The Stillness of Her Smile

I wish...
In small enticing circles
Across each smile she gives me;
I travel softly
From one corner of her mouth
And to the other
With the words "I love you"
Lingering
Between the soft spots in the air.
She is an effect of change
Brought by a silence in her eyes
And a stillness, pure as beauty
Suggestive of the peace
Of knowing one's true place in life
And knowing
That no matter where I go from here
It was right here
In small enticing circles
In the stillness of her smile
Where my whole life began.

Strange Curiosities and Smiles

She danced the room
With eyes like honey gold,
Causing me to believe in
Things like hope
And love
And pain;
And it all came
In silently sliding vicissitudes
From a heart made up
Of lovely moments
And a quiet
Calm
That can give an urgent pause
To a life left stalling
In the wings.
She smiled
From a place I knew too well;
A place where silence is
A thing forgot,
Where harmony
And song
And believing
In such things is more real
And less
Fantastic,
As it so often is here:
Here,
In her world of strange
Curiosities and smiles.

A Ghost & Gone for Good (or Multi-faceted Subterranialism)

Sitting beneath the hum of a thousand watts of fake and fluorescent oil and concrete-scented light, I long for the sweet breath of the Metro winds, reminding me of the world I left above me: a world filled with hope and dreams and movement. Not the silent sheltered graveyard that this tunneled tomb is to me. A carriage comes with screeching grating wheels and a hundred placid faces staring out, each visage torn by the silent hopelessness that this tomb of motion builds within us all. I watch as the elephant-sized steel caterpillar stops and gapes its sideways maw at me, welcoming me to its compartmentalizing hell; laughing with its pre-recorded voice of instructions, like a robot that cannot feel. I step into the guts of the beast and lose my soul with all the other wearied travelers, as I await the sweet release that its closing jaws had promised me. But deep within its belly now, I find that no release will come to me. Instead, there are only new and older smells, more human and grotesque in their complexities. I scoff at the idea that I could have once considered this new world with all its perplexities and all its swallowed lives as anything close to better than the frightened and yet docile life I left behind. I shudder as I discover that my kindness and my thoughtful nature and my conscientious ideals that encourage progress in a human life all mean nothing here. My skin grows pale as I feel the silence of the void, enticing me to become one of these lost souls. I clam up, deep within myself, becoming silent in my heart, as the thought approaches me in fear and a kind of frolicking cold mayhem, that perhaps I've always been one of these pale zombies: dead wanderers in a world of steely grey, enticing others toward the void. But just as those thoughts emerge, just as the light within the tunnel of my mind grows dim to the point of patent blindness, I hear the robot voice again: "Hollywood & Vine," it says, as I stumble through its maw, returning to the thousand watts of fake fluorescent air without that is still somehow within. I feel the solidity of the concrete and immovable ground beneath my feet and wonder, had I stayed another minute there, alone within the belly of that beast, would I have found myself turned to one of those lost souls: a ghost and gone for good?