Static fills the space inside my head.

Steel support beams hold up brushed stolen ceilings,

And there are strangers crammed into tubes of lead;

This machine of moving parts pushes us all together.

She’s crying because her baby is two aisles away.

He’s crying because he’s a baby and his mother can’t stay.

I’m crying because I can’t get home in time.

Sidereal cereal destiny formations.

Use a dictionary you hopeless astral visionary.

To whom it may concern,

Postal dedication has left me drained.

But I’m an awful mailman today.

My letters are crumpled

My bag is sopping wet

My hat is on backwards and

My car broke down.

Sorry if this is late.

Sincerely,

Your mailman

I spent the night staring out my window.

The bricks in front, the strangers below.

Their thoughts rose like steam from sewers

And blinded my heart with concerns much newer

To me.

It shocked me to think I knew their troubles

Like I was buried under that same war-torn rubble,

But I suppose that’s what it means

To be human, or at least that’s how it seems.

Every night it’s someone new

Walking past and a whole new brew

Of worries and fears

And eyes like headlight deers.

A saga of tumult and sacrilegious ant-sized men in suits and ties.

Fill the pages, handwritten, sloppy yet legible amenities,

For late night dinner parties and cocktails and compliments

And the veneer smiles.

–

Eventually one man will see the sun over rocky mountains

Cracked with professionally trained white enamel.

Excavates the geology of social interaction and party sins.

Now is not the time for him to break away the crust of will.

–

His parents taught him who he was, and he never questioned it.

He wrote off expenses with diamond tipped single-use pens,

And doesn’t know how to live.

Grace left behind her daughter,

Wrapped in drapes and swaddled with light.

Her breath came softly and only 

When her lips slide apart

At will she lets the lovely air glide.

She spoke with eyes and worked with words.

The heavy-lifting dictation a whisper at most.

And in one moment she knew me

And knew my needs.

Business is Business.

——-

I imagined,

In my head of course,

A story complete of a young man in a

Lion’s den.

–

His name was Richard

Or Robert or something.

In fact I don’t think he wore

A name card.

–

The lion didn’t need an

Introduction.

He roared and drank coffee from

His large metal tin.

–

He mewed business and facts

No time for names, I guess.

The gazelles had migrated too closely

For him not to attack.

–

Riley shifted from foot to foot,

And his toes got sore,

His palms sweated out, he dehydrated

For his life was on the hook.

Oh wait, memories.

Oh stay, my weaker knees.

“Stand strong to nostalgia’s breeze.

Give no ground to soldiers

of molded green nor

Those mossy bricks of nature’s belief.”

But myself is me and I am weak,

Due to years of trying to seem

Stronger than I was

Made to be.

“Put the left in front of right,

Push onward through the

Mental fight,

Because days like this were

Made to test you and

Your silent might.

Oh knees, oh memories

Do not surrender again,

Please.”

Sometimes

The air is thicker than my lungs can take,

But that viscous, vicious oxygen has nothing compared to the thought of what is to come. 

A dedication to the anthology on my shelf-

Frost-bitten teeth and winter is cumming(s).

Fall shakes(a)spear(e), but nothing can be Donne.

And Swift, Brad st. was covered by white, oh marvel(l).

The wall cott the snow, tracks along the previously pristine p(l)ath.

The rain will fall, and the fall will stall in the reed(s). 

Oh Lord, alfalfa fields are white.