Inspired by Ralph Angel’s “You Are The Place You Cannot Move”

Your eyes open, slow, sluggish.

The corners of your mouth crinkle into a smile,

The best dream you’ve had in months.

But you don’t feel right.

Everything’s backwards,

You’re thinking of someone to blame.

And you do.

Luck, somehow, found you,

The coffee did not burn or plunge

Fallow brown drops into crevices

Of your hybrid’s interior.

The traffic’s moving along,

You’re like everyone else just trying to get through the day

And the place you’re dreaming of,

The place you’ve dreamt of,

The place you dream of,

Seems possible.

It hurts here.

A man’s face in a third-story window,

Sputtered gray in his hair.

A history wrinkled on his face,

Each wrinkle a road of a well traveled life.

Intersections, train stations, roadside benches,

The names of places and people you’ve known,

Of glimpsing the newspaper’s ghoulish headlines.

Your eyes close, but your mind never sleeps,

Scattered thoughts, absent voices,

Blurred lyrics of the last ten songs

Oozed from speakers—

A ritual of your afternoon commute.

A spilled beer at the bar,

The golden stream hurling off the edge

Splatters onto the scratched surface they call a floor.

And you have decisions to make.

Isn’t that why you’ve come?

Inspired by "There Sat Down, Once, a Thing on Henry's Heart" by John Barryman

There sat, a thing, in place of Henry’s heart,

Its fangs draining each drop.

If he had one hundred years and more,

In all that time, weeping, sleepless,

Henry could not ignore.

Starts again always in Henry’s mind

A whisper somewhere, a murmur from behind.

With open eyes, Henry attends, blind.

All the bells say: too late.

This is not for tears.

Wait.

But never did Henry save anyone

As he hoped he would.

His hands, hack, hack, hack.

The whispers, murmurs, in control:

“Hide the pieces, where they may be found.”

He knows. He went over everyone,

And nobody’s missing.

Often he reckons, in the dawn,

Nobody is ever missing.

Until now.

Epitaph

Epitaph

So I may say,

I died of dreaming,

Having dreamt and awoken.

So they may say,

“She died pursuing

Buried secrets and revelations to come.”

So you may say,

“He reclaims forever

One who died following

The whisperings in our sleep.”

Inspired by Langston Hughes' "Harlem"

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it wither away,

Once a plump grape,

Now humiliated in a raisin state?

Or linger like the winter rain,

On a spring day?

Maybe it just flies,

Like a dandelion,

Freed by the breeze.

Or

            does

                        it

                                    just

                                                fade?