Sits with a Smile

She sits with a smile
It radiates across her round face
It echoes straight ahead
And balloons to fill the bubble she has put you in

You can feel the bubble
It pulsates around your lost head
You notice it surrounding your stable body
Then your trusted body weakens, bends and torques

Your body is foreign to the smile
It harkens memories long lost
But it does not connect to your warped mind
Instead it carries you inside a low lying cloud

That cloud knows not the time
It speaks of longing known only to all persons
Who have ventured on their own
Only to find the courage to remain in the cloud

The smile comes pushing through the cloud
It offers peace in solitude
It offers hope in the face of desperation
The wayward son emerges from the dank bubble

Mere men are offered the choice
Every day of their stretched lives the options weighed
The cowboy bangs the fence post into the earth
On his left the pasture, on his right the rushing cars

The smile fades into herself
The bubble’s walls grow thicker
For a moment the light refracts just so
As the straw breaks, the smile returns

The cloud blinds the light
The evanescent mirrors fall into place
The show you a dark world
One which no man deserves save Dante’s imagination

Your lips part like a pond of reeds
The wind blows straight through
It carries on it the words of time
And whistles silently like the ruins of lost generations

Where was that smile last decade?
This soapy bubble has cleansed
It has merely broken and slapped you in the face
The body responds by snapping back into place

The work of your generation is still left to toil
The body aches as the mind bends inward
So the singular smile will have to wait
Until the next day’s eternity falls from the brink