Chance Spring

We find each other every few years

in bookstores or bars or

the lyrics of some unheard song,

collisions as inevitable as spring.

This time, you have developed new habits,

squinting, laughing a little quieter,

you are less earnest. 

And all the color has been drained 

by winter from the trees outside--

the grasses, the gleamless river water,

this negligent sun.

Perhaps we will not ever have 

spring, that anticipation of familiar 

buds to edge out and flower on all the same branches. 

I used to think we always would, or 

hoped, amid these chanced

seasoned meetings of the heart, and

that seed we don't wish for, but have.

The New Hour

This is the end, finishing

the way all things do:

seasons of baseball,

birthday parties, bells

ringing.

One day we are bounding along,
cheering and listening,
making bets and lists.
Then find ourselves walking amid

the strewn bags of

stepped-on peanuts,

the cake-smeared party hats,
the lost bets.

There is a ringing through the body

of the quiet tongue.

No chatter or music,
just the silent new hour.

Anonymity

There's something so sadly satisfying in

being alone--not loneliness, that creature of the quiet house,

with its dripping tap, mouse droppings, cool linoleum floor,

and echo of street cars, long and tunnel-like and lined

with doors. that will always seem lonely.

But satisfaction in being on the busy street--the coffee

house, beside a crowded couch without a familiar soul

outside your cup. Famous strangers, unfamiliar neighbors,

a mess of stranger faces outside front doors.

It is this to love in the city--mother metropolis, with her

trash blizzards, fast-forward, where-am-I, grab-the-map

delirium, where we all mess together. Our cyclone home,

in which we are often lost in the crowd,

that loves us little back.

Sprinter

I am a sprinter.

A poetry sprinter.

Rolling down the one

hundred meters of

the moment, my lines

are under ten seconds.

A brief flash of

bright nylon, spinning legs

and then the finish line;

the runner's rapid breath

then the cheering that echoes after.

Spin Me, Spin Me

I imagine how I will speak of this time once it has passed. I was in one of my poetry phases, I'll say. Reading it all. Writing what I could muster and turning, in the moments in between, back to all the books I loved as a kid. I was reading picture books while drinking strong coffee because the way it made my heart race matched how I felt my heart should feel. I was taking medications that made me sick, and imagining that somehow there was someone out there reading my blog. I knew there wasn't. But, at the same time, I liked lying to myself.

It felt the way one feels when riding sitting backwards on a train – going where you need to go, but not seeing the road there quite as you should see it. In fact, sometimes I'd sit that way and I pretended I was going to end up where I'd come from – rewinding time to arrive at my past. Trying to get a grip on how I ended up there: how I ended up here, with the toe of my boot toeing a plastic bag full of shit on the sidewalk in front of my apartment.

I knew I was on the wheel, I'll say. That wheel of fortune that spins us ever round then round again, three Greek witches behind us. I knew where I was on that wheel, I'll say. Head down, falling down. I'd spend the rest of the year sitting there at the bottom of the circle, looking up, looking around, counting down for the turning of the tide up.

Spin, spin me, I want to say. Spin me at the top of this hill so that I can bend back in your arms and look at the city that way I love – the lights sprawled across the ceiling and the floor an endless sky.

We Used To

we used to love grandly

large words scrawled on big walls,

big syllables to loud rapid waters,

rivers had nothing on our force;

seasons could come and go as surely.

Now, we scrawl tiny sentences

on little sheets of paper

then fall asleep, alone,

with them all around us like pebbles.

On the floor

between the sheets

underneath the pillows

upon which we sleep

and dream, and dream,

and dream.