Mike Falconer

Stories of Shoes and Other Feet

My shoes go where they want
Your shoes need to follow
Not the rules, but what I say
My shoes are free to do what they want
My shoes are exceptional

Your shoes are the wrong color
I don’t care much for your shoes
Someone’s shoes that look like mine?
That’s different – it reminds me of my shoes
And my shoes are exceptional, didn’t I already say that?

Shoes on other feet
Don’t be ridiculous
Don’t be contrarian
Shoes are meant for walking
Not for being walked over
Well my shoes anyway,
and shoes that look like them

Stepping on my shoes makes you evil
Stepping on any shoes makes you evil
It also makes you singular
I always have a good reason for stepping on other shoes
But don’t get close my my shoes
My shoes need room to move and breathe

Some might ask why step on any shoes?
All shoes should be equal!
All shoes can be equal
And nobody should step on anyone else’s shoes
I will support and protest against stepped on shoes
But some shoes are more equal than others
Like my shoes

Don’t ask me to walk a mile
Like I said, my shoes are exceptional
I have many colors of shoes
But I like some more than others
Shoes also fall out of favor
Shoes are rarely just shoes
Particularly my shoes.

Mountains

White Mountains

A distant promise of adventures unrealized
The beauty of the seemly out of place
Nothing special anywhere else
But the heat of the desert in winter
Creating a strange normality.

Brown Mountains

Daytime in fall
Or false winter to locals
Cold but still looking like a movie set
Allergies from wind where nothing grows
A barren moonscape, given life and meaning.

Grey Mountains

The haze of “I’ll never get used to this view”
Traffic, fire, smoke, and the desert badlands
A kabuki backdrop to slots in the grocery store
The fantasy of mystery hills
Rather than where we went hiking over the weekend.

Pink Mountains

Dawn. And the view of those up too early
Black highways and the sodium halide cellophane of suburbia
An unreal unveiling of what is to come
No shepherds to see superstitious warnings
Only traffic lights to direct flocks

Red Mountains

Mother nature is a showoff
Not content with blood red skies
She boils the earth to the color of lava
A relief for baseball games and barbeques
Inspiration for juxtaposing photographers and poets

Sand Mountains

The oven dryness of the heat of the day
T-shirts, shorts, chapped lips, and the need for air conditioning
Hospitality in this most obvious of inhospitable places
A place for demons and families
A vacation spot by the pool.

I love coming home to where others vacation
The bright lights and silliness of a tourist mecca
And the conveniently small city beyond
Surrounded by the even present mountains
Who leave their footprints in our thoughts – between distractions.

A Party to which you are not Invited

Ever present, never present,
Not actually wanting you to be here
But missing you all the same,
Always on the lookout
Because who I am kidding?

Remembered anniversaries and birthdays
Never marked or acknowledged
The pleasure of gift giving denied
Gifts of old now destroyed
Because who am I kidding?

Like a party to which I am not invited
A catch up of perpetual second place
There is familiarity – but not intimacy,
The awareness of the slippage of time
Because who am I kidding?

And there you are in front of me
A haunting of space and time,
With no frame of reference for how to move forward
All we can do is retreat to our own corners
Because who am I kidding.

The Enemy of Synchronicity

Judgment wrought
The enemy of synchronicity
Betrayal begat betrayal

Righteousness for those to clad stones
Words that chattel
Disbelief in belief in oneself

The rights and the wrongs are but opinions
And detente is nothing but hard to come by
Not forgiveness, agreements to disagree

But doubt
Doubt that this will work
A reckoning unsure one wants

Betrayal is in the eye of the beholder
However, stings do not lessen
just because of whom endures them

A modicum of trust is a fragile foundation
Being the better person is a point scoring solution
Understanding is not for everyone

The responsibility for the beliefs of others
A weighty burden,
Only equaled by the zealotry of always being right

But what it would be to be wrong
Is this the price for self belief?
The numbing effect of time – the hope

And hope is all that any of us have
The recovery, timid, and fragile
Damage done, an undoing yet to be seen.

Time Passes

Old photographs.
Young people now gone.
A different age.
A diffident page.
Walls that received scrawls.
Papered over notes to future generations.
Rooms of changed purpose.
The rescaling of memory.
Conversion misalignment.
Context leading to comparison.
Time Passes.
An indoor playground.
An indoor care home.
Shared memories.
Forgotten times.
Small house.
Small rooms.
Washing up by hand.
Ill fitting appliances.
Painted wood.
Wallpaper and patterned carpet.
Condescension and lack of comprehension.
Old roles winding back the years.
Reintroducing subservience.
Bordering on servitude.
Time Passes.
Board games.
Card Games.
Game Shows.
Soap Operas.
Take aways.
Documents.
Arrangements.
Subsistence shopping.
Abandoned hobbies.
One of the many things no longer possible.
Depression.
What to eat.
Joint pain.
Weight loss.
Waiting for loss.
Ready to go now.
Undisclosed medical conditions.
The awful nothingness.
Time Passes.

Helping Hand

Right or wrong I give you this gift
Self doubt, and guilt, do not make it any easier

Why can I cry?
For so many other things tears do not come close

Short of the cheap manipulation of film and TV
But the sobs for you are real

The pain lingering and numbing
A contradiction in emotion

Struggling to find the love to fill the void
Inevitable comparisons invalid as they are inescapable

The national trait of self repression
Mistaken for stoicism and a lack of care

Wrong and right
Fear and sadness

The weight ever present
In spite of the best laid plans

Moving on from the onward rush
Cowardice is an ugly and unpoetic word.

A Gift of a Book

Poems of old
Thoughtful in return for thought provoking
Written words for the written word
An author’s blacked out signature in a signed edition

A value of forty cents.
A new inscription, new meaning, and new value.

A mark of friendship
Uncomfortable as unmasked feelings are to those who should be the least concerned
For others there is acceptance of a new found identity
That prompts a return to exploration after a soul laid bare

What greater gift?

The End of Days

Did I fail you?
To die in my arms
Without warning or mercy
Both of us knowing that this was not right
But being helpless and hopeless

Quick, trying to save you
When I should have been saying goodbye
The long drive to the vet
Knowing it’s too late
But needing to go anyway

Never underestimate the privilege of a proper goodbye
The end of days
No blame other than guilt and self doubt
A hole in my life
Where your whole life was

The awful nature of our final moments
Overshadows a life lived together
Making memory raw and painful
Rather than joyful and treasured
The assurance of time is scant reassurance

The detritus of daily lives
Slowly removed and stored
Your crate, bed, bowls, and meds
Gone, like the padding of your feet
The staring from walls, all thats left

Life, love, and death condensed
But loss is magnified by its repetition
Those that have gone before
The inevitability of those to come
Collecting lives, experiences, and heartbreaks

But that’s the good stuff
Life has no meaning without death
Love has no meaning without loss
A companion for the living of life
An unconditional bond to bind

So this is my goodbye to you
As lackluster and inadequate as it might be
It comes from a place of love
And framed by the good times
The hope that I did right by you and the love you so selflessly gave

Farewell to yet another companion,
The ones who shared my journey
Those whose lives structure mine
As hard as this is, the privilege is mine
Grief is but love persisting

Just ask my other dog
Who grieves in his own way
We rattle around the house, unbidden
Finding our place in our own world
Without you, but with you in mind.

For Dapple

A Perfect Match

Thinking about you
A race to feel, feelings
The struggle with impatience and the passage of time
Hurry up and fall in love
Delete the apps
The dignity of banishment of memory.

Get it done
Start the run
The deep dive past the small talk
The intimacy of peeling back layers
Uncertainty and caution
The emotional safety of men
The physical safety of women.

The perfect match
Never so simple
Hallucinations of the future
The channeling of the love songs of lone guitars
Waiting for walls to be broken down?
The games that were not to be played.

There goes those ghosts again
Putting into shadow the dawning light
But this poem is not going to go there
Rather we’ll look to the possibilities
The future noir of being our best
Social media coming outs
And the juggling act of being what we want to be

Fear of apathy and a lack of relevance
Shaky foundations looking for new pillars of reinforcement
A certain resignation is a dark cloud on a summer’s day
Too much control, too much past and too much age for getting lost
Again.
I am adrift, not looking for rescue, but how to swim.

A Friend of a Fiend

Stranger by the day
A stranger by deed and thought
When did you disappear down the rabbit hole?
Begging and taunting, for me to come after you
Only to spring a trap of mind and soul
This is no longer Kansas

To argue, correct, or engage is futile and frustrating
The person I once knew seems to be gone
Lost in a distortion field bubble
Does one give up so easily?
Friends are few and far
To lose them to conspiracy and fakery is heartbreaking and reeks of cowardice

The contagion of influence
How dare you fall for a lack of critical thinking
Debate me, argue with me, but stop with the broadcasting
Engagement is a team sport
With glue and dedication
The monster you are becoming would be reviled by who you once were

A friend of a fiend
A job to mourn and document
An obituary for a friendship
Part of the larger cultural miasma
No less important or devastating
The decay of an orbit and the collapse of a system
The final joke to take it all seriously