How is it, in all these centuries
We haven’t yet learned to get along?
Why can’t we hold different opinions
Without coming to blows?
Why can’t we let people who earned something
Keep it, instead of stealing it from them?
Why don’t we recognize the human right
Of people to live in peace
And raise their children without fear?
Why do a handful of thieving bullies
Get away with making war,
And taking what isn’t theirs,
And abusing people?
Will we ever find ways to live together
Peaceably,

The following words crafted soon after the soul of me daddy set adrift into the empyrean realm joining the rank and file of entities constituting spiritus mundi.

Borne aloft into the netherland
the body bearing thee soul
of Boyce Brandon Harris
birth name given to my late father
buoyed into the great beyond
united with spirit
of mine late mother Harriet,
whose passing well nigh nineteen
orbitz of the earth around the sun.

the season of warmth, or rather inescapable heat, is pulling near. perhaps we can start there. perhaps i can meet her on the curb like we used to. where i asked her if she needed a drive home and she insisted not.

she wore different lashes then. her hair was full and her presence shadowed mine. i remember calling in a panic, "do you feel the way i feel?"

she could always put a name to it.

I mistakenly thought the departed
could have nothing more to say, but I was wrong.
For me, the dead do make a commotion.

I hear them all the time in discussions
I have with them about things left unsaid
when they were here, with you and I.

Do you talk with them too? I wonder
if you’ll share what they say to you.
We’ve no reason to keep this to ourselves now.
I just want to listen to all they were.