I am always making things up.
Go ahead, call me a liar.
You’re not looking through my lens.
You don’t see things
with my eyes,
feel things
in my peculiar way.

Streaked, dirty, meticulously clean,
cracked, smashed, hairline fractures,
antique, barely used, swinging in the rain,
barely hanging on the frame,
shut tight, wide open windows.
Sometimes covered with paper.
Eyeglasses, even contact lenses.

Maybe we are all only dreaming;
did you ever think of that?

Tangled in cotton candy.
Crashing, pink ceilings.
bending details here and there.
Sometimes on purpose,
sometimes forgetting.
Octets changing places,
Hanging in midair.
Shostakovich did it best,
but his octet is rarely played
and never finished.

It’s so easy to think
there is one way
to do a life;
countless variations,
twisting, turning toward the end.

Through the glass, which is clearer?
Is it one or two?
The doctor asks.
Sometimes it is hard to tell.

We can love each other,
or drive each other crazy
with our differences.

My friend’s husband is ill.
She drives him to a hospital,
It takes all day.
She is exhausted.
She keeps writing me,
giving me details of her life.
Off to Egypt, pyramids to show,
a business to run, besides she
doesn’t baby her men.

(I’m trying to take it in;
having a hard time.)

It’s a choice one makes.
Letting people be.
I started learning that in middle age.
Marriages, friendships,
not all of them meant to last forever.
Turns out nothing lasts.
Dip your hands in ghee
some swami said,
long before keto diets were the rage.
Inside,
I suspect,
we are all the same.
Messy, working out life’s stuff.

I was 15,
riding the A train to Harlem.
A man took out his penis,
rubbed it good until he came.
Not that I knew about it then;
it really freaked me out.
I told my mother;
this was new for me.
Riding the A train you get to see things.
She said, you’re making it up.
I never told her what bothered me again.
You know what grieved me most?
She didn’t believe me.
No one did.

I’m proud that I wrote this down.
The apocalypse has been postponed,
At least for me, at least this time.
Twenty miles per second sideways,
winding paths won’t harm me.
The dead can just keep talking,
sometimes keeping me awake,
Mostly silenced.
Their voices stilled, drowned out by
coyotes howling in the night.