She sits at the bar,

Downing a shot glass

Of little white lies,

Wiping her lips

Across a phone number

Smeared on a napkin.

Where does a poet go on vacation?

To a cottage on the satire shore, with clapboards of couplets and wallpaper of words?

To an alliteration amusement park, with deadline-defying rollercoasters and chapbook prizes that just gather dust?

Or maybe on a seventeen-line cruise to the Isle of Haiku, to bask in the south sea sonnets and imbibe mojitos garnished with meter?

Maybe.

But most poets I know just sit down at a desk and journey alone, word sherpas at work, gone on vacation.

 

Inside a library book

A diminishing Polaroid

Colors fading

Images mere whispers

The faceless man

Sits on a ghost of the bed

Enters my mind

and pulls up prose.

For a brief second time

The moment is defined.

Lies travel faster in Paris.

The air is so saturated with romance and passion,

that deception slides across the surface

fueled by mere promise.

Lies travel faster in Paris.

But no one visits expecting the truth.

Poseidon chooses to visit his long-lost daughter,

Surfing on foreign seas in boots made of conch shells,

Tapping his trident to sound out the tides.

He has more daughters

Than the ocean floor has grains of sand.

But this newly claimed child

Carries his tale.

I have felt the tremors of a thousand shattered hearts,

Sent to me on the currents of a thousand cicada wings,

The rhythm of the strumming,

The agony of the shift.

My isolated heart is a lightning rod for desperate wounded love.

She sang down a memory, voice tatted in lace,

Lyrics woven in history, snared in nets weighted by time.

She captured what she could as the moment was deafening,

Her song overwhelming the silence of now.

He offered her the moon but instead gave a comet,

Sleight of hand replacing wax and wane with momentary fire.

While the moon might offer cyclical magic,

The comet burns in the blink of an eye.

(Written on the night of an August super moon)

Each morning I set off, terrified the moment will drop out of my pocket,

fall to the ground unnoticed,

be picked up by someone else.

There are only so many moments gifted in one lifetime.

I can’t afford to treat them like loose pocket change.

Let me be your Charon and I will ferry you across the River Styx.

Pay me with a kiss instead of a coin and I will transport you to the other side.

I am the caretaker of lost souls and love is my mythology.