February 15, 2022

work in progress **

All day, the extremity of the surf. The gulls rode the currents, unblinking.
There are dozens of varicolored buoys, bobbing and turning in the waves.
I feel my humanness thrashing about, making great clanging noises.
How five hours in the car can somersault into a dozen old narratives.
Maybe it’s the sense of everything going somewhere and nowhere at the same time,
Once in a blue moon, I remember signing a waiver and how the sky
turned everything around. At the going-away party, someone wore a t-shirt
that read “Life was good” with a stick figure of skeleton.
Maybe there’s a way of meeting the demands with a kind of friendly detachment.
Maybe it’s not so much writing a poem but how to be in the world.

** This week’s poem was composed of lines extracted from a half-dozen unrelated writings