Photo: Kick The Bucket by Cody Kapscos

Diamond-Crusted Morning

Someone came, last night, and scattered diamonds out my window
And painted the sky a kind of blue there’s never been before
There’s nothing you can see for miles,
Just fill-me-up blue and carry-me-off green

I pull on my boots and stand on my doorstep
The crispy air enters me like a honey-covered knife
It races down to my toes, like a horse in a field
And makes me alive in a way that’s better than before

It seems a shame to muss the perfect sea of sparkling
As I slosh ‘cross the field to go feed my Bess
But even the damp feels so nice on my skin
In a fresh, brisk, September-ish way

I hear that the leaves are turning to fire
In the places that have that kind of tree
We don’t have big displays here, just wheat to get ready
Cows to be fed, and life to go on

But you can take your red-tinged autumns
Your fanfare and boastful displays
I’ll keep my quiet, diamond-crusted mornings
There’s a peace to them you’ve never know

Left Behind

I watch strangers come through town,
With their tiny cell-phones that have email and GPS
And suspect I may have been left behind
By the world

The town’s paid a lot of money to set up some lines
So I could get a phone
But…who would I call?
It’s not that I’m stupid, or backwards, or
Set in My Ways
Only that there seems to have been a new moment
That skipped over me somehow

They move too fast these people that come through
I don’t know when they have time to breathe
They talk and “text” and email
Without ever looking a person in the eye
(I don’t pretend to be a
World-Class Conversationalist
But I know you’ve got to look a person in the eye
To really talk to them)

And maybe I’m old-fashioned,
But it seems like something’s gone missing with these stranger from out of town
They look at me like they want to rub me over with this
Hand Sanitizer
Stuff they’ve got
Seems to me there’s nothing in this dirt that calls for
Hand Sanitizer

Maybe I have been left behind
But it seems to me they’ve left behind some other things as well
Things like how to grow a potato
Or be alone
Or sit on your porch and do nothing at all
Maybe they’re just moving
Too fast
For those things to catch up

Only long lonely nights, there’s a thought, or a whisper
That niggles from deep in the back of my head
That maybe they’re right, that they’re really living
And I’m here in Nowhere
Left far behind

Loneliness

Do you know Loneliness?
The rip-roaring feeling that clinches you ‘round the middle
When you talk to yourself
Just to make sure your voice box still works
A crusty, immobilized sensation that settles into your bones and features
When they haven’t moved to say “hello,”
or even “bye
As you slowly realize that amidst a vast pool of nothingness there is only
you, 
drowning
Or floating,
Immaterial which

Do you know Loneliness?      
As manners start to fade from carelessness
Or mere disuse
You wish you had the will to care enough to keep them
Them being the only thing tethering you to humanity
But Bessie doesn’t care
If you leave your shoes on
And who calls their cow Bessie, anyway
Who,
For that matter,
Still has
A cow?

Do you know Loneliness?
Emptiness with no foreseeable end
A temptation to burn yourself,
Cut yourself,
Anything…
So SOMETHING HAPPENS
To verify if you even still exist,
If Time still ticks,
If anything,
Anywhere,
Changes
The only change apparent here
The interminable centimeter-growing of the wheat
The house
The only indication that you were even here

Do you know Loneliness?