Lonliness Ocean

Tell me, muse, the final cost,
because I hold seclusion dear,
and paid my dues in empty fields
outside the shoals of solitude.

Let me see the sacrifice
for drifting, rippled in calligraphy
tattooed across these ocean arms
that move the shoulders of the sea.

Show me in the trim of foam
above the lip of tossing waves
and dimpled spread transcribed
before prevailing winds and brine.

Write it on a minion moon, describe
the sin omitted and the penance still
delayed, tell me in the trailing
swells the water is not drinking me.

Tumbleweeds

Something homeless is looking there,
along a thin black rib of asphalt skin,
a dog or some dark thing blown in
behind a midnight squall of blinding wind.
A shadow or a cinder lodged
inside my eye, and blinking back before
the sky turns white I see somehow,
a bone of true unwanted scrap. A stray
is waking in the shapeless dawn
and waiting for an echo to respond.
Perhaps the bristling trees have squeezed
the road that winds unleashed beyond the musk
of dying leaves outside the shacks
and clutter once invited there. Outcast
by happenstance, the lost are drifting
on the tip of vagrant branches thrown,
stopping now and then to tap a memory
on the passing of an empty window pane.