The parking structure across the street keeps its lights on all night. I know this because at four in the morning, trees making noises like rats under beds, I wait for the sun to come up.
To calm myself, I whisper poems under my breath. Though I have books of poetry gifted by friends that have left long ago, I make it up as I go along. In my silence-studded sentences, there is some sort of thinking. But as soon as they’re said, they’re gone, only briefly stopping to watch, curiously.
Tell me why I hate to turn down the lane. It’s not because I see the trees as they were in warmer weather, in thinner air, in months long past. It’s not even that the people are all that harsh (though behind doors they talk in louder voices). Maybe it’s because the words of the poems stay in the air. Here, on the lane, the sun comes up with the encouragement of failed sentiments, of feelings that died before they had a chance to be watered, and a parking garage that stays lit all night long — just in case someone left themselves behind.





