relocation

Appearing so softly upon the balcony
of mosaic that silts silently while we sip
our tea, the visions of a new
neighbourhood dig in and find
a corner in my overcrowded memory, take
a bite out of the past, shake their wet
tails, whimper and settle into a comfortable
post to watch the wanderings of
the heart.

The young woman, reminiscent of poems
read so long ago, the earliest imaginings
of otherness, scorned by pornographic
rebukes from allies, carries water
vessels back and forth, and always I sit
reading of streams of consciousness.

A mother runs upon love that her eight year-old
drops silently and unassumingly
as his training wheels carry him
over the thinly layered asphalt of our
neighbourhood.

Ah, possession, that long-sought-after
and easily-found ware, why must you turn
simple words into an affirmation of avarice?

inheritance

In the manner of olden times we
walked silently over oft-trodden
sidewalks while our thoughts, distracted
by their lure, rained misgivings over
the roads to be paved by semblances
of ourselves in a mist-driven
future. The return home is marred, but
always, by these familiar traces
of unsettling intimacy on strangers'
faces. While, slyly,
unconsciously, our elbows touch, we
talk so flippantly of the ways of the world,
and chewing apart the complexity of lives lived
in simpler environs of modern inconveniences, we ignore
the frayed feathers of an old
crow above our wandering thoughts.
Like simple stones under the ever-roaring
foam of currents that we do not feel, for their
familiarity we take in stride, the traces
left upon our palms the prophecies of our forefathers.