Not another sad poem
I don’t want to write another
Lost-in-the-night-of-my-soul,
Moonlight to guide me,
But the heavy’s getting old,
Down by the river,
Numbing my feet in the water
Waiting for “you’ll get used to it” to come
That, or hiding
In the sun of my memory
Kind of poem.
But it’s all I can seem to do,
Scrape this ugly out of what’s been used,
And I’m carrying the spillage from the
Past on my shoulders
In a bucket with sneaky holes burrowed through by hope,
Ever lighter, ever lighter
Turning on a smile to get through,
and so are you.
I see the pools of light when I dare look
in your eyes,
And I sense the urge to run away
At the slightest insight.
So, run from the words in another sad poem,
If that’s what you can manage to do.
And I’ll walk the parallel path,
Putting down words not happy,
But true.
And I’ll call it a release
of less-than-worthy constitutions,
A bottom to the loneliness bred
in our broken institutions,
And maybe when the running’s done
And my words are all tapped out
a blessed emptiness will fall all around.
In the empty, our paths will cross
Our breath will slow
Our shoulders all free
And palms open, exposed
To the elements, skin prickling,
and to the moonlight that led us on here
Wrapped up in my mind,
I see exactly what’s possible Under those conditions.
Nothing’s left to say then,
Nothing’s left to run from then,
And in the empty there’s just the you of you
And the me of me,
Detached from expectation and
Hopelessly free.
