Someday you'll remember that this Right Now 

was a better Right Now. Those big feelings,

squeezed into small places, walled by fruitless 

accounting and exuberant faces,

opposed low ceilings. What if we could go

back in time to before I dropped your mug 

or forward to a rinsed pastoral since

you’ve let it go? We’d come to our senses

like up for air; after a justly hug 

themed walk-and-talk, adopt a non-silly 

way of living. You’d stumble on fewer

yesteryears (self-harming after the fact)

and I'd learn how to stem this crude wanting

and what that means for our prismoid future.

These samey days and nights popped uniform

from ice trays, stirred together in a mug

make baby food; gone by blent with to come.

Once, as now, I sat playing on the rug,

clockwatching, hoping secretly to bore

my children but they just came back for more.

It was, but is no longer once I say

“cleanup time”; like how I’m not late for work

but I will be when I get there. Going gray

in mirror only, readied in the dark,

I chase the ever-leaving train and hum

a lullaby whose words I do not know.

Much as I am, I’m sad I’m not more so,

but you can’t say I’m ever late for home.

Lank tears of recognition, purgation,

repetition. Pocketful of mixed seeds

fondled and forgotten. Warm-welcomed weeds

awaken in the cleft as sidewalks rise

and fall and rise atop a prodding toe.

Shoulder to restive shoulder, black cement

cobbles are unloosed from their settlement,

sprinkler water moves in great black veins through

fine dust. Tears run as far as the jaw line,

sympathy for the hummingbird spent, eyes

closed so fully that it seems without them,

touched for the sake of later relation.

Follows pepless step, taproot testing brine;

another puddle glances the dank hem.

The breeding suite’s one porthole makes up for

the insulary murmur of discard

chute, nutri-station, sonic cleansing wand:

Her reflection, gazing back in weaving 

triplicate, starred, upon triple-paned fused

silicate, a cracked tourmaline Beyond,

at herself gutted, forms three Fates fated

to issue from a single grieving; rules:

“You’re fine. Now... just repeat that evermore”.

Oh, if only it were impossible:  

Her mate-match, reassigned, before leaving

advised, “You can too hold on to what you 

lost. See? Someday, maybe we’ll be mated

again. Waiting is easy.” But it’s hard.

“Lethargy set me down a blue infant

in an inch of tub water. ‘It's hard to’ 

mostly meant ‘I don't want to’, and how could 

strength, having never been one of my strengths

(my wiggly arms only good for bathing 

fruit and sorting baseball cards), serve me well

in the fraternity of the impaired?”

“Springtime rears and I start to miss my friends; 

put out feelers. Not hard to find, I suss 

my reflection in the windows of a 

passing bus; I look all weird.” To what end,

these underpaid pursuits? We all work hard 

all week to spend our weekends lost in thought,

left the hell alone not loved and bothered.