Author: Michael Angelo

Today the weather is calm;
it is a gelatinous film
layered over cars and beggars.

Leaves are falling, slowly,
as though autumn were
mere suggestion.

They need not heed
a season because season
is just a word;
a simple measure of change,
and we
need not follow.

Change is thoughtless,
and colors shift
without direction or pleading.

We’re all a little ruddier
than we were yesterday.
Tomorrow,
we’ll be a little more.
After,
the trees in white snow
will be naked.

Ice on bare flesh,
numbed fingers and toes;
remember
we’ve been here before,
within mist and cold,
within particles of light
on a snowflake.

We dance and fall, slowly,
as though life were
mere suggestion.

We need not heed—
life is just a word.

It

is captured in the yellow leaves of a tree becoming.

It
is within

life’s infinite unfolding,
shifting, and morphing
steams and food carts,
car crashes and bomb blasts.

It
shines

in pretty girls and hopeful boys,
on beetle shells and satellites;
the leaves are overflowing

with It.

They are melting into stellar amber beads
of seconds
glimmering with the promise of our golden hours.

All you really have is this moment.

The great and terrible tomorrows
are phantoms.

This here is truth, this poem,
and your eyes scanning.

Behind the mountains, within the clouds,
between the alleys, beneath the clothes,
there is nothing.

Nothing is the only thing promised.

If you love,
love scorchingly.
If you hate,
hate like ice.

It is better to feel
the sting with achingly alive fingers.

The realest thing is this poem
and you,
miracles of the senses.