Ode to Everything

This is an Ode to Everything.

An ode to drifting between fruit trees, never picking,

never stepping up to home plate

relinquishing ambition.

An ode to staring life down and wondering how you are going to fill the time.

Not having enough time.

Value impermanence: the bad will pass you by but the good is gone too quick.

This is an ode to Bruce Springsteen, Sam Cooke, and Janis Joplin

and the Ohio summer my grandfather died and was buried in.

His chair is still empty back home.

This is an ode to adornments, vanity, libations, liberation

I am afraid to die. What if whatever happens after this isn’t good?

This is an ode to who you love now; you cannot have them forever.

To brain freeze, lung burn, we haven’t run that fast since we were kids,

all your dead incarnations discarded in your past life like snake-skin shed over stones.

Thank you for forgiveness immeasurable, and the heart’s possibilities, infinite.

salvaged art

pungent divinity spilling out of Sunday Mass

Money found in deep coat pockets,

good soup

This is an ode to the villages that fly by outside train windows

We, the interlopers, the transients, the passing-through.