Random Poems: Unknown Source

All the long, nonpareil days of August, I waited

Walking beaches incessantly

Combing the tides for word from you

Only sea-glass emerged

Not a word formed on foam.

My hems are mud-clumped threads

My boots caked in salt

The flumes of my bonnet blown backward,

Catching the joyriding wind.

Not a whole shell is extant,

Only bits & flakes, a bubble on a wave…

Still I walk.

My sisters look to horizons

Expect me to raise my eyes

But I am stuck in a story of you

Where a single, cool, green cylinder

Rolls to my feet.

I bend & slick off the water

I tremble, using my teeth on the cork

[A faint ‘pop!’]

The fainter smell of your ink

The mystery of your yes or no

Curled like a hermit crab in wine-bottle shelter.

There is only one today;

Always only one me

So fraught with self & simpering love words

They seek me out front & back

They drip from me like raindrops down oilcloth

Run to edges that curl the streams

I wear a Papa Salt hat, yellow in this sunlit Other Day.

I don’t expect a Prince a-riding

I’d prob’ly fall in love with his horse & dash him from saddle,

Leaving him standing bandyleg-beached

As Horse & I gallop, splashing, into the sea.

Time To Rain

Mercury gone retro brings monsoons

But since that last hailstorm in June

Things are quiet.

I feel like a chess piece out of play

Cornered by a pike-poxed pawn

A Queen at bay to the dwarf

But dwarves are Earth & know the caves

What better ally to be sent me?

I throw the ball again to

See if I can hit the sea

It’s all downhill from here…

Dancing On My Daddy’s Shoes

Tho something I’ve never done, seems somehow dug into my memory

Like finding a bone among the feathers

A made-up story about a little girl I never was

Nor can be this life.

And so loved anyway

Still dancing.

When No Belief Was Left

We turned back

The trackless waste devoid of all save Hunger

Beckoned no more

In full retreat, we fled, thankfully

Fragmented among ourselves,

We slept in the ruins

The mild nights belied our inner chill

From all the ice & snarl, we breathed relief.

Alive again to home & hearth. We were

The heathens left alive

As ghosts, alone & insubstantial

To live among the resting of our lives

So packed with promise just before the War.