You And Me

We live on assume.
Assume your next breath
will not be your last.
Assume your car will start
Tomorrow so you can rest
Tonight, or if not, take the bus.
Assume slippery slopes are
Amenable to crampons.
Assume your mantle will
Soon support awards
That tower over Al Gore’s.
Assume you will wait for
The other pair of socks to
Thaw each April morn while
Sucking out the moisture, so
You will know the flavored
Dew of different seasons.
Assume there will not be
Tomorrow and inject drugs
That will not retaliate until later.

Assume you will be fruitful
And multiple, by not spending
Allowances on frivolities.
Assume the time to assume for life is an assumption.
------------------------------Every tick is assumption.
-----------------------------Every wave is assumption.
-------------------Every birth and death is assumption.
My coffee is gone.

---
words: Paul Handley (more)

Tracks

Yesterday on the beach, I walked along the tire tracks the beach ranger left. Those tracks now were gradually erased by the tide. Just like time erases our tracks and traces. Some of them are not important, so it seems, so it doesn't matter. Some are better erased. But there are some that we wish would not be erased by time. All part of the cycle, though, like leaving a year to enter a new one.

But some things linger. Like a conversation may be over as soon as the sounds of the voices dissipate into space, but the ideas expressed may stay with you. And of course, art of the visual kind and words written, those can stay a long time, from year to year, like in this blog, too. Tracks that are not erased, but that instead can remind us of lessons of years past.

Also I thought of people in my life, and remembered those who are no longer alive. It seems as though their tracks in my heart will always stay, as long as there is my heart.

And I wonder what tracks will be made this year.
What poems will be written? What sunsets will astonish?
What blossoms will be so fragrant that they pause us in our hurries?
What lovers will meet for the first time? Who will be born this year?
In other years to come, what tracks will remain of this year just begun?

----
by: Steve Wing, Florida
originally posted in January 2007

words written

words written on unprinted paper
pills swallowed through sealed lips
weather broken on the inside
and this is where you hide
voices spoken without
balls kicked within
numbers left uncounted
to that is what we amounted

----
words: Cathrine Lødøen, Norway (snapshots)

double rainbow

---
image: Brigita Pavsic, Slovenia (soul flowers)

Red Damselfly

The day hints rainbows
in a drizzle mesh.

No matter.
She collects pieces of sky

on her wings
as her family have done

since the book of Genesis.
Silver light

climbs up her dress
like the curl of a rose petal.

She tickles my ear
with whispers

that slip into the skin
of the mere.

She leaves me
with the empty breeze

and a private song.
Sunshine in a capsule.

---
words: Gordon Mason, Scotland/Spain (Catapult to Mars)

The Hearse

beyond the battlefield

she divorced the whispering
lilies as their petals grew
bitter and no longer creased
in her palm.
they, adorned with memorabilia,
are carried out to sea -
shielding her eyes from the sun,
she stepped into the fragile
penumbra and let go of
yesterday

----
words: E. Miller, Oregon

Torn Hibiscus

---
image: Smitha Murthy, India (Life Wordsmith)

Instead of trying to kiss and paw at her

I remember that dismal,
uncertain time in college
(lost in the mists of life's dark,
tangled jungle)
when my wife
(my girlfriend then)
decided she needed to wander,
to date other guys. If instead
of trying to kiss and paw at her,
these short-sighted jackasses
(thank God for that)
would have been chivalrous
and caring, selfless and concerned
about what she thought and felt
and had to say, she might
have connected with something
in one of them, something
she admired and needed
and came to love, something
she has never found in me.
Things might have been
very different than they are today.
Certainly if she had dated another guy
even a handful of times
I wouldn't be here right now.

---
words: Michael Estabrook (more & more)

Alone

ghosts of passing cars, flaky and white in
soundwaves uninvited to a melancholy willing
to remain like all the wrong memories that
litter the floor with half-empty coffee cups,
and silence creeping about with bony fingers
that used to be kind, but remembering is
always off by just enough to guarantee
life will never live twice, and i can never
pretend away the vestiges of years like
suitcases perhaps never meant.

---
words: Bethany Basset (coffee-stained clarity)
image: Dorothee Lang (virtual notes)