fireside gambling.

A distant star in the sky,
Fades with time, like the glow in your eyes.
When you push back the curtain, with your fingers shaking
Wondering if looking to the star is the first mistake you’re making.
Feeling the glass against your nails, thinking to all the thoughts snaking
Through and through your head.

Lean back and breathe deeply
Take the time to get your head straight
In the midst of time, it won’t wait
But you can’t either, it’s time for you to initiate
The change that will rest your head easier in the night.

Breathing the blue light, watching the light from the window fall
Across the floor and the ceiling and the sky and the tall
Curtains that want to ban you from seeing something so small
That is in fact not small at all
But will one day fall.
The light that glows is the one that comes out at night and shows
Everyone what they need to see, for one night it
Covers the holes and makes the good seem to grow
And multiply into a real equation that everyone can see
And then know that they can be what makes us all feel so free.

The change is always the hard part,
But in the end it’s inexcusable to ignore all the holes
Unless you sew up the holes in the bottom of your souls
Down to the soles of your sneakers that have survived all of time’s tolls,
But they’ll stay on, just keeping on with the roll
Of adventurous spirit.

It takes a special sky to change your mind
To show the parts you try to ignore, only seeing the pieces that are torn and
You can’t seem to fix with just one kind
Of desperate measures of change with the only things you find
In the back of your closet under the clothes and snow boots and tennis rackets.
Deep in the depths of the reds and blues that twist and wind
Around each other and through a strange terrain of tiny pieces that build a puzzle
Deep in the puzzle there is a bit of seamless good
That should make us look past the dark black and put
The green at the top of the list simultaneously unclenching that fist and I know you could
Just see it if you look hard enough past your self-effacing mist.

The adventurous spirit is the troublesome one,
Because it’s hard to put away, it’s hard to time it out, it’s hard to know when its time is done.
But the time is now to pull back the shade
To look to your poker hand, and win with that spade, seeing them all
Laid out across the table, smile on your face
Proud of your victory, proud of your pace and the fact that you never left a trace
Of truth across your lips to bluff your way into it
Into the spirit that will make it all worth it.

-lbr.