The Whole Darn Thing

The lemon-bleached letters on the ground

A message to the morning sleepwalkers

Their way to work read backwards

A sense of real life happening in dreams

A dog squats and unceremoniously pees

An acid drop melts a wormhole in the ground

Nearby the irony of a garden of wild flowers

Weeded, tended, not wild at all.

On the threshhold from street to park

A chalked poem to a captive audience

“A lemon wedge between my sharpened claws”

writ large in double spacing across the narrow path

I leave the poem behind and cross the park

The trees like sharpened claws

The grass sliced into wedges by tarmac paths

And I want to squeeze the life out of it this time

A lemon-coloured leaf falls at my feet

In the distance the sad snake of traffic

Seal-like skins of joggers dodging

Yellow jackets of safety-first cyclists

The colour of a winter sun

And facing it the sun-worshipers

Motionless, they soak up every ray
In case they miss it, the whole darn thing