Tech Ride

The elevator slid shut with its mechanical waddle,
the M button glowed, and down we went to the Mezzanine,
just me and the man with the blue tooth in his ear talking
aloud to his phantom recipients.

My god, how poetic that stanza would have sounded
ten years ago: blue, tooth-in-ear imagery and spirit conversations.
But now, there is just a man in an elevator talking business,
and I’m the one left mumbling to ghosts.

When Nothing Worthy This Way Comes

I leave the engine running with
absolutely nowhere to go, though
I have memorized every worn rock
on the asphalt trance that teleports me
from home to work, eyes oozed open.

I buy Mr. Collins at a book store
with intent to leach. I plunder
in the dark, looking over my
shoulder as I pluck, trying to invent
clever disguises for my abductions.

I chew ghost crumbs from lost lines
forgetting the flavor that does not come.
I often think how clocks and watches
tease us with death.
Is this the stuff of sonnets?

I rush to pen with little more than nothing,
then wonder why the page lies flat.
Rashness evokes a sour ink and likewise
gives rise to rancid plots. My blood
curdles and looks nothing like my blood.

Words fall into stanzas on their own
and I am no longer needed; yet,
the paper still itches and by habit
or by skewed nature, I scratch like
massaging the air of an amputated limb.

Everything is known, that I want to learn.
The sky. The moon. It has all been said.
I am content to doze through thresholds.
Rhyme is a consequence of probability.
Metaphors merely add length and mass.

I must rely on enjambment to
move my moments onward.
Later, unaccountably, I disappear,
then reappear, shaken. And still
my hand refuses that sweet tremble.