well I don’t hardly know her

is time ever wasted?

are there really things to be learned?

does a wasted youth produce a productive old age 

or just a mourning for a life that never was?

I worked hard to get what I want but all I got was tired.

“But I think I could love her…” Crimson and Clover, Tommy James and the Shondells

until she wasn’t

a life in place, love all set, 

it all allowed for a sleep of

storied dreams played out in scripts

rewind edit replay

in waking hours of wash rinse repeat, 

of work of school of making a house a home

she wrote of things made sense in half-light

she wrote fueled on tea and sugared toast

until she couldn’t until she shattered: 

in her sorrowed hours

of the heaviness of a death she mourned 

in the vastness of a light slumber

she woke into a life out of place 

all that life he was there but not: 

while she was there all in

until she wasn’t 

“Anyone who’s had a heart, wouldn’t turn around and break it…” ~ Sweet Jane, Velvet Underground 

whence

It’s a place somewhere between awareness and sleep, a particular exhaustion that’s not exhaustion.

A fleeting moment of time when the day is too hot but the air is cooled by shade and the stillness broken only by the oscillation of an over-used fan that clicks as it sweeps back and forth in the soft glow. 

Absent is the lulling swarm of the cicada drowning out the persistent reverberations of a heart pounding wild, un-rythmic and breaths, shallow, laboring to find its depth. 

I remember loving

little lines, flesh

not so taught, exhaustion 

in the mirror

there were lovers once;

I remember loving

a body on fire

with a pulse quickening 

figments of imagination 

bled from veins on wrists 

ink on paper, scratch scratch

on fingers smudged 

the fan oscillates, cooling

in the late morning 

a body on fire

with the hours of existence