Running Down the Road

Rural Road – © 2010 Patrick Canganelli.

---

Running down the road
long road that it was
how it tired me

catch my breath

great dust of my heels
must it travel past me

wind in the mouth
what a nauseating ear
I think my heart has stopped

ache of breast
how can I think it
can I feel it like the
strain of my calves

what a load to carry me so far

heel of the earth
what have I become

bark in my fingernail
and muddy of throat
why do I speak to the past

must bone and wood
suffer round black orbits

deep wells of timeless youth
find a moldy apple
gripped by my teeth

no muscle in my carriage
physique combated by treading
heels
now send me to Hades
my visit is past welcome
and I am the mat of the earth
once more.

-Excerpted from The Noumena book of poetry by Patrick Canganelli, available on Amazon.

© 2007 Patrick Canganelli. All rights reserved.

#

 

I Am Alone

Old man at evening – © 2019 Susan Canganelli.

I am alone
on a planet filled with people
how can I say what’s in my heart
when I am filled with emptiness

I want to be anywhere else
but where would that be?
and
how do I get there?

cold days
lonely nights

who might I be?
I do not know
I cannot say.

If I dream again
someday
would it be of anything?

I fear not
I believe all I ever was
is gone
I don’t know how it all went
and I can’t say where.
if I skip around between land and sea
would I stumble onto some part of me?
I doubt it.
nothing about me now
seems likely.
I suspect I have only ever been a specter.
and the specter of whom I might have been
is suspicious as well.

if I could find a dark dry gravelly place,
(that would not expel me)
I would settle there
and call it home,
and wait until the darkness came
and retreat into the shadows
where no one would find me
and I would never
again
know my name.
Home at last.

© 2019 Patrick Canganelli, All rights reserved.