if I could capsulize my life now, it would be late afternoons, a recurring event of time spent staring out the picture window into a quieting backyard, shade chasing the sun’s paintbrush across the waterfall, past the trees, stopping at the mountain’s peak, when the pond turns into a bottomless inkwell   that stretch of time sits me down every day and makes me watch light’s slow descent   as if a day’s cycle is a lifetime and I’m clinging to the setting sun

foreclosed houses, unhoused dogs apartments for rent, souls desperate to rent employment for schemers and dreamers, the mouthless market of buy and sell   a blur of need pinned to a bulletin board every line colorfully imagined hope and desperation typed and laid out in the back of a newspaper,   printed in black on white with the truth hidden in shades of gray

an ant is born and he’s an ant – fully grown, timecard punched, ready to march the mobbed trail to fight, carve meat, scavenge the dead, haul it home   born already a graduate of boot camp, he toils, eyes ahead, feet speeding, mouth and mandibles in nonstop motion for three months   then, he dies alone on the side of the road   which makes it a bummer to be an ant so unaware he had a life was it really a life at all?