Tomorrow for the second step

I’m thinking time

for the next book,

fiction or otherwise,

bio- or auto-,

titled maybe

“Misdiagnosed, self-medicated, freely

associated and so on

and so forth”

sub-titled maybe

“A memoir of traps

in place and in time”

authored by Longing to Get Out

ghostwritten maybe

by Anything for a Buck

and published maybe

by Slow to Print Books & Son

thinking maybe that if the title

and sub-title and author’s name

and ghostwriter’s credit are

long enough and clear enough

the book itself can go short.

Page one would begin

because that is what page one does,

page two would begin

with a cliché

about journeys of self-discovery

and segue into

a discussion of agoraphobia

depression and related maladies

and my favorite vegetable

treatment, a topical ointment

guaranteed

to get the hero out the door

where what happens next

will not be therapeutic,

but colorful maybe

 and as the train of thought

rumbles on thinking

I’ll post this on Facebook maybe

and the train suddenly derails

with a roaring and a squealing

the hero somehow avoiding injury,

dragging himself home,

suffering a few cuts,

making somehow out of all of this
a silk potholder, if not a purse,

embroidering as finishing touch

“Tomorrow for the second step!”

If not us...

What if geography overwhelmed

history? Left us with no story

to tell? It would begin

and begin and begin.

The end, if it came,

would be a long time coming

and look like we’d seen it all before.

We wouldn’t decisively know

what we’d seen and the words

for regret would sound little

and late, if we heard them at all.

When the glaciers came,

they’d press down hard,

grinding and gravelling

our stillborn lives and,

if we could see ourselves,

we’d be so much unambitious

dust. It would begin

and begin and begin,

and when the wind picked up

the dust, it would whisper

late summer’s turn to fall,

snow yet to come,

to bury all our undreamed dreams

in mounds where our endless

undanced dances

would begin and begin

and begin

a fruitless drift,

never to arrive at the foot

of the tower,

with the faint image

of god unremarked,

and nothing but ghosts passing by

in a place no one could name.

Never to get to where

history remembers who we are,
where hope is a gift

we must work harder to give.