Buried Alive

It's not like setting fire to the rain

as Adele sang when she jettisoned

her guy and friends cheered

images of mystery and catharsis

with symphony accompaniment.

It's more like being buried alive

in sand with only my head exposed

to stare alone at the sea of our love

without arms to take us where

we are meant to be.

This is in response to the visual prompt above posted at Magpie Tales.

The Kiss

We dressed for our day, the air
between us thick with thrown words,
they loomed, suspended from then to now with no
bridge back. He turned,
just that. Longing jolted through me

for contact, even clothed contact,
us coiled, whorled, my head wreathed in his hands,
touched lips tried upside down like us,
a kiss to map a new way back, to rebuild what was lost
one kiss at a time.


I love that these lovers, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, were long- term marrieds.
This is in response to the visual prompt at Magpie Tales #92
And for dVerse Poets Pub, open link night #19

A Dream in Which I Run Over Two Toddlers

This is offered in response to dVerse- Poets Pub prompt to use idioms and spread the poetry love
and Magpie Tales haunting visual prompt as seen here.

Last night in the graveyard shift of my dreams
I stood looking at a high hill that I needed to climb.
My niece ran over to show me a train track to take up
and a flat, open tram to sit on for the trek to the top. No directions
were given me for how to work this tram but
I was drawn up as if by an invisible cable.

I climbed slowly and then plateaued for a bit,
climbed again and again plateaued. On the third plateau
a young boy appeared beside the track in front of me. He held a rope
attached to a smaller, open trolley on which sat two toddlers.
The boy laughed as he pulled them along in the same direction I was headed
then turned and raced the toddlers' trolley toward my tram until I ran over them.
Traces of blood tipped the front of the tram.

My tram continued to the top as waves
of disbelief, horror, guilt, hope that no one saw, fear
about leaving the scene of the accident and determination to make a police report on the accident
washed over me. Through it all careened the question
of how seriously the toddlers were hurt. I saw my daughter at the hilltop,
told her of the accident. She had heard it on the news,
but never said if the two little ones lived or died.

I wandered and worried since it was longer and longer
from the time of the accident, stymied
by how to find the police and consumed
by concern over the toddlers' condition.
I felt like a woman in a foggy field surrounded by chairs
whose arrangement makes no sense as I looked around for what to do next,
as if a dream is our sixth sense but defies discernment.

MOORE

This is offered in response to the visual prompt from Magpie Tails that can be seen here.

He wrote it on his tombstone.
MOORE. The story of his life.
He dressed it up fancy, the extra "o" and all caps. But it was always about wanting
more, more than anyone else had, more than he needed,
more than he could ever use, more than anyone wanted to give him once they knew him.
MOORE. He thought he was entitled to it,
to more, because of who he was.

He promised more, too,
in the belief that everyone wanted more,
lured them into his sticky web with visions of
more. But that kind of more can only happen
by seeing the real need for more. That more he never saw,
another's need. Never knew that obsession with his own
more blinded him to others' need, missed altogether the difference between
more and need.

He wanted it on his tombstone. MOORE.
Thought of it as his clever tongue-in-cheek epitaph to what was more important than his name.
He who dies with the most more wins. Never
caught the irony. It was on his
tombstone.