In the old city what's done in the feathery dark brings you to the light with your face in her palms you vanish, a disciple to her breast grieving is spiritual, like aging, you think & the olive branch that taps at the window at night in the wind is only budding just yet #vss365

When you erase the day with a prayer in the accent of wine & the lonely lights blink on in the distance you feel the evening on your shattered skin soft as her beautiful promise #vss365

In every lost city rain wets the longing streets where there's a heart for the taking a tear will submit to the falling & so the blue notes on jazz alley float away there lived a woman here yesterday she spoke so lovely in her modern way #vss365

Fireweed time of year.

Saying farewell to a lonely day in a city that gives you everything but the thing you need quite by happenstance you climbed this tower where lifetimes come & go softly as yesterday's girl brushes her hair & the mirror gathers the light that has touched her sweet face #vss365

Blue star falling we pretend it isn't a world forever gone

We had beers in a Mexican bar lime in her glass, flower in her flaming hair she helped me when I couldn’t sleep for the fall of footsteps, the scowl of a broken moon when the past un-shadowed, she smiled in silver beams that shone through the window to light our eyes #vss365

"Gonna make me a home out in the wind." -- Bob Dylan

When the cracks appeared in your voice that melted her, spider lines formed in the corners of your eyes you were last seen deep in the night your lover had just dropped you & you couldn’t drive your way to daylight off in the distance it glowed with deep desire #vss365

Ticking clocks in every direction, the gravity of another day. That lonely feeling pummels and bruises everything. Evening is dripping, a front porch, soft in the rain, a distant dog barking— a freight train slowly pulling away #vss365

If you have the chance, please remember voices like water--rising in the country of your old & favorite moon I live now in a town where it's cold, not yet dawn northern constellations are tilting while couples dream in warm & loving rooms #vss365

September is her style she wears it on her shoulders soft blue mountains will never be this lonely & she almost says she loves me #vss365

The light is otherworldly in the valley where you love me draw your seductive words in the thin air between us their meaning is medicine it heals my catastrophe when I spill my heart into rivers Darling, blanket me. We will sit & watch our children play, on the horizon #vss365

Sorry for your troubles, says a waxing moon with that old #elastic grin you walk together—chasing Orion now that Lonely Town has gone to bed & yet a distant radio plays: Sinatra sings for these empty streets at 3 a.m. drifting in & out of clouds on snow-scented wind #vss365

We exit the lighted city at the end of a black & white movie I touch the hand of the one beside me in the car we are bullets in highway darkness eyes upon a moon impossibly full how soft & strange, this night so easy to forget the earthly business we're born in #vss365

And when it was over I was on a plane flying back from November in the dark with that loneliness of falling stars

There's new snow on the mountains &a lamplight in the corner a voice sings across the buffalo plains the way you come softly, like rain there's a rise and fall of beautiful things at the end of November when the winter issues orders #vss365

I'm a man who'll learn the hard way why lullabies are beautiful, even a little sad why a night is measurable in 3/4 time it's enough to fill the desert of my arms with words like, “Oh, how I’ll miss you” the room is dark, but I hear her lips part as if to say that again #vss365

We were learning hard lessons on a radical road the day we lit out in sweet rain you were an ancient religion I a river of stone our time moved like bison gone but for our tracks —carved into grain on some Western fencepost to whom they may concern #vss365

No one knows the weight a heart carries, and so you come into the country of northern skies. Coyotes sing to night-winds. Mars peeks over a black mountain. A bull elk comes to drink from a river by your bed. Empty isn’t so lonesome, you think, feeling light and unbound. #vss365