In the dark, anticipating the wall I should have touched by now,
it’s been way too long, taking slow steps I shuffle to anywhere
Positively some street from someday I thought I’d remember
hearing voices in treetops, in whispers of crickets
At night when alone on the fray under overhead stars under planes,
for that’s how I see things, eternally groping for words
In a pinch when there’s no recollection or meandering time to arrange
I finally lie down
Chagall 2017
When I was a child, my mother told stories of how she first saw me in the hospital after my birth, and I would ask: “But how did you know it was me?”
Chagall 2017
Long ago but not long from now
till time passes away, we’ll hold and we’ll sway
in our special step;
where did they find so much tinsel?
Beneath a drizzle of ticker-tape mixed with rain,
I think lips taste, well . . .
very nice.
In our race down mountains, I often feared that you’d fall
and I’d tend to you in clearings, healing poultice and wrappings.
At the base of a timeless place, so sheer in its rise that up becomes down
before we know it, and we’ve lost more than merely a glimpse in the knowing.
Promise that we will always let one another
down softly.
© Chagall 2014
Thank you for your invite to a world that might have been had it been
some other day when the world’s more inviting, we’ve so much to be thankful.
best,
Chagall 2017
When Mr. Quan died, one of his 5th graders said her favorite memory was his challenge to the class to play the recorder faster than he and the wonderful frenzy that ensued.
Chagall 2017
Back-
ordered logged slid and stabbed
Chagall 2017
There are times when I am so close, inside-out and knowing
A net afield in the wind I capture a glimpse now and then
It takes a while to comprehend that the hum I hear is not
A machine but me moving in and out of step with the come and go
Of what had been in anticipation of what could still be
For fate fortunately finds fragile cracks that we slip through
Guided by unknown wisdoms I encounter a fount in the rain
Singular drops of water assemble to elevate the collective pool
Two by two and one by one they fall as we fall lulled by rhythms
Only earth thus far as far as I know can make any claim
Of descending dew we are birthed slick in the canal we slide
Headfirst and sometimes breech into the actual, outside-in and knowing
Chagall 2017
The Me, confronting the banality of their own existence,
must inevitably evolve into the Blame You.
Chagall 2017
2020 – Perfect Vision™
On the ground lies a shadow of a winged-object moving
yet nothing flies overhead.
Chagall 2017
Today I willed a butterfly from clear ‘cross the yard
to come to alight on my palm.
Chagall 2017
V
Alphabet City 