Featured Poet:

               Passing Unnoticed

 

 

Gliding above, away, today –

like a solitary cloud,    

the best of me passes unnoticed

but for the odd ones who see these things,

 

who remark on things like clouds,  

whose eyes fixate on bits of the sky.   

They don’t know how else to look,

 

and keep falling upwards,

out of reach of the severe ones

stumbling the ground in front of their eyes.

 

Watch them walk right through the falling rain.

Walk and walk, and through the rain,

and walk and fall and stiffen.

 

Catching their deaths of cold seems about right.

And I wonder if all their lives

are little deaths...

are little deaths of cold.

                     Running Together


It helps me to make sense that the earth spins.
Makes things easier to follow, easier to swallow.

Delineations, demarcations, differentiations:
my lieutenants in battle.

Okay, so I need the spinning, need it,

no matter how much I wish otherwise, how much

 

I plead to allow – just once – two plus two

to run together into something soupy,

 

something sloppy, something slushy and shoddy,
coming not even close

to anything resembling four.
As if you didn’t know all along:

I’m all wishing and pleading,
and little more.

 

Sitting Outside at Night

 

 

I heard nothing,

but the wind in the leaves.

Saw nothing,

but the radiance of the moon.

Felt nothing,

but a delicate sensation of falling,

falling, into the moment, witness

and accessory

to the day’s hushed surrender,

as though I was in

the very anteroom of God, peaking

behind His slightly-open door

as I sat –

 

as we sat.

Yes, of course.

You were there too.

I remembered because everything

broke

when you told me

not to forget

to take your car in for service tomorrow.

And the falling stopped,

and the door slammed shut,

and the moon

ran away

with the leaves.

                                                                                                                              (More G. S. Payne next page)