Som en Hemlös Själ

You remember it, it remains at the edge of your awareness, a memory of youthful optimism, there was a time when a song could change your heart, you refused the cynicism of people who knew better. How the fire gets washed out by reality. I think you need to shed it. Everything burns around you, why wouldn't you burn, too. 

It's not too late to start over, to go back to the beginning. Remember who you were, remeber how you knew better. 

You sit in a rocking chair on the back porch at sunset, listen to fireworks pretend everything is the best it's been. The dog is anxious, stares at the sky and wonders if you’ll protect her against the unseen enemy. There’s a metaphor in there and you don’t want to see it. 

Go to sleep, try again tomorrow. It’s not too late 

to start over. 

Gloria

New Hampshire sinks into your frazzled edges, fills voids you didn't know you had. You try impatiently to force a peace, a purpose, but that's not how it works, and you should know it by now. A third season on the road, summering across America, escaping into the outskirts. They offer you an apartment in Brooklyn, everything about it should have you saying yes, but when you drive out of New York along the FDR early one Saturday morning, all the shoulds wash away and you're left with the same inexplicable yearning for Manhattan that pulled you across oceans time and again and you were never sorry. 

I gave you my tired, my poor, I promised to want for nothing if only you'd love me, and I mean it still, how can I mean it still? There's something kind in a love that refuses to abate. 

I have lost so much, New York, but I have yet to lose you. 

So though the road leads north, 
I'll be back when the nights get longer again.  

Summer

You pack up

You leave

You mourn for a second but then the country spreads out before you. So you forget. 

You leave behind. 

I told you once I will always run, 

And I didn’t know how fast I’d hold to that truth. 

It feels less like fleeing,

Now. 

It feels so much more

Like flying.

108 degrees

My envy of the waterfowl in the Buttermilk Channel knows no bounds. 

I am a thousand degrees of humidity. I am a pile of loosely frazzled curls atop my head. I am summer, am joy.  

I am joy. 

How many dark months did I not remember this feeling, did I think it a figment of my imagination, a youthful state to which I would never return. And now, how easy it is, how self-evident. Of course you are a million morsels of happiness, what else could you be? 

I am yearbook signings and last day of school giggles. I am temporary goodbyes. I am adventure on the horizon. The heat wave breaks and breaks against the glass monoliths of Manhattan but does not break me, this is the difference. 

For so long you thought you had nothing, were nothing, the illness takes and takes when you have nothing left to sacrifice, sometimes I think I live a half life, offering so much upon its demanding altar. 

But would the light, when it comes, look as bright if I had not the black of night with which to compare it? Would I know the preciousness of this joy if I had not endured months in its absence? Do you not think, when I go to die, I will add up both sides of the coin and find 

That the life came out 

To full? 

Raise

You sprint to the end of an era; your landlord throws you a lifeline and tells you to hold on to it for later. Your parents ask if you couldn’t cross the ocean and babysit their plants instead, you are a perpetual potential to those around you who see your flailing tethers and long to hook them to their agendas. 

It’s too sunny, too warm, the breeze to mild for you to be angry about this. 

We sat in Battery Park and watched our heritage dance around us until dark, sat at the edge of Red Hook and watched the sun set behind the Statue of Liberty, I sat under a tree in a spot of shade and watched clovers hide their fourth leaves, life is a mystery. I packed the contents of a year into the open nooks between contents of a life in my storage unit, 

life is predictable. 

June has arrived now, my darling, summer has arrived to take us all somewhere new. All you have to do is hang on. 

All you have to do is live it. 

How Brilliant It Can Be

Thunder rolls in, covers your windows in immediate night, branches lashing against the panes. It's gone in an instant, taking a few degrees of swelter with it. You can't be mad. If anything, you wish you were out there in it, your senses could use a little shakeup. 

Tomorrow, a holiday awaits, the one that always cracked your chest open in all the ways it could. The longest day, the shortest night, but then the day when it turns. How winter lies in wait with every summer. How darknes hides behind every light. If you want to come back in the fall, just let me know. We'll work something out. 

One week until adventures begin for the season. 

Sometimes it feels like you are doing everything right.  

Print Shop

Another gloomy day, you wonder how much of this you can endure before thinking that maybe it's just a sign, that maybe the universe is looking to push you out, out. You look at weather forecasts in New Hampshire. 

The weekend is a mess of a country in tatters. Of assassinations, parades, and marches. An audience member asks, what am I to make of my American dream? and the presenter says, it was never meant to be easy. You repeat it in your head. You had 30 years of easy, and even then, once or twice, the easy got stuck in your throat. 

We fight when we believe we have something worth fighting for. 

A dream not worth fighting for, 
was only ever a figment of your imagination.