I wake up
from a decades-dream
to discover
I wasn't sleeping.

Regrets swirl around in my head
like lyrics to an overused song.

A water color glass
where paint is added
bit by bit
until
it is all
muddy
          black. 

On a Bridge with Munch

Faceless
and voiceless,
I stand on the bridge
between yesterday
and tomorrow,
a cartoon figure,
fat
and flat.
I open my mouth,
but out comes
no sound.
I open my eyes,
but see nothing there.
The world is a Gaussian blur
of painterly impressionism.
I have
no
face. 

The promise
in an old photograph
is in the smoke-filled room,
rising seductively
from the cigarettes
perched precariously
on the side
of the coffee tables,
it makes me squint.
My vision distorted,
I see
what is not there.

Hypocrisy after Emily Dickinson

The red and angry, swollen spot
cannot be ignored.
The reaching out
becomes a hiss--
instead of kindness,
sword.

What should be gentle
hides its shell
and prays for camouflage. 
The love, the helping,
doesn't bloom.
The grace, in sabotage. 

Nothing

There are a lot of blank spaces

as I look back

but

         blanks

                      are what I'm used to--

blanks

               are what we got a lot of

                                                     back then.

The story

                 has been filled in,

                                            drawn on,

                                                              made up

                                                                                as I went along

because fiction

             is better than

                                                     nothing.