The forsaken dinosaur

on the subway track

is a promise

that at one point 

– in the past –

a child was crying

(and that there were dinosaurs)

Because life is very painful sometimes

and the green plastic dinosaur

was not simply lost forever

but lying

right there

in mocking eyesight

“Let me get it!”

The child must have said

through desperate tears

to some harried adult

who clenched the wriggling arm

perhaps too tightly

“Pleeeeeeeeeeease.”

But no 

some suffering must simply be born as 

with a horn

the subway barreled in

enclosing the dinosaur

in a steel coffin

A blessed act of finality 

on the subway’s part

God giveth

and God taketh away

The child (probably) 

lived to see another day

but dinosaurs have been extinct

for millennia

Each building is the color

of the eyes of a lover lost

A cowardly pale coral

A regretful deep cerulean

A divorced mahogany

that looks almost black against the sky

The sky which is the color 

of my eyes when I dream

grey and misty and cold

The snowflakes fall

and disappear

like money 

And the streets swirl in little eddies

of impenetrable acquaintance 

And yes 

parts of the world have turned their back on me

but who hasn’t had that happen ?

I grew up in trees

I grow up in cities

My hair grows diligently

The light flows through the windows

diaphanous and shy

My hands freeze

And rivers cut themselves across them

Rivers which will become canyons

in the time it takes a sequoia to blink

Who doesn’t love to skate up to the brink ?

To totter on the treacherous ice ?

To feel gravity’s potential ?

There is a cathedral

I have yet to see

whose buttresses are almost in flight

whose columns are impossibly round

whose trompe-l'œil walls reach staggering heights

whose shadows are so dark 

they swallow your words

before you utter them

One day I will find this cathedral

I wonder what color it will be ?

I wonder what echoes my footsteps will make

as I kneel at the mysteries

it has in store for me ?