Shall I compare thee to this land, enshrined, And thus risk bleak and unintended blame When nature’s lovely gifts, by gods designed, Hide blemishes that bring the match to shame?    

She loves you with a burning flame but spending passion quickly she jilts you just the same.

For what little it’s worth now, we might as well be a boatful of grasses beached on a highway: not the first time we’d have met each other in the wrong

The sign flickers, half-lit, as if undecided. Inside, a man replaces springs no one takes time to save.

The James Webb found the furthest galaxy, again. The polar ice caps are dripping at my door. I'm waiting for the war in my head to begin

April, here I drill. Turning the heavy clay-rich soil, I include hardware store compost bags. I encircle heirloom tomatoes, Cherokee Purple and Green Zebra, with the wire cage.

Do you think of that morning? The two of us half-drunk from life and the night, believing the world would always embrace us...

The wind this morning romped through the willow oak trees, kicked their brown-sword leaves back and forth across the grass...

A gentle end at life’s last night is a blessing worthy of embrace. Why rage at the dying of the light?

I would give a year to walk in your shoes one week-- on Sunday I would flex my muscles at the gym, walk naked proudly through the others in the locker room...

The bones remember more than flesh allows: Each rib a record of a whispered past,

I vowed to you I would stay wild knowing you loved my teeth  except when they chased other flesh

This language can't find anything that rhymes with orange.

Like a dry fallen leaf blown by

At dawn, I press my palms to cold glass, watching the corridor stretch like an empty sky. Charts flutter: life, pulse, breath; each tick of the clock heavier than the night.

The road bends, broken in places, mud clinging to tire treads. Storm debris waits like memory:

The air once full now slips away unseen, Each inhalation measured, frail, and slight. We mourn the quiet life that might have been.

Remember  the year you sat out the orbit around the sun? The year you hovered in space and all you wanted was to watch the planet

I did it for her. She never got the chance to go, becoming a mother so young

Ice clacking branches in moonlit gusts deem this trudge conceivably lethal, but dim echoes of its crunching