tap tap tap.

What happens when
You confine yourself
To writing a poem
With only one finger.

Without mettle...

Sometimes I hear a song, and it makes me want to make music so badly that it hurts

Music I must make because I am the next undiscovered thing who never will be

And if only I’d known it sooner in life,

Because now I have children:

If only my parents had loved me more I would be famous.

I start to scheme. Who do I know? Should I take piano lessons? I could sing karaoke in a restaurant and be discovered at 40…

Then I remember, oh yes, it’s just that I drank too much coffee.

  ...

Trees

This morning,

dropping the boys off,

I saw little Christmas trees in the garbage.

These trees have been in their rooms each year since the littlest was a baby.

It's a tradition I learned from my mom. Maybe she learned it from hers?

All of us were alarmed, the truck would come soon, we had to get them out of the garbage and into the car. One of the stars was missing, where was it?

Ezra looked inside, I looked in the garbage. We couldn't find it, but at least some of it was saved.

After that, driving to work, I thought about memory. It's not myth. You do feel it in the heart, hard to breathe, like a shock of cold air. My littlest boy, already 9, was in the back seat. At what age does memory get tied up with sadness, the way it is for adults? I thought about this and I remembered how confusing it was as a child, seeing adults cry when they claimed to be happy.

Passing parked cars. A man stepped out with an artificial leg. I thought, memory is like a phantom limb.