It's not like it's some great escape when you only manage not to suffocate

Morning at the Elizabeth Arch
--Joe Weil

The winos rise as beautiful as deer.
Look how they stagger from their sleep
as if the morning were a river
against which they contend.

This is not a sentiment
filled with the disdain
of human pity.
They turn in the mind,
they turn
beyond the human order.

One scratches his head and yawns.
Another rakes a hand
through slick mats of thinning hair.
They blink and the street litter moves
its slow, liturgical way.
A third falls back
bracing himself on an arm.

At river’s edge, the deer stand poised.
One breaks the spell of his reflection with a hoof
and, struggling, begins to cross.

Retirement
--Robert L. Penick

You're 65 years old and you sit in your back yard,
drinking light beer and listening to Brahms on the radio.
The wind make the Japonica bush and your
remaining hair dance like seaweed in a riptide.

They took everything from you at the factory:
Hair, teeth, testosterone.
They took nearly everything.

The sky isn't as impossibly blue
as it was 50 years ago, but it will do.
Geese honk overhead, heading back north.

The sun makes you feel like
a successful clay pot.

--fan video for Kath Bloom's "It's So Hard to Come Home"