A Poem: Today's Sunlight

Today’s Sunlight

I awaken in pot holes 

of sleep and shadows, dawn to those 

with keener eyes than mine 

and breaths that follow a sober pulse.

Today’s sunlight endures the damage 

of living.  

The earth is all one thought.  

Here I can know that.  

I read the world’s drivel 

at the pace of a coma, suffering 

the fire and ice of bewilderment 

when there is no place 

outside of winter in my home.

Down by the river, in the woods 

where the old fools are drunk and laughing, 

the police follow a trail of footprints 

to the age when men knew silence 

and stealth and admired the courage 

they lacked.

Sunlight hides in a my friend’s 

smile when she listens to her grandfather’s 

stories, when the day’s impending 

doom skips over her and worry flutters 

through her breathing, leaving her 

empty house in the care of laughter.

The accounts I know 

of an old man’s arrival at the well-placed 

foot of a grave, the slothful lust that

browses through life are the only encounters 

I can give to history, which leaves 

no children or next of kin.

I live in the eyes of strangers 

when the passage of time matters more 

than any moral, when friends looking 

for solace end with more money 

than they can hide, and precarious flowers 

bloom in my bruises.