Responsibility

I know it wasn't my fault.  The fight that tore through my circle of friends and changed everything.  That is the frame I've been thinking about it anyway.  Like things weren't always changing with all of us.  As if there was a golden collection of moments that an event could be said to have really changed anything more than some other event.  But it is this frame that seems to explain this regret.  It wasn't my fault, but still I feel...what?  Guilty maybe, as if I could have done or said anything to stop it, but still this feeling which I am calling guilt, but really it's a burning rod through my left lung that somehow emanates from somewhere beneath my belly button.  The sensation haunts me.  It feels like a spirit has entered me and wants me to know or feel something that my mind can't figure out.  So let me start from the beginning and perhaps through this sharing, the spirit will manifest itself and I'll know how to let it go or it will let me go.

It started with a rabbit.

Sky Diving

I look for rain on the stained sidewalk,
where a younger me danced under a cloudless sky.

It is evening again, that same twilight flushed
and dusty as the skin of plums

Always the waxing shadows obviating the known day
into dusky, disremembered dreams

My feet fall heavy as marble
as I trace my footprints home

My footprints, because the cracks and lines
in broken concrete fuse with memories I have claimed

Today, there is nothing left to remember
but the silhouettes of figures passing under streetlamps

Today, blurs the reliable street signs
Set into green, symbols from some ancient tongue.