One day you learned to read and gave me monkey hugs…

At home, Cassy barely got the door open before her cat, Toby, was weaving between her legs. “Dude you’re going to kill me. The doc says it will be suffocating. Won’t he be surprised when it’s you?”

People said it was safer here, away from the cities. Less shelling. But being far away means you eventually run out of things, like gasoline and medicine.

When I first met you, I was green

…the saxophone simmers on my senses and the clarinet caresses my soul, as the baritone sings, his voice oozing like Belgian chocolates…

He spent the day out in the saguaro garden, trying to get abducted.

Double rows of twenty men tramped by us, swinging chain-whips on handles, whirling in time, the grit of metal snapping down on bruised and bleeding backs.

The guide leads us to another tree, and this one is “unique in all the world,” he says. I wonder who else in our little group, besides you and me, knows that line from The Little Prince.

A bad spirit with short legs.

We live. We die. Some early, some late.

Sparrows in the chinaberry tree

in my great-grandmother’s front yard

where I lay on my fat belly

book on the ground—opened—

She was an old hand / at new starts.

I was flying through the woods, rather low to the ground, sometimes in fact walking rather than flying, going back and forth, actually, between on-the-ground walking and low-to-the-ground flying.

The leaves of Butternut trees

Made soft, clapping sounds.

Arms spread wide, he said--

We’ll build our house here.

…she played music and danced on the table in that gray and maroon dress that revealed her marvelous legs.

7/8/20**

In my time here I have surmised it is the easiest thing in the world to be one who is never wrong. To do this one must apply careful thought and consideration into always saying and thinking what is most fair.

Every morning is the same
for the heroic dung beetle.
Every morning he awakens
to search for that ever-loving
fecal matter.

Ordinary citizens are swept away under a broadside of raging insanity and a tidal wave of blind hatred.

Even as I waited for Tammy, the ever-helpful and annoyingly chipper cremation services representative, to return with paperwork (even in death, it turns out, there are contracts to sign) . . .

As I grew older, while I slowly spun in the wind, staring at the sky, I contemplated what life held ahead for me.