Tag: poem

The city kept one trail of grace:
a station. For too long I knew
it tossed trains out of town each day;
like birds, caught countryside and flew.

I brought myself ‘longside the tracks
many a time before, in dreams,
but here in person I did stand,
and nothing real is as it seems.

My toes were poised on concrete edge
and reaching out t’wards humming trail
on which I knew the bird was trav’ling,
coming for my own avail.

And two oblivions were mine.
They stood a moment’s breath apart.
One came before the bird would do,
one came before again t’would start.

While both would end the city’s grasp –
dead streets that wrapped around my feet –
I stood uncertain even still
and contemplated which to meet.

The tunnel echoed promises.
The bird did come without delay.
Upon a breath, a choice was made
and I stepped in and flew away.

The stranger whom I did not see
who passed not but a day ago
who carries no regard for me:
a stranger too. I cannot know

your will-not-be’s or could-be loves;
the days you’ve spoke or smoked or sang.
I cannot know your words thereof;
how long or if you’ve clenched in pain.

who knows you true, I cannot tell.
I cannot see your daily fears
(those which you wake just to foretell),
or if your mind is ever clear

enough to see yourself as real
as I myself shall never do.
I wonder if you’ll ever feel
a gladness that was fit for you.

The world’s alive with us, and though
I know the stranger’s always there
I do not stop to see them, so
I don’t become fully aware

of equal insignificance
inside us all. And what a thought
it is to vision consciousness
that follows every stranger. Caught

in our own troubled lives and minds
(as every stranger’s born to be)
we lose that everyone’s alive
beyond our own mind’s registry.

Dear stranger, though I do not know
the fragments of your mind and all
its methods, or what you do show
to other strangers when you fall

or if you’re going very far
or every sight you’re soon to see
or why your dreams are what they are
or why they will or will not be

–please take this short acknowledgement.
It is for you, to know you’re there
and for the stranger audient
who lives a person’s life somewhere.

Pill, I have seen every end
and every one will drop and bend
o’er the edge, into the rain
beats now upon my windowpane.

Pill, it comes not from all sides,
but from all cracks and all divides:
within, without or farther still.
It comes and comes and always will.

Pill, inside you may not keep
the final carrier to sleep;
the will, the strength to make things die
but that’s okay, for nor do I.

Relieved to find that, in the face of the sky,
These eyelids still turn amber inside
And she whom I was meant to be
Exists in perpetual uncertainty
And dear old adorations survive
And sometimes still I am alive
Enough to abandon weary faces,
Enough to imagine groundless places.

I saw today for what it wasn’t.
I saw a day that could not be.
I rode a bus that – going, going
– had no means of moving me.

Places passed the windows (clouded)
people too, and yet worlds more
or so I thought. My faulted eyes
soon saw they’d seen it all before.

And everyone was walking on,
heads down and just about to fall
and feet were grasping at the ground
but they weren’t moving. Not at all.

I knew that I was one of them
I knew, I knew, but even still
I left the bus at Place Unchanged
and watched it go. I always will.

They gather by the thousand
Upon my tongue’s awakened tip
And with their bitter baggage
Prepare to sail a voice-bound ship;

Escape the bloody gutter
Where ev’ry day they sigh and sag,
But then I swallow them again
And try my hardest not to gag.