First glances and second encounters
Text messages and tiny smiles
Flowers and chocolate
Dates and confirmations
Small kisses and long nights
These fleeting feelings
Come and go like puffs of clouds
Some entertaining children
Others transform into hurricanes
Lovely how they form
Unsightly how they fall apart
Love and affection
Odd at times
Nature’s way of section
Evidence including flaws
Of human depths
Intimacy doesn’t always lead in a direction
Not every action creates an reaction
Not every glance buzz with flutter
Not every conversation intriguing
And not every water particle forms a cloud

These years, they ask us questions
answers that tomorrow never knows,
held in the arms of yesterday.
The weight of this dreaming
pushes the clouds onto the ground
and our fleeting conversations
with this flooding rain
breaks the boats we built
that were already too unfit
for this ocean between the clocks we build
and the time we chase

passing overhead
clouds with their bottoms clenched, rain
on parades elsewhere

We decided to take a walk.
If the moon and stars still existed,
they were hidden behind clouds.

Then a fog hit us like a wave, a cloud
that had run out of gas and crashed on us,
to further shrink the perceptible world.

Ordinary, walking people became vague
phantoms that could loom, in film noir
black and white out of the fog,
suddenly sharpen and colorize,
only to disappear again in moments.

Sounds, out of sync, or garbled, came sharply
from odd angles, turning that fifth sense unreliable.
Noises, at first muted, were abruptly amplified as
if the hand of that ghostly vapor ran a soundboard.

A man, moving in stalker-like silence, clops,
like a clydesdale on cobblestone as he passes close.

I half expected a distant fog horn to announce
the passing of a ghost ship where all be welcome.