MAYBE

Maybe if my life crawled

Slow enough to trace the Earth

And come back to the beginning

Still beating, still burning

More than June’s screaming sun

Maybe if my heart was as proverbial

As one mentioned on many a beloved poet’s page

And attentive eyes studied its rhythm

Sometimes slow, sometimes none at all

Forever living far beyond its allotted time

Maybe if my hands

 touched the bark of the oldest tree,

that has offered more breath

than my lungs will ever struggle for

stronger than the storming centuries it stood up against

Maybe if my eyes came alive

Like a city weekend night

And I were somewhere breaking the speed limit

On the fastest way to not here

Enjoying every unfamiliar turn

Maybe if time would stop stealing

my side of the bed

And leave me with a little room and proper rest

If each hour were as soft and kind as my favorite pillow

I wouldn’t mind its company and I’d be better for it

Maybe…

If I were all these things

I wouldn’t be me.

Final Storm

You left your footprints

I found them there after yesterday’s rain

 alone

 in the mud

I was happy to see them

Even though it meant

I’d never again

 get to struggle with the blinding sun

To see the hope in your eyes

As your lashes flutter

Unaware of the envy

In the bird's chirp and morning's mutter

The footprints stay

Long after your final storm

Beside them, I stand long in thought

Close to where you once briefly stood

Perhaps taken by the same current

Of confusion

Struck by the same jolt

Of anger

submerged in a river

polluted with our own qualms

so much that
an invisible today

and the urgency

of every imagined tomorrow

formed a bleak yesterday

that I could not find the strength

to wipe away

I imagined a world

That understood the breadth of you

a Brilliance

stretching the visions

Of those who gazed upon it

With elated eyes

My mind drifted to all the moments

You could have made true

In the places that could have been

If the future safely held you

The sidewalks with your scribbled name

I will walk up to,

stop and smile

because it’s a name I knew

and I’ll wish those that walk by it

would have known it too

You left your footprints

and even though it was too late

I left mine beside yours