Soft Landings

I like poems with a soft landing.
Poems that state the obvious, but curve and index
Like a child’s cursive,
Like a tormented line about the struggle.
Oblique to the Gilded Age of socialism

How shall we prose? Like servants
To the line of matrimony in cuffs and trailer blades
Succinct to a priming formula on Saint Street
Where even majesty has a name with a warrant attached
Like strings to an A frame.

Shall we eclipse too soon
Like the taunted urban jungles of academia
Too frozen from the higher straits
Of bell towers are dull hymns?
I was there, I made it to the top.

I looked down in wonder through a map
Of consciousness and I was rebutted by reality
By a bus boy teaching memoir
Who told me this can’t be done.
Death is meaningless and religion is fantasy

He told me. Where was my dotted line across the maps
Of reality that demonstrate how to get here from there
So I can share the degrees in which constellations tap
Their feet on the earth? Here my hymn grows cold and lonely
Waiting for the top to come down like a leaking garage

In my mother’s house. Here the laundry isn’t done for weeks
On end and I can’t curl the weights any longer, but I stare
At my rabbit and dream of when darkness will pass
And I will no longer need these dreams to come true.
There will just be happiness in soft landings and you will be here.