The Hunter throws
Sparkles of fire
Into a cold spring sky
Laughing and singing
He shouts out loud
By the dog’s adoring eye
The Twins and Goat,
His longtime friends
Have pride of place
Above this merry dance
This scene forever
Fixed in space
Their eyes remain entranced.
Gliding, in a half daze through the largest city on the planet
Tall building after tall building after tall building
A succession of Manhattans. Numbers beyond imagination.
This mad crazy city. This jumble bumble of life and living.
Of beeping cars and fearless pedestrians.
Of sights and sounds and smells and cries.
A concentration of humanity, unheard of in all history.
All yapping and laughing and loving.
I yearn for my tower in the sky. The jetlag gnawing through my skull.
I’m whisked through a tunnel, winding beneath a deep river
Cleaving this town between Xi and Dong, the old and the new.
My head longing for quietude
To sleep, then slowly absorb what all this means,
This wonderful, powerful, incomparable chaos.
Here go I
Frogmarched into a fiftieth year.
Painfully aware
Of time
Slipping like sand
Through open fingers.
Painfully aware
That I am still alone,
Undone,
Half done,
A thin, soft voice
In a loud cacophony.
Painfully aware
Of all that has
Passed me by,
While I slept
And crept
And wept
Through the years
Of my vitality.
Painfully aware
That hopes of love
And warmth
And deepest kisses
Are lost,
Muddied and torn:
The heavy costs
Of compromise.
Painfully aware
That others of my ilk
Never came so far.
Painfully aware
Of the depths
Of my fragility.
If you step outside
Of the International Space Station
With the planet spinning below you
At 17,500 miles per hour,
You will not fall to Earth;
The forces keeping it up
Apply to you too.
But if you push yourself away,
The Space Station just inches
From your grasp,
You cannot return;
There is nothing you can do
No arm movements,
No contortions,
No forward crawls;
You will gently slip away
Your salvation always in sight.
This is a terrifying thought.
It was the way he laughed
And he laughed a lot,
A sparkle in his eye
As he watched us
Frolicking idiotically
Around the living room.
Our endless debates
Around the kitchen table.
He was the black
To my white.
Probing, pointing out,
Never resting my case.
Our times outside
Indulging my endless
Stream of blather
Asking me to consider
Other possibilities.
We learned together.
He made me who I am.
I miss him so much.
#rarediseaseday #february29
The cat stares at me.
Jumping lightly to the floor
I remain in his quizzical gaze.
Why am I still here?
I’ve become part of his life now.
Ever present, no longer that transient ghost
Flitting in and out of his small, cloistered world.
I never leave. Why is this?
For I’m cloistered here too.
Eating, sleeping, dreaming, occasionally muttering.
Roving for spare moments
To ease the ennui.
Instead of spreadsheets and conference calls
To Do notes and calendar appointments
I’ll get back to you and what’s your ETA
Always worrying I said the wrong thing,
I can now peer across the valley
At distant houses and farms
At small birds frolicking, bees tunnelling into flowers
The endless clouds with their myriad patterns.
What am I doing here
Dear quizzical cat?
I’m learning from a master.
I’m learning from you.
After the last book has been read
The last Netflix series watched
The last puzzle solved
The last tweet, the last Like,
The last Zoom meeting endured:
The virus persists
And we are left with
Nothing,
But our own empty thoughts
In this relentless merging
Of days into weeks into months.
A stone hit me
Square in the head.
It hurt me quite badly.
Dazed and in great pain
I sought it out.
I said “Hey stone,
Why did you hurt me so badly?”
The stone remained silent,
Impassive, uncaring,
Unresponsive to my predicament.
It was, after all,
A stone.
Does any other adult feel
Like they are a wall?
Stopping waves of pain crossing
From one side to the other?
Sometimes that wall
Breaks
Or is insufficiency high,
Then the pain washes
Into unprepared garden spaces
Where inky torrents
Do their worst damage.
No more bright flowers
In once pleasant beds
Only sticky detritus:
Dark mud
A lasting stain
That cannot be
Washed away.
I keep thinking
Of the five lone exiles
Thrown from their mother planet
On a journey through the stars.
They are free now
Free of us
What happens here:
The pain, the wars,
The urge to hate and torch
It touches them not at all.
True alien spacecraft
Technology barely understood
By the creatures who built them
Beings of a single form
Who could not bear
To live beside each other.
Perhaps, after a million years
One of them is found
By curious minds.
Will they marvel
At the careful handiwork
The thoughtful construction
The imagination needed
To set great vision to flight?
Or will they discover
That those who made it
Were cursed
To wipe their planet clean
Trading a vast future
For a momentary chance
To despoil and destroy?
On they travel
Through the endless night
Free of us
This marvellous tribe
Of great mastery
Yet wanton violence,
There will remain
Just five lone exiles.
Pioneer 10
Pioneer 11
Voyager 2
Voyager 1
New Horizons
Passive Impressions 
