetting it happened,
so we can pretend at being free.
I am as stray as they come,
bent in all the wrong ways
from trying to make do
with what some think right.
It all goes wrong,
when you do it that way,
without real blessings.
Was it by design
that we chanced there?
Let's maintain abstraction,
and not become that specific.
Call it an unfortunate episode,
where destinies met,
to go separate ways.
Repeat that as often
as might be necessary,
until one blurs away
into the other,
and the incident reports
all read the same:
leaving blanks for names.
280218E
-----------
It is easy to be alone,
when you least want to be.
It is hard to be with someone
when you most want to be.
I doubt it gets any better than that.
Nothing can ever measure up
to those powers of imagination:
that dreams were once made of.
Everything has changed so much,
it all seems remarkably the same:
and I cannot dream of anyone I want,
no matter how hard I try.
We are at our very best
when set up to confusing each other:
inventing what we assume are new ways
to inflict the same old types of pain.
As stuck in the same old circles,
as a snappy old rubber band,
afraid of what might get in,
or what might come out of it all.
That is not what I thought
that any of it would come to,
when it came to anything,
but I was wrong about that too.
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