Sonata and Senility

Who knows how long fingers stumble over piano keys,
like a toddler taking his first steps,

before patterns and rhythms rehearsed
become as natural as walking,

running full speed to the corner.
Gazing at a dotted page.

eyes scan, making copies of images.
At first, the ink’s pale.

After repetition, it becomes bold,
imprinted behind lashes, coded in muscles.

Later, during the concert stare
into the blank white light of stage fright,

notes disappear from sight,
drained from mind to hands,

performing on auto-pilot.
Who knows how long

these notes will cling to cells
before vanishing

like an audience departing,
leaving us rocking on the bench,

trapped in a body that no longer
remembers how to find its way home

through the encroaching darkness,
as Alzheimer shoots out the lights.

Waiting on the Train

A chameleon slithers along the deck,
changing colors--lime to brown.

I dip a finger in liquid depression,
paint lips with one perfect drop
that trickles across railroad tracks
of a dead-end mouth.

Words never leave this station;
they only travel from mind to hand
and back again.

In the evening's blistered light,
dust swirls and snows
on my frigid sax-- standing in the corner,
waiting for a reason to scream.

I hear a car pull up the gravel driveway;
it's him:
the vice on the throat of this strangled silence.
 
Even my nervous tongue begins to sweat
as it hides behind teeth:
prison bars--a locked gate,
white picket fence,
suburban smile.