Looking out this double-paned plate glass window into the gray frigidity and red-leaved bitterness of October in one of the last wild and still-untamed bastions of freedom in the west at the mountains thinking about how even they are moving, my darling, and how the spaces in between them are growing just like the space in between the sun and the earth and the space between all the galaxies all at once and the space between the spaces between the world and I and soon I’ll just be floating all by my lonesome in some swirling pool of- not air, no, not even air, just nothingness and watching everything float away like disappearing city limits from the tailgate of a truck on cruise control zipping across the badlands and maybe you’ll be there but going the opposite way and there’ll be nothing to do but watch it all go, go, go, til it’s
gone, gone, gone

When it's October 12th-
When it's a sunny Sunday afternoon
In the fall
When you're curled up in your comfiest sweater
Next to a purring cat curled up in his
And you sit in front of the bay windows of your home
Watching the clouds and cars and wind roll by
Carrying burning yellow leaves
In the updrafts.

When you want something,
but you don't know what.
Maybe it's a want to want,
misplaced in hopes of filling
the ever-present void in you.
Maybe it's happiness.

Maybe it's as close as you'll ever get.

Either way,
Maybe it's enough.

When you want something,
but you don't know what.
Maybe it's a want to want,
misplaced in hopes of filling
the ever-present void in you.
Maybe it's happiness.

Maybe it's as close as you'll ever get.

The talent is what we wake up with
And it has got nothing to do with
Being good,
Because everyone has at least some
Ability to do something
In the beginning.

The soul we all have
It's just a question first,
Of volume, second,
Of whether or not we lose it and third,
Of how well we interpret it.
It's the grit
In the battle-cry
It's the blood
On our fingers as we work the neck
Of some great instrument,
Playing on despite the insignificant pain,
With wet strings.
It's the vibration
In shaky muscles clenched
In complete and utter control
To hold a pose for a moment,
And flow into the next.

Skill's the hardest.
And it's got nothing to do
With perfection.
Perfection's an antiquated lie-
No, skill's greater, more intangible
Skill is turning typos into plot movements
And a missed note into a syncopated part of the beat
And each stumble
Into part of the dance.
Skill's in improvisation
Because error is unavoidable.
And when computers and amateurs err,
They freeze up and break down.

A skilled artist knows better-
Knows the mistakes are all just part
Of the grand scheme,
More a product of divine inspiration
Than anything we could have
Meant to do.

There is something magical
in the whirring
of a midday laundromat.
A cessation of pride,
maybe.
People all dressed in sweatpants
the air full of detergent smell
and the sound of coins clicking
against great tumblers
as they go round
and round
and round
and round...

The people smile back,
no use pretending superiority here.
Whistlers twitter on, folding towels and socks into neat, organized piles.
The children are well behaved,
their hands full of potato chips
given by their parents as a pittance for their patience.
The patient patrons
ponder on,
their empty hands crumpling receipts.
This, with the crunching of chips
and the distant whistle
over the percussion of clicking
coins clattering
in a dryer
compose an unintentional opera,

an ode to humility.

Humility's honorable honesty heals humanity's hubris.

Noisy trucks pass outside the floor-to-ceiling plate glass windows,
Where the hot air wreaks its violence
and men make their ways

in spite.

The clouds are on fire-
puffs of vapor burning umber, leaving dark trails of ash in the east.

The watery sky takes no notice.

to be a stone worn smooth in the bed of a river rushing to parts unknown, save for the banks and bits of cattail being dragged downstream by a million hungry hands, broken up into the smallest constituent parts by a million groping mouths and spit back out into mother ocean's wide accepting embrace and stirred into a stew of bones and various creatures picking them clean, many of which know not the existence of anything above the surface save for warmth and light, like the embryo turning fetus which also swims in a sea of nourishment, also cradled in mother ocean's loving arms, also perfectly content to feel the light of the outside from a distance until, in time, when the descendants of the same coalition of cells that once made up the body of that fetus breaks back down to atoms, flesh feeding new cattails and a million tenacious sets of teeth, slowly washes back into a rushing river where I sit,
a stone worn smooth,

                                                        ­                       watching it all.