Four Short Poems, March 2010

Four short poems, March 18, 2010


1. Running down
a jealous moment
Locked in the
arms of shifting
evolution,
torn between
how I feel
and what I want.


2. The lights fizzle
in the haze of the evening,
peering out
over the distance
between there and here.
Motion hints at other
life,
letting us know
where something else resides,
and where I stand.


3. Once
I passed a friend's house
in the night, each of us
knowing nothing
of the other.
If I had never met them,
what would I have
thought of their place,
their possessions,
coupled with my assumptions,
Would I have moved on,
taking it as another
distant light in the darkness?

4. I hear
your voice again,
and I am there,
the thoughts of that time
thrown back in my head.
I am reminiscent,
wistful,
unsure of the footing,
and how to proceed
from here.

-Daniel Coston

Tangents Poetry, September 2015 Issue

The Rogue’s Voice


A boy out in the wild,
with pieces of other stories
that your father 
told you in haste.
You grew too fast,
the pieces no longer fit,
so you left that story
and created your own.

She believed in you
in ways that made you 
believe in yourself,
and another dream.
You returned to the land,
just enough distance from the past,
You spent time and thought,
wanting to believe.

They did not say
why you went away,
what changed in you
and why that story ended.
Like the change you made 
so many years before,
the story all got changed, 
broken when you were gone.

Your legacy is different
than what you’ve said to me.
I will never know you,
but I know the way you felt.
You just wanted to dream,
and I know that voice,
like a rogue’s song 
with constant changes, 
yet always returning
to the chord that is searching
for another way to sing,
and for another home.
-Daniel Coston