defiant traffic
my nervous circuitry
reads aloud.
the luck of black crickets
chirping for pay
in the smallest of hours

in my ambulant walk
night goes off,
safety engaged,
cautiously out of
the crosshairs of her kindness.

we never went to India,
never snaked across sheets.
laboring in the seconds
just before knowledge,
and its textbook betrayal

I dig into my pocket
fumbling to discover
a swatch of musky silk
the cool leather of a rose petal
some proof…

I find forty-eight cents.

© Tom Watters 12/2/08

I’m fine.

a forgone response to
your detached query

those two words
stated and un-listened
so many times on.
I’ve considered accents to
create interest

you know

numbness has
its own ad campaign.
arriving random days at 10 pm
in the form of spam

an e-florist of
all the times I sent
flowers

not because I did
wrong things again
I was in love.

an eve of half apple
in trouble

now I stare at the tan
of my steering wheel
in park

loose change
in certainty.

© Tom Watters 10/16/08

alternatives to gravity
do not end well.
they leave the grounded
without the lesson
one desires to deliver.
repression of the sounds
falling in the forest when no one is there

giving in to
your sentence of impotence
breaks a law that no solicitor
could beg nature to dress in.

or some saw like that.

so we run, or walk
tell ourselves fables.
fly on the radar of our ego
blind and cautious
wearing the merit-badge of confidence

the hurting is anathema to
all intention pushing through the soil
so we don’t.

no.

that would be blasphemy
cardinal red.
sticky with something pure
like a thread of doubt.

our comedy is lower,
crime no longer seduces shock
ink becomes gray
the palate monochromatic.

gravity becomes exercise
tone for a slower grin,
heavier eyelids,
sharper comments,
and future investment.

© Tom Watters 10/7/08