As you look out the train window
And watch the old buildings go by
You imagine that one day you will wake up
On the wrong side of town
In the wrong bed
With the wrong partner
And that this is all
Just a matter of time

Sky Burial

On the charnel grounds
There are no illusions
The body is broken apart
And offered on a slab
For vultures--
But in that rocky, jagged world
There is a recompense
For those whose epitaph might read
“Never really lived, but died anyway”
That, at the very least, one can serve
A larger purpose and become
A source of nourishment

A parallel universe
Beside you
Shielded from view
As if by smoked glass
Grandfather reading
Grandmother in the kitchen
Then, now, after
Movements across time
As time and space bend

The walls of the hotel
Are so thin
You can hear the scream
As if in your room
You start up from sleep
And see the moonlit clouds
Through the window
You feel your breath go faster
In your constricted chest
While voices whisper near your door--
That scream, was it yours?

Cold Storage

A human head
Left in a tube
Looking with frozen eyes
Blindly at countless dawns
Trapped in a world of ice
Its former owner
Having prayed
With the fervor of the holy
For resurrection

The sudden shower
At the canal
The waves rocking the boats
The stone walls of the castle
Turning dark gray from the wet
While lightning savages the sky
And makes the air electric
This moment in the soaking rain,
Remembered in a year? a decade?
Kept in a cosmic record for the afterlife
Or swirled down the rain gutter
Into oblivion?
It is now, this feeling,
This rain

Like a seed
In the earth
At the mercy
Of Winter and time
Under the glare of the sun
And the gaze of the moon
Through generations of green
And yellowing leaves
Amidst the passing voices
Of children and old men
It waits enclosed
Until that Spring
When slowly it breaks through
And flowers