Mid-Winter Road Trip

Although the overnight weather report

showed that the coming cold front would stay

up in Colorado for another day

the thin film of snow that drifted

across the streets of Amarillo

told us that Flagstaff was out of the question

So we headed down toward Roswell

hoping for Las Cruces

then onto state route seventy

watching the rain freeze on the road

slowing a little more after every roadside wreck

but still going on

till out on a wide expanse of plain

at a place where a pickup truck was overturned

next to a smashed up Honda

someone else

the highway patrol

had to tell us it was time to stop

had to tell us that some days

there just is no way

to keep on heading west

© 2015 Frank Kearns

Ghost Stories

The close sun of Los Angeles

is hard on ghosts

you won’t find them as you might

lurking deep in redwood forests

or soaring on the wind

in the high sky of Mojave

In the light we tell our stories

cheerfully with bits of lunch

           at noisy restaurant tables

standing in chance market meetings

or bravely in fluorescent

          story-telling classes

The ghosts prefer to hide and wait for dark

to float down moon-lit river channels

tiptoe among the black palm tree silhouettes

echo back the words they hear

          in corners of dim living rooms

collect the things that we have hidden deep

and then explode us from our deepest sleep

© 2015 Frank Kearns