About this Book

There’s only a slight tear
at the corner of the page
where there’s the part
of the rhyme that says
everyone cries now,
everyone falls away
and everything
that used to seem part of plan and agenda
that would last so many years beyond
our petty days
of birth and death
now exists on
time stolen from some large
jar of sand
that is leaking
into a universe as vast and black
with the deadened light
that has fallen ever so much
while all we’ve seemed to do
is brush against each other in the streets?
glance through windows or in mirrors
to see if someone were looking at us,
sneaking extra shares of baked bread
out into the traffic where
all the crammed jostling is easily
mistaken for the tempo that
drives a dancer to distractions
that becomes legend
in the cities that might exists at the bottom
of the chasm
it feels as if our feet come to the edge of,
the edge of the page where the tear
down the side of the page rents
a word or two, divorcing
whole ideas and philosophies
without a shot being fired
nor a crowd stampeded with
troops with blades coming from the
the end of rifles that
smoke that comes clear and
vanishes like breathes in
winter, all the words that
get said and vanish with
each gasp of cigarette fume and large idea
that snap like firecrackers,
a warm room,
books that haven’t been sold
for drugs.