the one that doesn't sleep

With the natural rhythm of breath,
A warm wave hits the cold glass.
Staring out to the streets below,
Around a corner, down a block,
I see the lights shining brighter
Than the stars have ever blinked.
It’s unnatural to be so enthralled
By something utterly stale.

I’ve see this before
All over the world.
Every corner is the same.
But the translations are different.
It’s constantly moving,
Always flashing,
Always dying
And always surviving.

If it stopped, only for a second,
I think I should be cured.

The Goblin-Child

He lurks beneath stones,
under river bridges,
out of sight of passing people.
Not ugly,
not favorable.
Grumpy.
Children laughed
and threw sticks,
but he warned them away
with a chubby, stubby finger
and a rasping howl
from his orange lips.
Not ugly,
not favorable.
Grumpy.
Ages have been spent
catching birds and feasting.
Rumble snoring and scratching.
I’d be grumpy too
if I had a goblin mother
and a goblin father.

Brush

We painted the walls to shield our eyes.
Nestled in between the land beyond
And the golden lakes,
Our house crumbles under the weight.

Timber beams crack and groan from the wind
and the stones begin to break.
It’s a house we know, it’s a house we love.
it’s a house we need to leave.

Abandoned apart from the memory of battle.
A scarred chimney and a jumbled pathway
Offset the quiet door, sunken into the wall,
But do not cover it up.

An entrance so enchanting,
That a glimmer and a spark of wonder washes over you
But not us.
We still have paint on our knuckles.

I wish we could bead together the dew
And make a string that will lead us from the fields,
But our sense of direction would lead us astray.

And maybe we’d wander forever through our known trails,
Or to a new town where nobody knew our names.
If only we’d be so lucky,
We could wash the paint from our hands.

foreign

With a drooping jaw and a downcast stare,
History laces his stubble.
He has seen and he has heard.
It has been imagined.

Scuffed leather shoes formed to his toes,
Hands deep in his pockets, cigarette in his mouth,
And he walked into the pale shattered light.
Was he fleeing from a woman? Or maybe a man?
As the immense towers shot through the sky,
Tainting it’s aura with gray dirty stone,
The man simply sighed.
It has been imagined.

An accordion bounces notes through the streets,
A Parisian grins at the stranger,
Now on a bicycle with a dusty coat on his back.
An endless crowd of faces part for him,
Swiftly turning from the heart of the city,
Hiding from the shade and stepping into the sun.
It has been imagined.

A place of ice,
A faery nation of white and pale blonde,
The man with dark hair sits on a bench,
With a ragged dog at his side.
He would not dream of tainting the clean air with tobacco,
Plus, his fingernails were finally clean.
A chill broke his thoughts.
It has been imagined.

Nearly twenty years before,
With curls to his jaw,
He stepped off of iron and onto foreign land
For the first time.
With no exotica, he was puzzled.
Now he runs, wanders and searches
For the place he created as a boy.
It has been imagined.