For a friend

Untitled #102

Sometimes life goes on all around you

even when you wish it would stop 

and wait and hold the door for you

until you find the time to catch your breath.

The world feels photographed on occasion,

under the harsh, artificial light pouring out from under the clouds.

Except, photographs don't move so fast.

Like the crowds surging from either side of the city street

leaving you all but trampled in a wake, or sometimes not so kindly

as if to teach you a lesson about your untied shoelace

keeping you from keeping pace with this city.

Laces between fingers, sometimes it takes another

knee to the back of the head to realize 

that in the motion surrounding us --

the movement, the progress, the process  of life--

there's little room to acknowledge those who can't keep up. 

But it is in the exception to the rules, 

the details you can only see in the peripheral margins 

of a big picture that moves much too fast,

the moments of reprieve found when your head

is caught beneath the pull of the crowd--

Those are the strings you can't really stand to see come undone.