Valentine
I was always New Year’s Day
And she was always Valentine’s
As I stand among the final fading strands of confetti
From last night’s revelry
I feel as if everything is falling apart
As if bits of the sky are chipping away
And the business buildings are raining the first hundred
Thousand digits of pi onto my head
And through my soiled and soaked overcoat.
And if you, Valentine, peered into my snow-globe of a January afternoon
You would undoubtedly say that the spider had finally
Outsmarted himself—your eyes wide with childish glee;
For my temper, ornery and distant, is certainly winter,
While your February fuels hope of a spring ahead-
A budding world waiting to awaken and thrive in peace
The distant promise of summer—
children taking down their artwork
And teachers clearing out their desks
And everyone stares in awe as if they’re witnessing a miracle.
It’s getting colder here, you know
As the early morning joggers and
coffee connoisseurs dot the urban landscape—
and the tingling in my fingers is sadly
Only the stirrings of dreams:
That is the multi-million dollar question, isn’t it?
To understand love as distant as heaven and as close as
A month and a half away.
“Hush,” she said, and then nothing—
Swallowed by the winter silence.
Period 8:
There is a flipside to joy—
There is a flipside to joy—
Quiet as snow, it is lined with pebbles
And boulders, small rocks and clumps of dirt.
Where only the bleak grays of doubt and fear survive,
The foliage of trampled dreams and the cold,
Anonymous moon shining over me.
A place where you run at night,
Your heart beating like the pulse of blood
Behind a bruise, the disorientation of panic
Impairs reaction time like alcohol, and then—
And then the colors begin to whirl.
There is a flipside to joy—
A tunnel as thin as a pin, where,
Like Alice, you take a little pill and
Slide right through—like a camel through
The eye of a sewing needle.
You emerge in a shallow, dry hollow
Watching infinitude trains pull away
And then, you, as well, are onboard,
Waving back at the ones you left behind.
There is a flipside to joy—
Where words are no longer necessary,
Where we refuse, or fail, to act human,
Where the dogs can’t catch our scent;
But from my seat in the crowded dining car
Of the endless black eternal locomotive,
We boldly flirt with the coastline—
My eyes widen as diamonds of sunlight
Dance on the water.
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