IN BABY'S TOWN

On a dreary, windowless day in baby's town,

there is a blue buggy of empty rattles

and bottleless nipples. The waxed Mother

tuts along the sidewalk, her small carriage babbling

along, until she reaches a steep bump

in the road, and stops. Peering up to the salty

sky, she feels it slipping down her cheeks, salty

and warm, like ocean water wrapping around the town

twice before drowning. The Mother holds the little bump

in her delicately calloused hands and listens for the rattle

and tattle of her little baby's babbling,

but hears nothing but the Mother

and her aching chest. Sullen-hearted, the Mother

reaches out for a hand, but receives a salty

slap on the wrist instead. Wincing, waiting for her babbling

baby to surface. All through baby's town

echoes a constant dread that rattles

day in and day out, hoping to reach a bump

in the sonogram. So mooningly round, the bump

teeters on the flat side, revealing the Mother

and her stillingly haunted imagination. It rattles

through the night, tossing and turning, blood salty

on her tongue. Just a drop sends shivers through the town.

Below a paper mobile is the absence of a babbling

shadow hugging a prayer, babbling

on and on about loss and how it bumps

through the tiniest nooks around town.

Ballooning sympathies are sent to the Mother,

but she releases them. They will not numb the salty

wounds in her womb, will not silence the rattles

ringing in her ears. They are blue and pink, these rattles.

Pink like a rabbit's ear and blue like a babbling

winter, and both need a salty

sprinkle to make their colors melt. That road, that bump,

holds a woman so still, so raw, so cold. The Mother

walks with her buggy, back into baby's town.

Preserved in salty memory, the babbling bump

rattles the empty shakers of the desolated Mother

on a dreary, windowless day in baby's town.

THE LONDON EYE

she perches on a branch of wooden smiles

with her luminous locks scaling the concrete wall,

like dapper spiders on a crisp autumn night.

a smile has been haphazardly painted upon her face,

the color of blood oranges and london busses.

she teases the corpulent man with the clumpy shoes, an ever-so-slight grimace playing on her lips.

but then she plunges into a world where there is nothing but empty, unsealed envelopes.

crumpled hopes and desperate yearnings, lined with red and blue

making her wishes seem like a reality,

her imagination careening like a perturbed swan on the wake of a hurricane

overly curly figures swirl about, professing their love to unnamed beloveds.

vehement scrawls, burning the midnight oil, spitting out expletives left and right

left, right, left right left,

the kinks of his hair coil around his head

his mind, his own noose.

with the crazed glint in his marble eyes, he watches it swing from one number to the next.

indecisive hands and stationary rims, it manages to find order

he, himself, is dangling between here and there and who-knows-where,

stuck in an eternal limbo of lost and found,

where chaos reigns free.

CAUTION

i don't know

who i am

i know that i float

wander from one street lamp to the next

in search of my identity

i pilfer through wanted posters and child missing signs,

hoping to see my reflection

an empty shadow cast onto dirty sidewalks

i am simply a bystander, an extra, in the lives of others

i mindlessly obey traffic laws

stop, yield, go

caution.

the names that are being shouted,

they are not familiar,

they never are.

as i continue my path to who-knows-where,

between lost hopes and dreams to what could've been

i think, i think that i don't know anything