I.
Passing in and out of tree shades,
fragments of my thoughts
are left behind
each time.

II.
Semi-sleepwalking
in the damp sunlight while
pondering a poem,
as if  holding a tenuous,
(arriving in front of glass doors)
trembling feather...
(open)

and the air conditioner blasted it all away.

III.
Her profiled face just flew by, framed
in a trapezoid car window,
and my mind sprinted back
up the sidewalk along the asphalt to
grasp her but

she already disappeared past
the stop light horizon.

My mind took a long time
to catch back up to my body.

IV.
I sat to rest my throbbing feet,
and watched the tree shades,
shrinking puddles of night, struggle
against the sun that absorbed already the
defenseless streetlights.

Poetry is more than pretty images. A strong,
meaningful voice speaks out and reveals
the human condition, the inherent issues
of society, uncovers the truths of…

I threw my pretty images toward the sun,
and they sank, quivering, back down to me,
bleached transparent,

and I walked on, stripped of senses
for light and shade, pleasure and suffering, visions
or the concrete.

V. Paper Boats
Evening again.

A red stretch of flames was etched across the sky’s
deep blue edge by the last reaching fingers
of the sinking sun, igniting undersides of
billowing clouds –towering marble statues of waves and torrents –
with a gradient ember glow.

My heart knelt before this the temple

of my Muse, and unpacked:
pen, paper, desk,

while my feet tapped along

the endless grey squares of the sidewalk:
Andante.

How does a lover go about writing a song?
– A pilgrim, amidst a philistine throng –
How do their flesh pound out beats
and blood treacle into melodies?
And how would a castaway, beached
upon hopeless indifference, reach
a heart across the ocean?

A hundred paper boats litter the sea.
Watch, they’re a poet’s pathetic pleas, –
vessels of duets with himself, imaginary conversations –
tiny white specks smacked down in swift motions.
Yet fleets of hundreds, thousands continue to be spilled
onto the vast blue expanse, unrelenting, until
the words written upon them dissolve in the tides…

… and the evening sky subsided into night.

VI.
The light of day turned steady in its course,
And night’s descension caught my mind off guard,
– While off I seemed to drift from Lethe’s shores –
Piercing my eyes awake with moonlight shards.
A heedless autumn chill embraced my skin;
Streetlamps cast greetings through the swelling shades;
A love fermented, filled my soul, and in
The dark I trod the path the night has laid.
But then, a light, a porch, I turned, mistake.
My own home, stifling, dull incandescence,
complete with flies rotting in fruits, mould-caked,
loomed, and I would have been a corpse
in the dust of despair made, if not for
The promise of another promenade.