Skating past icy cracks,
jumping frozen logs
bent knees landing upright. 
The school slides by
ivy clutching red bricks,
sharpened pencils,
immoral clocks tick. 
Past bakery bins filled
with golden rings 
shaped like joy.
Disremembered.
I almost drop you on the stairs.
As you sob, I grab the icicle
draped railing, bare hand 
burning, gripping holding.
A stumbling drunk no less
addicted, you burrow,
I skate on.
                        

The waves on the sand
unfurl then roll away.
The rising tide fills the sandcastle moat 
and laps at the battlements,
an appetizer to its coming feast.
 
A puzzled sun is forcing its way
up through the visiting 
Sahara dust cloud, tarnishing 
and delaying the dawn.
 
Arid silt, alien to castles and beaches
is drifting down on its sodden cousins,
powdering the eroding castle
and surfing the oncoming tide,
waking old memories.
 
I pull my blanket away from the ripples
and with my towel tight around me,
warding the chill of the morning’s blockade,  
I’m intrigued by images 
of besieged medieval castles, 
and Arabian revolt battles fought
around and over massive dunes.
My visions have them raising the desert dust
that’s now floating down on my beach.
 
The castle is yielding to the onslaught
I grieve for this little metaphor of life.
                        

The empty bowl,
really a plastic dish
from a frozen dinner
sectioned into two
for mac ‘n’ cheese and broccoli
squirreled away, stacked
with all the others
potentially but never used,
too good to throw away,
detritus of non-cooking,
sat abandoned on the porch step.
 
Failure is not a black cloud, 
not even a sobbing wail
or a self-pitying trip into depression,
it’s a tiny feral cat,
extra fluffy, with a distinct
M on her forehead, a tribute
to, perhaps, a Main Coon ancestor.
She crept up to a filled dish
every morning, rubbed against
my hand, deigned to come into the house
to roll around in mock fights
with my delighted house cat,
but rejected my every effort
to have her stay.
 
She came for breakfast every day
until she didn’t.