Originally written in 2003

A traffic light late at night,
red, seems so pale and dim;
it fades into the darkness.
What might seem an angry admonition,
“STOP!” loses its exclamation,
an empty sputtering.
Stop or ignore, it doesn’t matter;
there’s no traffic anyway.
Its power is subsumed,
swallowed in the night.

Green, though—
green is red’s converse in every way.
“Go, go,” it breathes softly,
bathing the car in its seductive glow.
It beckons sotto voce:
forward, accelerate, seek no counsel.
It promises safe passage
without ever quite saying the words,
and if the car wrecks,
well, no one can say the light lied.
A promise written in photons
can’t be counted on.

Originally written in 2003

I stand in the snow in my slippers
breathing in the darkness
smoking half a cigarette.
I am not a smoker
but sometimes I like to smoke.
Half a cigarette is enough.

I watch animals creep in the darkness
among the stark tree trunks,
Nature’s bones laid bare for the winter.
Orion hangs high in the sky above,
looking down on a blue neon clock
and the headlights of cars
creeping along a road far off.
City lights twinkle like the stars above.

I wonder who owns the windowless house
two doors down,
its walls crumbling
and snow piling on the floors.
Someone must own it, I reason;
after all, it’s a house,
not a tree.
Some corporation owns the neon clock
but no one owns Orion.
The birds don’t care;
they roost on the trees or the crumbling walls,
they shit on the clock and fly under Orion.

My cigarette half-smoked,
I stoop to extinguish it in the snow.
Inside when I take off my sweater,
I do not smell like myself.