Under Crape Myrtle trees

Today I wondered about people who explode into a million colors and dazzle the night sky

And woo the sighing crowd before they fizzle and fade,

I'll spend long nights and cold wakeful dawns solemnly recalling,
Before the memory dims and faces lose their fine features
And one day I'll find her corpse coiled up on a cold beach morn
One sharp day, years after I called off the search.
Or I'll share a coffee with a soul long departed
She’ll look through me but I am of no interest;
I'm that old coat discarded down the line.
I'm last year's fashion in an antique spa town that's lost its allure.
So summer has slipped from the patched up highways
Now the sun congeals like egg white on the glass
And the heat is rushing fast out of the afternoon
It’s running and folding into inevitable grayness
And on the road of white from iron stile to bleached out sky
There will be another walking beside me soon,
A gaunt figure on a frostbitten road
The explorer whose cadaverous face tears like parchment,
revealing the pages of the rotten book of days,
Who walks in pain on Giacometti limbs;
And gives the lie to the promise of all these dead end roads;
So today I wrapped myself in the soft entrails of summer
I clung to the Crape Myrtle under its pink baroque domes
I twisted into the hazy distance in Mariners Park
Until the thud of wheels on asphalt became a far away hum;
There are flattering avenues where I can hide from approaching winter
Lush grass under trees that rushes up to embrace
There’s a mirage here of perpetual summer
There are skies as blue as upturned lagoons.
There’s a soft lie and a deception I want to believe.