The pain of
moving
in the cool crispness
of the night air
joints, like wooden frames
creak eerily
leaving echos within
the tissue around
denying passage
for fear
of breaking.

The sea is long
cold and warm
but ever wet,
beating and ever moving
in time with
the pulls
into eternity.

I watch the pressures
of plates rise the mountains
in a slow dance begun
before my eldest fore-bearers
began to squirm
towards them.

we stay, and die
and conquer and still
there is that which continues
without us, our perception--

constancy defined
not by actions or commotions
but by the beating
of one's heart

What are words for
when they fall
meaninglessly
away

Into

Silence. . .

Small inside aside

There are things one ought not assume
Based purely upon the exchanges said
In offices, halls, and in correspondence
Meant to remain in professional domain.

I have been up long nights
With my head cradled on
Wet pillows and stared out
At the yellow street lamps.

In the day unseen I
End up with cheerful
Words and doing all
The simples given.

But my doings?
dim reflectors
Of products
Once dreamt.

I grow
Smaller
Each
Day.

As a child summer clung
as a veil about the summers
hazed in greens and yellows
the trunks of trees rising in
moss'ed woods and
sprouting into the edge of pastures
long abandoned in the old age of
the loved strangers leaving the land to
the adventuring of children
as the days lingered.

I huddled then as the
words blurred into cadences
that would allow me sleep
in the age of always storm
battered hearts and
Learning to love the manner in which
the surge hits the surf and rain trembles
the window panes on which it falls upon
the dreaming minds inside
as the nights lingered.

We held hands in the summer
that birthed our majorities and
witnessed us grown together
and apart again, from strangers
to loved to strangers
again, as distance and realization that
nothing can stay the same as they were
when we could count forever on our freckled
wandering backs that year
as childhood lingered.

____________

Day one of National Poetry Writing Month!

I set aside
The things which I strode
Towards when my legs had
Strength for long treks
For attempts at those things
They said I was incapable of.
I was capable.
I wasn't capable of returning
To myself, not soon enough
To avoid losing all my gains
For want of being called
"Unselfish."

And my potentials withered
As so many yellowed flowers.

Beware of those which tell you
That all you wish to do
Pales in comparison
To that which they've left
To haunt your halls
To tell you you're unworthy.

I know it is hopeless
But--
There is nothing, in
My life, to hope for if
We aren't allowed to hope for
Hopeless things.

The prosaics are even
Laid out
Impossibly distant and
Unreachable from here
A good home of family my own
To raise as I will.

The plans I have made
To build
Up ambition of my own have
Crumbled to dust so that my aims
Are restricted to what I can pull to me from
My partnered half.

Hopelessness is endemic
To what
Is available to aim for.