Somewhere

A mother died

The bomb ripped through the oblique

Wall of foreign policy

Her eulogy

In less than ninety characters

As a matter of fact

Between the ice storm and the

Long-stemmed rose shortage

The same black on gray font

The same margins and spaces

The same twenty-six letters

The ink fades like our page-thin

Solicitude

Never

...give your frog a boat

He won't know how to make it float

He'd stare at it with froggy eyes

Then trade it for a bag of flies

Never give your mouse a car

He'll leave the driver's door ajar

'Til all his mousy friends and kin

Bring all their kids and move right in

Never give your bird a plane

The neighbors surely would complain

When, instead of tweets at four

They're wakened by a startling roar

And never, ever, for the world

Give your pig a string of pearls

For piggy pigs won't just make do

She'll want a set of earrings too

Time and Dreams and Waterfalls

The stuff of sonnets

Songs

And odes

Their mysteries we've oft

Explored

Down briared paths and

Open roads

Each parallels the movement of

Our lives

Along immortal streams

'Til time and dreams are

Cast to sea

And love and waterfalls

Remain

In A Booth

Seated side by side

She laughed

In all the right places

Watching his face as he

Ran

With the kite of her

Attention

Caught in the breeze of

His enthusiastic accounts of motorcycles

She probed like a

Detective

Looking for clues to the root of his

Fascination

And with her mousy hair

Her conventional

Glasses

And her gray pullover

She was never more

Beautiful

Homonymbus

All that I was taught

And everything I ought

Would surely come to aught

Without connections taut

Recipe

A man

Balanced on a bench

A book

Balanced on his knee

Thick paperback

“Child Custody Made Easy”

No doubt

As are so many hopeful tomes

It is filled with

Avenues

Axioms

Anecdotes

Assurances

Like a cookbook on a tiny

One-tree

Island

Eyes Closed

Staring into the mind's

Coal-dark cavern

Waiting

For sleep to sneak up from

Behind

Throw its arms around me and

Yank me down into the pool

Where

Through the ripples

The painted images on the tunnel walls

Come alive