2nd FIVE of April (poems)

 See the first FIVE here:

SIX:

You people, I thought you knew.
You didn't.
You had no solution.
Twelve steps and seven habits
And twenty-one articles -
Robert didn't know the order of the rules

What you painted
Left negative space,
We inhabit
As we return to beginner's mind
In what I call evolution.

SEVEN
random word: carefully

Carefully, I let rain slide along my arms
And form lakes as I step,
Feeding the ground from my fingers,
Oblivious to what is no longer here,
As if today matters,
If ghosts walk with me, they keep their own counsel,
If houses age or leaves grow,
They're quiet enough
To not disturb my sense
Of stasis,
It rains this April
Like others,
And in this, there is no comparison,
I carefully sidestep the issue,
And don't trouble time with measures.

EIGHT
random card: Five of Earth

By rote, now,
We move inside
what first had veins of
fear and expectation,
We stepped a bit aside,
Hired as the role we played,

In the first days,
We almost learned
Small talk,
We said,
"oh" and "hmmm",
And discovered
if you curve your mouth
It looks like a smile,

We carry another scene
In our sleeves,
Harbor its presence
like contraband,
Walking toward this
Keeps us walking in this,

We hop a bus or catch a train
Or drive our R.T.Os
On threads of maybe,
Toward some imagined past.

NINE
It's important to learn
There's nothing important to learn,

that kid there with his feet in the sand and
his head in the clouds knows everything,
I saw him watch a bee crawl and then the bee took flight,
His mouth went "oh",
And then he drew in the dirt with a stick


TEN

These tired streets
And cheated children
Have to dream big
To see what small things we've left them,

Once, towns were alive
And sentences didn't start
with "I remember.."

We blame them, then,
For going inward,
For walking streets
of interconnected weblinks,

What would we have them do?
Run on obsolete wild hills at dusk
And drink water we didn't poison?

These lines beg resolution,
Some hope in technology,
Or a future woven of the past,

Evolution equipping our descendants
With the ability to breathe pseudo air
And live without water.

There is no way to end this,
It may be that we've already done so,
And now they begin something
Outside the margin of our errors.

Third five (30 for Thirty)