I write and write
It is my lust
It is my fury
But on some days like this
I wonder
Do they mean anything to you?

magnolia’s cream-mottled cheek
   marking yet another bygone era
   plunked into the abyss as sorrow
   burrows into us, roots that become

our prisons / our refuge, the delirious
journey into what we've come
     to recognize as our shadow selves'
   last fragments of a fallen season

that last slanted sunset reflected off the lake
hinting with its brilliance at what we simply
could not admit to ourselves. The expanding
distance between us we hide in and seek thereafter

Not two decades yet,  
since the sun spat me into its glare,  
and already my head betrays me—  
six black locks, once fierce,  
gone,  
gone gray,  
gray as ash,  
gray as a lie,  
gray as the sigh  
of a self I can’t defy.