a few offices down
from mine someone
has your laugh

           i hear it from time
           to time         trickling
           leaking          faucet
           i am too lazy to fix

Loss, I‘ve been told, is a delicate art
mastered by Buddhists.
Apparently it’s all about
learning to become                    one
with the abounding chaos.

In laymen words: to swallow
the gritty substance
of metallic actualities
to let them fade
in that stinging gust, casually
passing you by, a stranger.

Or the tide
melting in the illusive sand,
never to be seen again
on the leather-like ground.

I stay too long
a horseshoe crab
dizzy with hunger,
not knowing how to let go
of the sensational sun,
left to the mercy of wicked kids,
left behind to shrivel up,
becoming one
with the scattered sand
and
in a last breath
still desiring to return
to the ruddy waters.

“Well well,” you said,
“and who are these hippies?”
I grinned and yearned for silence.

These are my parents
in the New Country they now call home,
back in the good old days
when love was a one way ticket
to Australia
and ideals were
worth the change in zip-codes.

Those were the days
when my father was happy
and my mother wild
with the fruit of her loom,
the child who is now taller than his father.

“I don’t believe in divorce”,
you once said as we sat
watching near-identical couples pass by.

But with a rate of one out of three,
marriage seems to be
an inevitable clashing of visions
and a bored sailor
waiting for the sky to fall.