You know how, when you’re on the first break from work you’ve had in years, and you relax some and refuse to call it unemployment, and you use your brain for nothing, and that’s good, and then you get several ideas for blog posts all at once, and you draft them all instead of finishing one, so you come off your break by ignoring them and posting a poem? Yeah, it’s like that. Photo by me.
Steam
for PC and J O’D
The wise write the mind
can know the border
of thoughts, one to the next,
to the next, as eyes
can see when one drop
of water turns to steam.
My mind behaves precisely
like an empty urban corner.
Leaves scrapped to dust, and
stained empty paper cups
congeal and scatter, the wind
full of scratching.
Rain, whose freedom
the wise suggest
we should lean on,
I watch from home.
Under streetlights, seeding
a parking lot with more
tender shapes.
In the wall
over there, a pipe
becomes a vent
and then a slithering
line of steam, supple
ghost becoming dark
damp starlight on the street,
no longer even that.
As it happens,
branches reach toward
my window, close by
and clearly. How is it
the space they cross
evaporates unseen,
as if the distance
held anything at all?
The Creative (Almost) Full-Timer 