You and I are living
But we live and die each day;
We wake or pass away,
Each and every hour.

I wonder if this is how my mother felt…
sitting in the quiet after everyone else
took what they needed and left.
She was just hoping someone
would appreciate her,
would see the way she held everything together
with her own tired hands.

The city awakens behind painted masks,
streets alive with voices.
Footsteps tap over quiet secrets,
and no one sees the skin beneath the disguise.
Each mask holds a story,
a hidden life waiting to be noticed.

The timbre of my snot wanes
And relapses over dragging weeks
Of illness.

The dry, shriveled saffron threads
of your old pains and troubles
need the warm patience
of the milk of your compassion
to release their gold.

Young airmen billeted in Grandma’s house
looking out over fields and distant woods,
playing tennis in the evening shadows,
waiting for the final bugle call.

It’s the silence of the quiet moments
that brings painful, shuddering awareness
that things are no longer the way they were
and never will be quite that way again.

His brother’s casket had been closed because
the injuries he suffered were extreme.
Even his sister, a registered nurse,
didn’t look to identify his corpse.
Instead, his rings and his drivers license
testified as to his identity.

I spent childhood days
climbing the pecan tree
that overhung our pool
memorizing its notches and scent
as it waited for the right time
to drop its leaves into
the cool water

My body hums with a symphony of stings,
wounds throb like pears rotting in heat.
My aching skin, flakes like a snake,
Each browned bite, tart and sweet.

The moonlit path lay soft and still,

Beneath the yew on the shadowed hill,

Where time wore thin its ancient thread,

And whispers stirred what words had fled.