Wildline

A Mouthful of Soil

One must not speak,
Whether it’s strong or weak,
Whether it’s good or bad,
for intentions sneak—succumbing and swallowing the innocence whole, turning pure words into a toll.

A whisper can ruin what silence might save,
The tongue is a knife,
And you might dig your own grave.

Even the gentle can start a fire,
When the truth will strangle you with desire.
Steer clear,
As what’s meant to be will find its way,
But not in the heat of a reckless day.

What must come from the depths of the dirt,
Must stay hidden to spare the hurt.
Some secrets are better left unknown,
buried beneath the roots that have overgrown.

The Streetlights Watch Us Rot

Once a stranger,
always a stranger.
Whenever you’re out, you see–the world was a living gallery.
Each passing person a brushstroke that stuns me:
Brief, brilliant, and impossible to ignore.

Someone unknown.
And I just ponder: the person who had just passed me probably has two dogs, perhaps a lizard, or a hamster named some obscene name.
Someone who may or may not have won medals,
Or ever participated in sports.

Who all have their own experiences.
I just wonder what their life is like,
especially the animals that run past me,
like the birds that glide above, like planes flying south.

I realize that they have families, like you and me.
As time passes, and I meet some of these strangers,
what was untold becomes a little piece of me.
I absorb their goals, their lives, and their ambitions–
but little do you know, they might vanish like Houdini as if they were never there.

But when they walk past you,
all of your memories with them are on replay.
When they walk past you, everything they’ve revealed to you hovers right next to them like a hologram protruding from their side.

You’d watch it once more before the memories fade away again,
before they fade away again.
As that person once was a stranger,

Is now always a stranger.