Jocelyn

Your ghost Jocelyn, is here in this hot summer night,

As heat lightning flashes silently and brightly across

The far side of the like, where demons and dreams linger.

 

You’re alive still, having long outgrown me and our

Childhood games and mischievous days on the lake,

In the waters where mermaids bore us to Eden.

 

I am, alive, or perhaps dead, left with my own loss

And broken sleep and dreams that turn to ashes

As I try to close my hand around incense smoke.

 

I sit on the dock with a bottle of red wine, watching

The heat lightning that’s roar I cannot hear or touch,

Just as I cannot hear or touch your grace, now we are grown.

Rain and Train

The daylight slipped away, put to sleep for now
by the grey rain clouds pulling a blanket over it.
The air chilled me in my thin jacket, defenseless
against the cold that come with the day’s dreams.
In this city there is no damp, musty earth to remind
you of the dirt from which you once rose up, and will
return to again.

The train rattles the tracks with howling anger,
nearly shaking me off my feet. The cries of the
breaks howl it’s rage at the cold, wet world.
How I envy it’s sounded fury against the world,
when I have to keep all my pain deep down inside.
There’s a suitcase at my feet, but none can carry a life.
My world is over here, and now I must begining again.

The city falls away to misty farmland and isolated
clusters of big, lush trees, the odd animal gazing back.
The rain keeps coming but nothing is ever cleaned again.
Nothing, not sacred blood, can wash our sins away.
If I sleep, I’ll dream, dream of things that hurt me now.
Maybe I’ll read about some happier person in another world.
Maybe I’ll manage to keep away the tears.