115. Strange leaves

Chapped lips and
home-made mitts;
youthful couples in the
crisper air:

Simple pleasures,
sights that cause a smile to
form –

Children gather treats
beneath
advancing winds;
cars lay rampant in
hazy, oil-soaked coffee
lines

To see as sights,
to smell as smells:
never to feel
the warm embrace of
commonality –

winter dawns, and
solitude
shows its weary
head too
prominently
to ignore.

114. Souvenirs

Lascivious poppies,
lusty in the sombre fields:
spill their irony in the
autumn frost,
shades of shameful
red –

Long have I envied their
reckless belligerence,
perching on some foreign shore,
immune to guilt, regret,
and melancholy:

No – guiltless in their wild
beauty,
trampled, laid to rest beside their
human brethren, forever bear the
burdens of their
art –

Fatal beauty
grows across the silenced fields;
echoes resonate between the
rustling stems,
silent in eternal
grief,
gazing on the frozen
graves:

Curious, unknowing,
woebegone:
cast in strange and
lasting
penance –

Generations strive to
recollect,
remember;
generations strive to
lose and
forget.

113. Carious

Long forgotten,
delirious memories haunt,
reclaiming us in
the exhilarated clutches of
terror;

things we would have said left
hanging in the jaws
of bloodied twilight.

Swallowed into jet black
night,
trapped in sparkling darkness
my voice collapses
into a mute,
crackling
whisper.

Discarded remnants,
fossils of another time
reincarnate:
all-consuming,
dangerous.