I've got a few questions here.

If time is cyclical then why don't we see ourselves? Why can't we predict the cracks in the asphalt that will swallow us? Or call out to keep ourselves from stepping into the paths of our own cars, blistering down the highway with our without us? Why can't we see who we are, and then if who we are is, for instance, a wild and mange-stricken dog, broken and snarling, why can't we turn away? Is it because, cyclical or not, with or without us, to look away from a snarling dog is to become nothing?

Peninsula

It doesn't snow here in winter. We lace palm trees with lights, white, or many colors. The night sea breeze bites some, forty degrees, and if it dips a little lower we have frost warnings. Bring in your pets, cover plants. Snow, if it comes, melts before it ever touches the grass. One pacific northwesterner uncle wears shorts during a December visit. The rest of us are bundled, probably overbundled. Some of us dream of getting away from this place, the sun, the lightning. Musty air you break a sweat in walking the length of a parking lot. But we don't know yet about snow. If it snowed tomorrow some of us would die, unprepared, idealistic. A mirage in the heat. A mirage in the snow. Maybe that's why northerners come to get out of the hard grey, though you couldn't call it an oasis. Not if you lived here full time. There is a lot of fucking water, though. You have to give it that.

Double Negative

A shallow chemical pool burns and sets an image, and suddenly the memory of birth is gone, the white fading into the shape of something that was never young and will never grow old. In this way, birth and death are twins.

Stratospheric Doldrums

A creamy white swirled by gray, a jellyfish plume cut into the foreground, this is the sky I see today. A curious sensation of drowning in air.

Road

Carving out a road, carving it slightly different from the rest. That's what we do. Our road is many roads cut through many sets of trees, mine an unpainted tar path that winds through the thick pines of a national woodland and you will pass me in sneakers and a dirty tanktop. No, fine sand shooting off from right-angled corners, through a bamboo forest, a rock garden somewhere in the middle of all this where you sit barefoot and meditate, or draw a tiger in the sand, an image you will destroy when it is finished. Or a slippery path of sand dunes and a gentle but unruly bramble of panic grass and sea oats surrounding and crossing the path.  The sky blacker and stars milkier and gleaming brighter than any other spot we know. You stand at the edge of the black ocean, the edge of the long, cool sand, land and ocean and sky nearly indistinguishable, and though I am afraid you embrace me and pull me carefully under. There are many roads, each person's road is slightly different, and though I have several mine are all the same road.  You know the secret, that you are the cause of the sameness of paths. That the reason my roads are one road is because at the end of each is you, waiting for me to find my way.

Flightless Bird, American Boys

How much ground is lost over a lifetime on useless legs, one in front of the other, so fragile and small. Like a glass figurine bird who has lost its way home.  Shuffled here and there in a crowd of patriots.  Easily lost, stepped on.  Dirtied with the mud of their boots.  They're all going the same direction down the sidewalk, non-descript buildings hugging their shoulders.  A sliver of sky peeks between their tops.  But the bird does not know how much or how little of the sky peeks between the buildings, because while the patriots do nothing but crane their necks, point their noses upward, laugh and discuss the rain or the cloudless blue or Apus/Aquila, they cannot ever see him, who passes beneath them and does not look up.

A puppy song for my neighbors

Whining, always whining is this puppy who is new and who wants to know the answer, though the answer she wants is not the answer to a question, but the answer to a shape, a shade of grey, a yearning to be lifted into arms. The answer is warmth, an atrophy of which leaves her head hung submissively over the edge of the couch back, waiting for a coming together of bodies.