YOU DON’T LIVE EVEN ONCE

I stand in the street
to break things up

drivers curse my lineage
a bus swerves
these are people not likely
ever to grow dear to me

everything disappears
even weariness

what I will leave behind is unimportant

children that are not mine run
through sprinklers in the park
dusk deepens

a moon not seen before
moves without a ripple
through this purpling heart

all lives must end

even those
that can only be imagined

Poem taken from Outskirts of Chaos by Mitch Rayes, Zerxpress No. 72 (c) 2015

COORDINATES

One tends toward the belief
that
sense of direction
is inherent, that we only lose it
the farther we remove ourselves
from nature and the natural world
but
even that had to be acquired,
there is probably a gene for
knowing where you are
or an allele, those little curly
offshoots on a gene that carry variables —-

How do we keep from being so lost?

Maybe I’ll do as the ancient mariners
and follow latitude by keeping Ursa Major
to my right (if traveling west) —-
maybe a white dove will fly by?

Or a child will take my hand
and show me the way . . .

It’s hard to unconvince myself that I’m not walking
south, even as the rising sun is to my right —
my mind is flipped (in the northern hemisphere
the sun rises in the east and would be to your right
if you were facing north)

Pigeons navigate by the magnetic poles —
I used to pay a man 50c to take my homing pigeons
various distances, 300 and 400 miles north from Cucamonga
where I lived, he had a truck with banks of cages
and he’d label each cage with a bird in it for what town
we wanted them let go: Bakersfield, Fresno, Oakland, Redding
and my birds would be home in a day or two —

Sometimes they wouldn’t make it — when Mrs White didn’t
come back, it really shook us up, she had been
a veteran of these latitudes

Poem taken from Remembering by Mark Weber, Zerxpress No. 72 (c) 2015