Clayton Medeiros's Shared Poems

We are in a time of endings
The last speakers of languages
Disappearing animals and plants
Some we probably never knew
Ancient trees felled into board feet
With their knowledge untapped
Like the quiet whispers of the stones
Islands drowned by rising seas
Brief footnotes in future histories
If there are more to be written
Perhaps it will all be epitaphs
About distantly remembered this
And that known only from books
Or digital reconstructions
In their cool indifference

It is an existential certitude
Despair will not sustain us
Joy lurks in some corner
Fails to accept dour predictions
Marred with misdemeanors
Strewn across the effort
To figure out what maturity
Was supposed to be
Where it might be found
Appear without subtlety
Direct and indispensable
Unlike traffic signals so often
Ignored by crowds of cars
In dense city centers
With everyone busily
On their way to something
Desperately important

He walked into the night all around
New moon darkness too much for
Disappeared shadows waiting for light
To bring them back into the world
In a town too small for illumination

If your strophe and antistrophe
Are no longer synchronized
You may need a new song
To revive your daily dance
A moderate measured melody
For the morning’s first act
Something more rhythmic
For act two’s afternoon
Perhaps some poetry
With a jazzy accompaniment
For end of day’s act three

I grasped for aesthetics
But garnered anesthesia
In lost days and weeks
Going through the motions
Of repetitive incarceration
A not so solitary confinement
In this multistoried mass
Of measured cubicles