I am leaving early tomorrow morning for Florida, so I am happy to share my latest poems with you today. My goal is to write a poem a month and post it here on the first of every month. Since I won't be able to do that tomorrow, I am posting them one day early.

These poems are very different from each other. I especially like Morning's Routine and hope you find it as amusing as I do.

Tomorrow I am flying to Miami and my brother Steve is meeting me there. We are spending Saturday with a set of first-cousins-once-removed from our father's side and Sunday with a set of first-cousins-once-removed from our mother's side. This is the cousin I wrote about that I did not know I had. So this is going to be a very exciting reunion, to meet a relative for the first time. Our family is so small. I have no first cousins (that aren't removed), no aunts, uncles or grandparents. We no longer have parents now, either. This should be a memorable trip.

Monday Steve and I are driving from Miami to Orlando, where I will be working for a couple of days. He will fly back home from there. On Wednesday, my coworker and I will go to Atlanta to continue to work. We return home on Saturday.

It is good to get out of the office. I am looking forward to going to Florida because I have never been there. You will be able to read about my impressions of this state right here, so stay tuned.

Here are my latest poems:

Morning’s Routine

Morning always dresses in her pastel skirts
To sweep night into crevices and corners

Morning shakes out the trees of balled up birds
Cursed with melodic voices, they must sing their complaints

Morning rushes to every window
to drop the serum of sunlight into each sleeping eye

Morning rolls up the damp film of fog
And stores it in her cupboard behind the horizon

Morning waits impatiently on my doorstep
Begging to come in like a dog that’s been left out all night

Survival

I read that it was the blindly optimistic Jews
Who did not believe the cruel beyond belief stories
of those who escaped from concentration camps
Returning to warn the newly-ghettoed
Of their certain fate if they did not escape
The soothsayers were banished as crazy
And the Jews were slaughtered

I heard that it was the blindly optimistic soldiers
who died in the Viet Nam POW camps
They kept pinning their release date on the next holiday
until a tsunami of disappointment
washed over them
As the holiday receded into the past
they could not stay afloat
in such a sea of hopelessness

Decades ago I was called a blind optimist
regardless of the headlines
hope rose in me daily
like a sun that starves night of its sustenance
until the darkness would lose its grip on the earth
finger by finger
and sulkily slide into its abyss

The sunset of youth
dissipated my optimism
disappointment hobbled my gait
like a house arrest bracelet
Darkness clawed its way out of the abyss
with the passing of friends
Experience tarnished the brightness
of everyday enthusiasm
The pallet of my personality
has evolved
As the primary colors fade
and the shades of sensibility blend
into the backdrop
of my long life