The last silver streamer alights,
confetti and ticker tape abandon flight,
balloons fall from celebration
failing to be held aloft.
Remember when we were? Each awakening brought
a new day with new sun in which we bathed defiant,
we dared it to blind us, we countered with our own
heat, radiance, impulse to grow, and then to burn away.
Soft brooms whisk the memory; the clink of glasses raised
to toast is still there, not quite yet imperceptible.
© Chagall 2017
How did we get here – do you know?
I asked uncertain of the blue
in the surrounding she replied
They’ve decided the moment repeats forever
Just you and me
I understood the nature of fate, she knew
It will have to do
Chagall 2016
Here.
Is.
The end.
Chagall 2016
Crisp incessant smacks across faces
then tears flow deliciously lips
lick my lashes
leaving me only
more lonely than now
She waits in style for moments to gather
her future is wrapped in red sash
or maybe her past
peeks through
There it goes again
on the breeze when suddenly
I drop
Dizzy in spirals
from heights attained glory
repeating some wordy world view
Wouldn’t you?
Coo-ka-choo
Tangled in branches
snarled in the bramble
I scurry to the roar of the falls
Aqueous foam
it’s oxygen-rich here
massive turbulence
magnetic churn of moon tides
I will not
hold on
I will not restrain
the flow
I will plummet headfirst
ride the scree like an aquanaut
I pray to be crushed
under oceans of water
reborn in a niched quiet eddy
on my back in warm sunlight
I croon
with these long extinct birds
Chagall 2015
Lingering
never say die
from this flat line
rebirth
Sparks spike
on the graph
upside down vees
mean carbon’s awake
I flutter I shake I
bake back to life
ain’t been this good
since the last time
Chagall 2015
My sadness was deeper than even she’d imagine
for this was my final visit, the last go
around the wheel, I’d return not again,
such is nirvana.
Chagall 2015
Autumn still conveyed my vibrant colors
until I realized it really wasn’t youth at all.
Chagall 2015
On my back barely beneath water,
the soft sand molds me to form,
I’m dense, settled in with full gravity,
heavy human-molten, I dare myself to breathe
in the liquid as at birth my lungs
accustom to the wet, I relax accepting
this will end soon, I smile
at diffracted rays of sun, the final light
I will see this time around; this drowning
is not so hard, it’s more a state of mind.
Chagall 2015
I am screaming inside the wind tunnel
My fear a step before me always
I slide away down the aileron
I think I’ve eluded it but it’s there
Suddenly the diameter about me shrinks
I’m as stuck and clogged as I’m inside-out
Flapping rapidly a flag on a pole
I relish the maniacal cold tornado forming
Concentric debris pellets my froth
I am squeezed to projectile blessed to be carbon
Chagall 2015
Alphabet City 