An out-of-sync dance, I like that. I’ll have to reread them all and picture them as such-maybe a person with a unique sense of rhythm, or maybe a group of people listening to and dancing to different music, or maybe a really odd choreography. 

Thank you for commenting. 😊

It really is, isn’t it. It plays wicked games with people. 

I recently thought about changing the last line to *or you will lose me too*. I think that might be a little more appropriate.

I pick up influences from different places. I try to avoid making dark poems, but I do enjoy writing about heavy subject matter when I can. I think grief and war and violence fall into that realm. 

I’m curious what kind of visuals and meaning you get from the window/wall/rooftops poem. 

I used the plural form of rooftops intentionally, but that’s because it worked with the image in my mind, which maybe isn’t getting portrayed to the reader. 

I often write from moments that are inspired by my place or situation in the present. For that poem, I was in a building in a city on an upper floor looking out a window. 

The views on all sides were actually beautiful, but I got to thinking about perspective, and about a talk I heard by Alan Watts earlier in the week in which he talked about looking through a hole and seeing the head of a snake and later looking through the same hole and seeing its tail and not realizing that the two parts of the snake were actually a part of the same organism. 

This led me to imagining/remembering buildings in NYC which often have windows that open to nothing but a brick wall you could reach out and touch. I felt like that was a good symbol for an obstacle that feels impossible to overcome—a challenge confronts us and immediately we feel that it’s an impossible task. Often, though, there is another window in the room, one with a totally different view that we could look out of, but we choose not to. 

I guess, in that way, it’s similar to the poem on grief. We want to let go of something, but doing so would change our lives and us as we know ourselves, so it’s scary, and we end up not making the change. 

I wanted to give a sense of height and perspective, from that window over there a wide panoramic view opens up and you could be looking across an expanse where you see many rooftops and even beyond. That’s why I chose the word rooftops, but honestly, I struggled with that word choice. I considered making a line with the word horizon, but in this instance, I decided against it because it added too many syllables and made the final line much longer than the previous two, so in an attempt to balance the poem, I ended up with what I feel isn’t quite the best line, but something that maybe still works. 😊

Nope. It’s always wrestling with the forces pinning it down and it usually seems to have at least one hand free enough to wreak havoc somewhere.

I was trying to describe the idea that war and peace are the same thing only in a different condition. Peace is just a state of war that is being physically restrained by some kind of strength. It was hard to fit this idea into a short poem, but I think the meaning is there.