when you live so far from home...

...talking to the people you love
takes on such new dimensions,
you need a tool box and a blueprint.
it's all chatting away
via email
via an ocean's distance
via some invisible waves bouncing
via satellite
it's life via a loss of direction
and wires that span the ocean.

sleeping in a strange bed

It’s hard enough to sleep at night
Without this city sneaking into your house.
It’s hard to sleep in a new bed,
When you know you shouldn’t be there at all.
It’s hard to say no, when a voice you’ve never heard
Starts offering you reasons you’ve thought about.
It’s hard to remember who you are,
When you try all your life to forget.

a theme that has been hanging around

...sleeping in a strange bed,
a wish, and hope, and a reality
that could never happen,
even though it is very real
and right now, when i least expect it
there it is again,
the smell of you,
coming through the windows,
the brief sense

--and my whole fragile shell
falls back to pieces--

the brief sense of you
and the clock starts moving again
--and the day starts to crawl again--
--and.....

sneaking in behind you

This city is such noise.
Nonstop, like a giant symphony, collected noise,
like a radio banging at the bottom of a garbage can.
sounds like one, one giant thing,
rolled into a ball and coming at you;
one confusing bit of dizziness and din
when all you want is something quiet.
The voices, the cars, the boat horns,
it sneaks into your apartment right
behind you without
attracting your attention at all.

So I spend so much of time
with my fingers stuck into my ears,
shaking off sound like a thing with wings
humming around my head,
dodging my attempts to quiet.

It’s strange, though. Inside all this noise
I’ve heard new sounds, trying to
avoid some many others.
A piano progression at the end of a song
just under the fading noise of a band turning it off;
new songs that I’ve heard so many times before;

a voice inside me, that normally yells,
now willing to just talk,
somehow more willing to wait on me now
than anytime before.
I wonder, though, how easily this too
will become noise, gentle or not,
with me plugging my fingers
deeper into my ears,
a vain and bitter attempt,
like running hard and straight at a wall.

History's Lost Dreams Become My Own

I’d like to bow a golden violin
And wile away the false winters months
Of a Antarctica winter
Looking down,
Or is it up?
On the rest of the world,
While they spin lost days
In a whirl of heat and stinking wet,
Looking one and all to become the next Lazarus.