Tag Archives: Poems

Achievement

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Have you ever met a goal and then felt hollow.
Have you ever attained great height
Only to discover
That the pole you were climbing was the only thing holding you up.

Deprived of our busy
All our razor honed focus
Touches empty time.
We lurch, unexpectedly dizzy.
Vertigo sets in.

It’s the day after Christmas.
It’s a scale reading your goal weight.
An empty inbox.
A renovated house.
When you’re out for a long walk,
but the sidewalk cuts off.

Goals create movement.
Movement ends goals.
Over and over, clunking forward
We struggle like fools
Driving cars with square wheels.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I knew a man

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I knew a man,
though not very well.
A nice man
now dead
from pneumonia.

We were all looking sideways at S——
with her regrowing cancer hair
but death came at us
from an unexpected direction.
I wasn’t even aware he was sick
until Friday.

On Saturday
I cut off the tip of my finger.
It’s not often I am afraid
but I was
truly
afraid.
I pressed my finger into my palm to stem the bleeding.
It felt deformed. Too short, too flat.
I didn’t want to know what it looked like.

A reminder of my mortality
too close
too close.

On Monday
we get the office email.
He has died. We grieve his passing.
The office is quiet
with heavy atmosphere.

Somebody has set
a vase of flowers
outside his office door.
They have been placed there
very gently
by honoring hands,
sad hands.

We need
to honor the dead.
We decorate their haunts.
We create ceremonies.
We save mementos.
We tell stories.

I only knew this man by sight.
Another office worker
someone who helped grease the cogs
of our mutual machine.
We might wave or nod.
He had a habit
of muttering to himself
funny, quirky things.
I would pick up snatches of his internal dialog
when I walked by.
How well did he know me?

My finger is stiff with scab.
I worry at it, clean it, unwrap it, rewrap it.
It will have to last me
a few years longer.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The river

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The river
Runs rolls rumbles tumbles tosses
Yesterday it was just a creek
The rains have swelled it
This is why
The banks are so broad
The usual pebbly islands sunk
Redrawn rewritten redrafted
Underneath the water
Unseen
Beneath the roiling muck
The river rewrites itself
With every passing rain cloud
It changes who it is
It carries garbage further away
It carries new garbage in
It fills new puddles
To fill with new frogs
And new adventures
Because it chose
To flow where the water wants.
It allows life
To alter its bones.
It doesn’t resist.
It relaxes into chaos,
Falls in, falls out.
It dries to emptiness,
Floods to new paths.
It bends.
That is why
The river is forever.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gone for Five Minutes

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Sitting at my desk, trying to focus at work.
Put this in that folder there,
Type that data here,
Fill out all the little boxes…
What was that.
a ghost wind passes through me.
I continue to type
I continue to read
but something inside has been
toppled
and everything’s going gray.
oh god.
what is coming.
my stomach lurches.
please tell me this won’t last.
the world around me has lost all color.
Death has awoken
and rests his bony fingers
on my shoulder.
life is meaningless.
the world has stopped turning.
i’m back in that place again.
this cold, lonely cell
and i can’t remember how to cry.
five minutes pass… not long.
just as inexplicably
Death changes his mind.
wraps himself in his cloak
and curls back into a benign black ball in the corner of my mind.
as he retires, ambient warmth returns.
The world sets back into motion.
Color resurges into my reality.
I’m in my office again
Still typing away
Coworkers unaware
That for five minutes
I was briefly pushed
Out of their world.
Thank god
It didn’t last.
It didn’t last.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

the desperate

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people can smell desperation.
being social animals,
they pass the desperate by
sniffing in fear
instinctively knowing
this one has been cut off for some reason
a rotting limb
a toxic trash.

the desperate can be found
in the heart of the city
the pulsing downtown.
wherever people collect
so the desperate are drawn
driven to suck what they crave.
what society will not give freely
they parasitize.

in the center of things,
yet humanity flows around them,
unwilling to touch.

in the center of things,
forever on the fringe.

excluded
for fear of exclusion.

because everyone knows
the stink of desperation
is catching.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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