Nobody Feels any pain

—Bob Dylan

Where have we left them—our amphetamines & our pearls? I have been known to misplace even the rain. Fog follows us, a sickly green balloon. Online the tall boy from my childhood would love to catch up, swap stories, each tale of wildness & woe. Divorces & knee surgeries, politics & pot, the friends lost to alcohol, all the pissed off kids. I rummage through the jumble in my old thrift shop handbag. Sleep aids & aspirin, the empty Snickers bar wrapper from just last week, small notebook. And right where I left it—the rain.

Oh, we Say it all the time

It’s a jungle out there. Meaning, the world, the mean streets, the workaday weeks, their dense tangle. You grip your car’s steering wheel, which is to say—your life. You focus, try not to think of the dream of the overpass, the car flying straight off its edge & out into air. And every time the surprise—of waking, wondering, suspended, not knowing. Have you fallen. Have you flown.