Funeral

Long ago at your old friend's funeral
Outside through a soft snow flurry I saw
Your flawlessly fine face faintly aglow
Your arms full of the fairest fresh flowers
Your gloved fists and your gorgeous gloomy eyes
Braving the ghoulish cold getting ready
To bury a very scary fairy
Tale of love that's wild and willful and wrong
This wilted willow has wasted away
For too long so here I watch you and wait

Exhibits of Love

Gloved hands probing deepest of wounds,
Valiant hearts and committed minds
Wrestling with death each moonless hour;
The mud-caked faces, bloodied claws,
Of the firemen that dig and scour
Through charred rubble for silent bones;
The voices that uphold such laws
Protecting every assortment known
Of skin or faith, of age or kind;
The truest exhibits of love.

Last Fall

Leaves of saffron and marigold
mingled with canary and rose,
some shattered, some frozen
within the mud and early snow.

The scent of chilly air and soil,
the sound of familiar voices
rising up at once to a roar,
the feel of gloved fingers below,
all fused becoming something new
that grew more and more distant,
but she enjoyed her last fall; every hue.

Successful Evasion

Simply this: Successfully!  This,   
the word they wrote—from news we heard— 
of how we dodged the damned police.  
But we too evaded sadness,
regret (for who we'd now become),
dread, disgust at weakness within, 
and fury at a world unfair—
those, they never printed or said,
but were torments still that we fled;
and past and future too (enough, 
to only think of cash and cops):  
No homespun Spider-Man pillows, 
Batman blankets, Zorro flipflops....
shopping for hoodies, gloves, and hats 
(for winter), with our moms and dads,
under the summer's hottest star,   
for second-hands in old bazaar. 
Evading who we were, could be, 
we fixed our eyes on dazzling rocks—
sleek fragmented mirrors, tokens  
of commitment, happiness, love— 
that could for us on black market,
bring in (fingers crossed) crazy bucks.