It’s November

We have used up

Our allotment of color for this year;

The pigment wells have run dry

Colors are draining from the landscape.

Inexorable fading

Among the maples after a drunken Halloween binge

The reds wither in unpicked apples or

Go into hiding –

Submerged as cranberries or

Crouching in the holly

Yellows and greens

Have more stamina but even they

Are sinking quickly, visibly, into the soil.

On a warm day

The blue sky

Is tepid and wan

And my energy filters

Down through my numb, wiggling toes

Chasing the colors

Flexing in hopes of priming the pump

Even as I succumb to the unfulfilled promise

Of a long winter’s nap.

November 2009

Hatch dreams

At the beach

But I have known

For a long time

That the beach

Is where dreams go to die

The wind and the water

They

Unravel

Everything

When the tangle of thought

And emotion

Is too tight

The beach is where I find them

Unspooling

That is where

I feel rage

And it dissipates in the wind

As I try to walk it off

And then

I think

No one will see how deep it runs in me

The beach

It has more broken things than whole ones

It sweeps what is fragile

Away

And dumps the remains back

Days weeks years

Later

Shells

Fish

Children

Societies

Refuse to treasure

Treasure to refuse

Paradise

To whom?

January 2005