it’s the 1940’s on a bench in a park his winter gloves around your little shoulders you, plump and bundled under a newsboy cap, he with his fedora, fat tie and overcoat no one is smiling in this colorless picture under cracked glass but you know he smiled often, and you did too that you are sure of that you remember love hides a lot in photos too shy to show the world the truth of its existence preferring, for some odd reason to portray our lives in black and white

if you or I were one of my goldfish it wouldn’t take long for us to show something like pond misery, lolling bored under a lily pad sitting sadly on the bottom or staring with hopeless eyes at the sky humans despise prisons of any kind while fish can make a life even a happy one from simple curiosity, of the shadow that crawls over the lily of all that falls to the muddy bottom and so much still-time to ponder stars, impossible to do in an aquarium at night they can als

for most, Fall is a colorful dying our summers are a forever Fall with brown the color of death next to the dry creek the parched grasses stand stiffly, pincushions of auburn bushes have died, preserved as mocha shrubs, lifeless saplings stand with coffee-colored trunks today’s clouds are swirled, cookie cut and stretched, blown apart, twisted the sun, a searing ember in the sky I must have missed the season’s turn from desert beige to the deeper shades of death