Monday, November 3, 2014

Michael Snider




Love’s Drive 


Driving to work and driving home forever  
While nothing ever changes but the lights 
And my illusions and the price of gas, 
And every day I choose again to drive 
To work, to work, to drive back home — enough 
To drive a man to drink, I tell myself. 

I have a list of things I tell myself. 
I tell myself that nothing lasts forever, 
That there will come a day I've had enough 
Of everything and I'll turn out the lights 
And lock the doors and take the car and drive 
Until I find myself or else run out of gas ... 

Thing is, it's likely I'll run out of gas. 
I’d have to have a self to find myself, 
And since I’ve given it away, that drive 
Would take me just so far, and then forever 
I’d be lost from you, without your lights 
To guide me — ah, there’s more than just enough 

Right here and now, alone with you — enough 
To get us through. As long as there is gas, 
And you and I, my love, can see our lights 
Shone for each other, I can tell myself 
It doesn’t matter we don’t have forever 
As long as we know where we need to drive 

To find each other when we need to drive, 
When the common world is not enough — 
It never will be since it’s not forever — 
And there will come a time there is no gas,  
And I can never know when I myself 
Will fail, and someone else will kill the lights. 

Whoever’s there, if anyone, to kill the lights, 
I hope they know enough to know the drive 
Of love that drives us all, that I myself 
Have only touched, but I have touched enough  
To know it doesn’t matter if there’s gas, 
And love’s the only thing can touch forever.  

Your love helps me to trust myself enough 
To drive, no matter what the price of gas, 
Where our love’s light may shine, if not forever.





Stars


It wasn't half a billion years until
The first-born stars had died to make the stuff
We're made of—even then a slide downhill
From symmetry to chaos sure enough.
For everything is broken, even stars,
Even the cores of atoms, even space
Is broken, and nothing can unmake the scars
Of time which finally unmake every place.
Like you, the stars tonight are beautiful
And dying—what could ever matter more?
No simpler way could be as magical,
For we are still those stars that went before,
And while the Hubble circles in the night
We see their light, almost as old as light.



© Michael Snider



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