Given a lifetime of late night walks, my favorite is to strut a huge semicircle girdling a bluff some two-thirds of the way up an elevation of the river’s eastern shore, but I only do this in late November, and a big plus for me then is that I can easily pace my way without a care in the world just by placing one foot down slightly in front of the other on cloudy, moonless nights,

My head is a washing machine churning / a personal history of memories mixed with / the scent of a men’s cologne I can’t name /

on the way home to our own church service / the reluctance to sit through a sermon, / again, was somewhat stayed by a breakfast / in the age-old natural bridge gift shop /

I was an orange banana when I was brought into this world. This world was cold then, with wide expanses of cold ice and there were fiery bodies of animals swarming in it like cars on the roads of a metropolitan. Penguins were still jumping into thin-skinned lakes and ocean pools. And youngsters were still taking their pretty vows in front of each other to save the green planet. 

WHEREAS,  the beauty industry has dominated the hearts, minds, and clutch purses of tween/preteen/teen girls and grown women the world over, from the beginning of time, in every hamlet and in every bustling city, in every valley and on every mountaintop, from time immemorial and since Eve was banished to the desert after biting into the forbidden apple, thus gaining the knowledge of the condition of chapped lips; and

my grandmother lived in a quiet old house / hidden on an infinite road of wooded green / sleepy mist often hugging its walls  /