What She Left Me.

we make our most important decisions unknowing, our most fatal mistakes without hesitation.

unforgiven for the least offense, we trade life long enduring pain for fleeting moments of
closeness, destine already to leave,
leaving you broken.

the chance you thought was yours like words
spoken in anger, you can never take back,
and all the bitter heartbreak to come isn't
worth that single moment lost forever,
that is all she left me.

The Waif

You are not to blame for what I've become, You

who abandoned me, wounding me, forever
Traveling from border to borderline between comfortable numbness and stark despair
Alone in my life have I become ...

Distant and disconnected from the mother who could not love you, condemned you to feel unlovable, to find love, but not joy, to give love, but not keep it: keeping your distance instead you kept it vague, until you faltered and fled, abandoning us all.

A little girl alone with her witch mother,

-UNIMAGINABLE!-

Her anguished childhood, lost, to the terror of war,

Sharing her, sorrow and shame I see her enduring what I could not have survived,

But you, a frail little girl were resilient, it took her time to break you...

The little girl I never knew, who I am helpless to help, comprehended, or forget.

Who haunts me, following me, She leads teaching me, that

Love is not what you give, it's who you lose,

keeping only no one to lose I follow her,

losing her, losing her,

I am lost

Loving now only those who won't let me in I keep them out.
Keeping only what was never mine I have lost no one,
losing no one, living alone.

Skyline

There's a city out there

he wants to be part of .

Skyscrapers jagged edges

etch their way across his mind,

from the tenement top

he tries to touch them.

Leaning an inch, two, three,

too far, he's falling ,

Falling frantically

pinwheeling arms

throw him back to try again,

in desperation that drives him,

and again, until fatigue defeats him.

Then with arms hugging folded knees in despair,

he watches darkness descending

on a dimming distant skyline.

7-2-80

Desperate Loner

When I was a kid,
it was easy to be like Eastwood,
a dangerous loner on the trail,
No one to stop my aimless drifting.
When life seems more real than dangerous
faces more mundane than bad,
It's easy to be what only Eastwood
could understand, off in search of some dusty trail
to die somewhere, a desperate loner.

9-24-80