Rhythm
goes underground.
The clock clicks 12 twice a
day. And night movements glow that much
slower.

It’s time
to find your own
metronome encased in
mahogany wood. Wound up and
ready

to soothe
the most restless
body to haunt empty
streets. When will the pendulum swing
back is

not the
question you want
to ask. It’s those alleys
that connect everything back to
nothing.

As I
say the words spray
painted on a subway
station wall “gratitude and grief,”
who knows

why these
tears taste so good,
how the empty car will
warm you overnight in a dream.
No one

owns this
land, the city,
that underground refuge
possesses us to tell it like
it is.

I must
confess the truth:
property will always
confuse me. Here I sit alone
in this

rented
jumble of rooms
inside a century
old building made of bricks and stray
stories

tossed, or
lost, or misplaced.
Truth is I made up that
subway graffiti to reclaim
this year.

Fill in
the blank with four
letter words, with shattered
travel plans, human contact in
tatters.

Rolling
across floor boards
in search of any face
you might recognize from eyes
and forehead.

Indoors
alone again,
lucky to be alive
to live through this without gasping
for breath.

No more
tears streaming down
cheeks while standing in
a crowd, the band playing its third
encore.

No more
memories to
make, share with anyone.
Remember how you said you wished
you could

become
a hermit just
like Thoreau? “Not till we
have lost the world, do we begin
to find

ourselves
and realize . . . the
infinite extent of
our relations.” Walking the whole
way round

the pond
is no joke. Is
the only way to get
out of bed in the morning, the
only

choice left,
a slow run toward it,
count the curves in the next
circle left to draw with what
remains.

Note: Thanks to Henry David Thoreau for a few choice words from Walden.

Without
these shadows, how
will I know where to find
corners to coax me to believe
in light?

Snow squalls
burn through the day.
Crashed semis in flames.
It’s a miracle no one dies
out there.

Into
this dark winter,
miracle can’t be the
science we follow to beat this
virus.

Stop the
dying. So much
depends on words that fail.
They sink straight to the bottom as
ice forms

above.
My vote is my
vow is my voice as it
gets entangled with others to
become

one long
break—beautiful
disturbance that spreads as
ripples to awaken water
beneath.

counting
on counting to
get me through the final
stretch: miles lines days stanzas votes
exhales