Often more praise

Is given to the selfish,

And sometimes,

Sheepish blanket.

Then to the humble,

Campfire imagination

Of the one who

Conjured up the thought

Of what it actually takes,

To truly be warm.

At some point during the midnight hour,

A very tired gentleman,

Listens carefully,

(And fearfully)

To the mechanical hum,

Of the dryer tumbling slowly.

And just as he dips his toes into soggy puddles of distant dreams,

A turbulent whistling,

Whispers through the walls.

(And his incoherent ears)

Combined concurrently,

With the ever-so-faint

Ticking of the clumsy dryers

Wonderfully inaccurate dial.

(An apparent, yet distant cousin to the egg timer)

And a chorus of chores is born.

A symphony of starch.

This lint-less lullaby.

Delicately drying his wet and wrinkled brain.

As notes of lavender and wild cotton ambush his airways

And perpetrate his perspective.

And remind him,

(Whilst his soul is still sleeping quietly behind his own shut eyes)

That he had dried a shirt,

Whose only aspiration it had always been,

To be hung

(And treated)

Just the same,

As some of the more fortunate sweaters.

Watching the dancing silhouettes                    

Of  many bouncing bats

Waltzing  in the warmth of

The nighttime floodlight,

Is precisely

What’s happening

At the exact same time

Half-way across the

Spinning globe,

In a very dusty marionette theater.

That resonates with a similar

Smell of sparkling dust

From aging velvet curtains

And strands of wispy smoke

Stemming from

Recently blown out candles.

Sometimes

It will rain twice.

Certainly once,

From the lazy river

Up there in the sky.

Casually dripping into the mouths of the many,

(Undoubtedly impatient)

Earthly contestants.

And then a second time.

When the  residual rain,

Descended directly from the

Original,

Drips from 

Recently synthesized leaves,

And candy – striped

Parlor awnings

Onto weathered sidewalks.

And sometimes,

Fleeting streaks of reflected light,

Resemble ensembles of

Stray animals.

Dashing across the road

(Like swift ghosts)

Perhaps it is the

Splendid pie

(Buckled tightly in the back seat)

That truly warms the car.

Leaving behind it’s cherry scent

To permeate,

In the space between the seats.

Rather than the volcanic vents,

Who

Consistently wreak havoc,

On the long ago deserted dashboard.