L.R. Harvey Poetry

COFFEE-HOUSE KENOSIS The sign over the urinal read  please remember to flush yourself in red letters, but I forgot because I was late and in a rush, bustling out  into the crowded coffee shop  to look for someone who never showed up.  I found out later you were there, the whole  time, had even saved a table for me. I scanned the room  a while to the clink of spoons,  then left. The problem was simply that I imagined you differently. 

PLAYING IN TIME'S CREEK Well, you get to attend more  funerals, for one, where you attend more intently to the way light illuminates the rain-stained faces of the saints present. And then it matters more  what rain smells like than where it came from, or who sent it, or why.  This is the night's unbuttoning, a slow slipping off of the backpack weighed down with what they said we needed to know for the test, t-shirt damp from hauling the weight of all that knowing. Philosophers quit studying and test their luck at Candy Land while children croon I told you so from the top of the chocolate waterfall. In time's creek one poet quits turning over days to find the metaphor and says with a shrug, well, it’s almost dinner time and we haven’t net much; let’s love each other.