By Aleksey Calvin

From some city bench I am ashing...

Else I am as ash...

 

Soon coyly smashing an ember,

Benchforth,

With the side of foot.

Alike a corpse it goes ashways

Pecked at by winds,

 

Vanished

For good.

Into the gaps between sunrays' chimes

Where

Quicken the miniature mallets' bright CRASH...

A slap and a slash of such shooting stars:

Flash of a sunbunny's concrete-side dash.

 

We are our own watchsouls,

Lone bodies,

Of dreams our own seers.

From the bench beside me

My neighbour goes,

Across Spring leaves.

 

Just as sirens ring in the distances -

Mind's oceans -

And the ash disappears...

To the eye

No trace left a'wash.

 

All is smashed!

As Earth twirls,

Feckless,

And as Earth, Promethean, burns...

I tremble, catching a scent on air.

“For what remains of all these forms?”

Out in some fading Arcady whispers the ghost of Schwartz...

 

Yet, I personally do carry something

That snuck to stay

In my back pocket.

An old note saved?

Eh, perhaps...

Though, really, who cares what reckless words we once wrote,

And which shallow thoughts we dig up from their graves

N|O|W?!

 

My thoughts' marathon stalls before a flood

As the world's pallette reverses:

A heart dries sunless

By the deus ex machina

Of a single cloud...

 

And should most then care of what none can know:

What doth survive in a burning world?

How can one clutch

In a melting hand's palm

Books bound in rain

And a sunweaved soul?

- 2015