The trend continues, threshing
a harvest - full quiver -
pictures of factories
and ambient mood lighting.
A grammatic race to the bottom,
our long walks on frozen rivers
and lakes, the two hard to differentiate
in this bleakest winter.
Tributary, ironclad shedding,
without respect for style or
formality - orbital,
broken locks.
Haunting the corridors
of the Paranoids' Union
the eternal we
stumbled over something
greater than the sum
and were lost in the citation,
writers.

The difference between a river and a lake
is the difference between you and I:
destination.
And so much more beyond that,
like a dam bursting (common)
overused but nevertheless something to behold
I'd have to imagine.
Beyond the geometric, and the
ostracized engineers
and the intricate politics of faulty construction,
only a thoughtless
overly political
college freshman
would call it utopian,
and anyone who would dare describe a flood as 'cleansing,'
has never seen a goddamned flood,
but at the bottom of the Atlantic,
Mid-West,
there are no rivers or lakes,
just water waiting to breathe.

Peaks

Pretend to enjoy the view,
hiding your goddamned fear of heights -
You owe it to yourself
to not let everyone down.
Your father told you
that if anyone ever hit you,
no matter who or where,
you will hit them back.
Maybe not the best advice,
but more coherent than
anything you ever learned in college.
Still you hoped for clarification
explanation -
what is your policy on emotional abuse?
And the self-esteem issues don't seem
best resolved through sheer force of will
looking out the thirty-third story window
over segregated neighborhoods
and Newark burning
feral and real
unlike anything in this cage.

Picture Postcards

Semi-apocryphal,
a love story devolved
into landscapes etched in green -
fodder for tourists
as a side-note,
and traded the mysterious
associations and nocturnal webs
for a laugh track.

A cure for paranoia
involving cloaks, no daggers,
and a thousand-year conspiracy,
heavy on the symbolism -
was your definition of education
in the twilight of our youth.
I had to smile.
Your paintings never had streets,
just buildings,
this seems significant,
in passing, like a snow day,
or postcards from strangers,
expressing generic goodwill.

Arterial burst
an urban monument -
sociologically speaking -
the broke-down psychology
an education in
theory
and practice,
never far removed
from the cold reality of pavement
and realizing
that everything you ever have
and ever will write
is just career advancement
and impersonal in its self-
centeredness.
Environmental break
and absolved of responsibility.
We never hurt anyone,
the ground did.

Virginia is for Lovers

You wake up
the bottle as a metaphor,
medicinal
and the mirror -
you lost your creative spark by age fifteen
and lived as performance art
(we all do.)
Lapsed Catholics and laid-off steelworkers -
your grandfather still says that
the Civil Rights Movement
is tantamount to communism -
this might as well be eastern Pennsylvania,
after dark, anyway.
In the winters we never see the sun
or feel warmth
and the summers are a temporary high,
chemical dissolution.
We exaggerate the lows.

Revisiting:
an introduction to our character
hospital-ambiance
all cameras and clocks.
I don't have the time
to figure you out
and I don't have the sight
to

You interrupt,
the interruptions are the
parts of life
where things happen.
I've learned to
enjoy the blank days
years perhaps
and this
cemetery pause
will not make me stronger
you taught me better than that
and I can't follow
and I don't want to get there first
I'm past the collection of memories
and exploration

Break
and across

Highway

A cast of characters
shadowed
ill-fitting garments
broke-down
in the middle of the road.
And I
as one who showed promise
could only think
of the symbolism
and not save
a goddamned
soul.