Lost Dreams
written by: SR Inciardi
Just a few nights of chilled air tells the trees,
bleached and weakened, to give up their hesitancy,
to drop their leaves in a waterfall of color. The change
in the sun’s angle confirms it’s time. Their hesitancy
straddles my downcast eyes like shadowed,
wet pavement between two streetlamps.
A book comes to a new chapter. I stay unclear
about why the last one ended so abruptly.
I’m wandering streets in a misty rain,
along an unknown road, dark and slippery,
and I wonder if this night, unlike another
in midsummer, foretells how my journey will unfold.
Surely streetlamps light the way when light
can lessen a mystery — or so I’ve been told.
It’s why I find myself searching through a set of eyes
that can no longer tell what awaits, under light
that barely brightens, yet taints my skin,
tensions my muscles, cramps my legs.
I find myself traveling in a car without a driver. I look
from the car’s rear window, past shadows that loom
beyond the dimmed light of streetlamps,
the sun’s faded memory and the dust of the old light
worn and aged. I see the past withering into oblivion.
What moves past moves along a rail of time,
each piece continuing to pass with no end in sight.
On a wide boulevard, dark, empty houses
are barely lit by the streetlamps lining each side.
I move past their stillness
to see the light’s angled glare strike
the dampened pavement. I watch traffic signals
turn amber. Further in the distance, they stay red.
The streets are empty. There is no sound
except the growl of the car’s engine. The car’s tires
displace the icy water pooling on the roadway.
Now I stop to see what comes unannounced,
upon pages singed and mangled, awaiting the edges
of the jagged light like the obscure text
in a book beyond light’s reach, or the silhouette
of a lone deer grazing in darkness
by the side of a highway. The traffic whizzes past.
I know I know nothing of endings, since an ending comes
unwilling for me to prepare. I live to keep what once lived
alive, to stutter into the silence of dreams lost
in this wintry night — redefining moments
I once cherished.
- Lost Dreams - January 23, 2026
- Stilled World - October 16, 2025
- Bitterness - July 31, 2025
