Morning Couplets

Traffic-jam arteries and toothpick eye sockets;
heavy fingers type, carve tunnels, pound out the day.

Today, I leave my pillow at the same time I started my first day,
when she may have pulled me to her breast or watched me float away in white arms.

Light leaves us and we are left in a cave; we’d rather see
the false shadows on the wall than this reality.

A gun shot no one hears; the birds and deer won’t tell us
his last words spoken in love into the night.

The shell of a day waits to be filled,
an empty pie crust, cooling.

We fall back to last week, when the world was round and unaltered;
now the world is triangular, balancing on a fragile point.

We walk about in this Labyrinth, look into the trick mirrors
and find nothing, nothing that will convince us that we are real.

The alarm goes off, and is shut down; we try to push the numbers back
for sleep, and for the sake of our brief mortality.

My bones want to stretch long, greet the day unfolded
with arms raised high like an arch, a lightning rod.

A wet spot on the counter, another drop in the pond; I slide
out of bed and bend my knees to walk.