Wasps, tambourines, & jugglers filled the fair.
Tugging at your sleeves the crowd
ebbed & flowed around the water’s edge

in all its twilight rippling calm.
If speech were in disarray & piecemeal
in its distribution, it played amongst the birds,

music & drifting thoughts devoid of all purpose
but to be in communion with summer’s end,
& the last morsel of ephemeral, plasticene joy.

The community property of this moment
will go out in the dark. Though I know
none of you, we go on separately, together.

The sounds echo as we go away hearing
seagulls, accepting handouts for the coming political
rallies that talk on & on

about the reality of this country going
in a hand basket to where we do not know.