Alphabet City

what if 
you are the snow?

so many constellations,
one sky

numerous simultaneities

the sum of the heart

cc: Chagall 2021

a stark visage comes alive
in the garden moonlight,
fluorescently yours I pulse
alive on this wind, a carpet-ride
at relaxing low altitude,
I hover over your yard, I wave,
imagine you sleep there, 
inside this same dream of me

cc: Chagall 2021

Alone on the roof
Full-rigged ships at the harbor
Watch me sail away

cc: Chagall 2021

this time around is an accident
but she sees the effects of it
having been played

so
she stows that away for another day
awaiting the right time

cc: Chagall 2021

So far from Eden
No single soul who shows love
All the gates are closed

cc: Chagall 2021

subliminal incantations
rapid and vapid
impervious legislation
daringly uncaring
cosmological perturbation
no place is alee

nor free of debris

see?

listen to the fabric rip
this is a new kind of trip
we're on

And
we're off to see the Wizard,
the wonderfully wizened, 
the neo-enlightened,
the dumbstruck,
the blinded,
the absent-minded
half of the Haves
that got caught
blind-sided

foresight is 20/20

and hindsight is merely
erased

four scores and I'll have enough
to leave this place
behind

what's your problem? 
now, you  never mind

see this face?
you keep your place

watch your step
on the stairway to the stars
I've heard there are spots where
the banister breaks and 
the landings give way

to freefall

cc: Carlos Chagall 2021

remember when we were crazy,
when fireflies flew frenzied flight
in fields at night, so far away and long ago,
once the pleasure of foolish folly, 
tumbles down green incline
to rest rapt in your arms
face-down to the ground,
inhaling the earth,
spying small life we found there,
the tickle of a blade of grass that grew there,
kisses stolen propped on elbows, bodies contoured
to the lay of the land, our cordoned off slice of life

all the world was a dome above
the firmaments below our vantage

on a branch overlooking tranquility,
will we ever coo again?

cc: Chagall 2021

when I was a child I would often awaken 
in the middle of the night to a world that had slowed

time would take on a macabre dimension, 
a drawl

I felt as if moving through syrup
with a voice not my own inside my head,
more a sense of a presence, a grinning, derisive entity 
that hovered inside me

and I would call my Mom and she would soothe me,
we'd sit at the kitchen table, she smoking a cigarette
wearily, while I would wait for the feeling to pass

later in life I would rest on the couch regularly,
mid-day after school, and successfully will myself to 
exit my body, float into the kitchen and bounce above the cabinets there

one time I turned my attention outside and knocked over a trash can
that sat at the curb awaiting pickup

now I find I am anticipating correctly things that are about to happen,
sending people mirrors of their own texts at precisely the moment
they send me theirs, as demonstrated numerous times these past days

friends are forever saying "you must've read my mind..."

I am again in slow time, 
afloat and prescient

Chagall 2021