I sit and I stare, trying to peer
into the back of my beautiful sons’ eyes
because I am looking for something
that I soon begin to realize,
I may not be quite ready to see.
He makes those two glass fish bowls
skitter and bounce from one side
of his peripheral to the other side.
My son is much too kind to warn me,
perhaps he cannot find the words yet
to let me down from such ocean cliffs
or from the sharp edge of a chipped
drinking glass.
In my elder indifference to danger
I assumed that I knew everything
about how to catch the impressionistic
flight patterns of southern fireflies,
and I thought I knew how to push
a strand of orange yarn through
the eye of an orange cat committed to print
by way of 20 pound crisp virgin paper.
Its sheets are bound and folded
into a book that will repeat the crackle
of open and close so many times over,
I can spot the pages gradually littering
the corners of this home,
the lonely and dark spaces
set behind bookshelves
bursting at their seams.
Jeremy Szuder is a born and bred California native, raised with a tender and dedicated loyalty to the arts. His poems have been published in Harbinger Asylum, The Hungry Chimera, Fine Print Literary and Visual Arts Publication, as well as the 15 years of self published offerings he has created, most recent, “The Huckleberry Finn Effect”, released in 2017 and “12 Poems To Uplift”, released in 2019. Szuder lives in Glendale California. Jeremy Szuder can be reached at jeremyszuder@gmail.com
