BLUE WATERS RUN RUSTY

I have been trying to come up with a title for my collection of poetry that captures the light and dark of which I write, and I decided to name it after a poem I wrote sitting in Bryant Park in NYC on a crisp autumn day. The wind was fierce and the sky gray, and my musings leapt from mind to paper as the towering trees sighed a somber sonnet. Just another day in the life of a New Yorker caught between pleasure and chaos.

BLUE WATERS RUN RUSTY
A still stuttering breeze utters not a single word
implying the secrets to my own damned psyche.
Eyelashes flutter, disguising tears
chasing away my former buoyant self.
The wind kicks up its heals
giving my sunshine the boot;
and me a bruised backside.
Confusion pales compared
to the empty feeling building,
sinking like quicksand in the pit
of my anxiety ridden stomach.
Normal twenty twenty eyesight
now envisions a universe
composed only in black and white.
Caught within a silent beige purgatory
displaying colorless skies
and clouds that hold no imagination.
Weathered within this surreal snowstorm
foretold but never to take place.
All I am left with is numbness and cold
that tingles up my crooked spine.
Apparition in my mind with no warning sign;
that damn time bomb ticking
within my migraine diseased head
should have held the hints to my demise.
Sanity collapses along with the tightrope
that was supposed to catch my fall.
Reminding me of the fine line
of mortality, morality, and me.

(c) Rose Bruno Bailey