It's Still Life

We’re talking Venezuela;
it’s coup dressed up as civics,
steam lifting words from our mouths like ghosts
that won’t vote,
and I am a bubble in the jacuzzi,
a brief republic of air, spinning its borders open and shut.

“Wasn’t it flat feet that spared Einstein the uniform,” I say,

and facts being facts,
statements pretending not to ask permission,

while my grandson perches on the pool’s edge,
small shoulders folding inward,
weeping because time has teeth
and it bites tomorrow.

I tell him endings are just doors that learn to walk,
that life practices goodbye relentlessly
but hoards more hellos than it admits,
so look there, Nico, look where the light keeps arriving.

And I am still the bubble, loosened from my skin,
caught in a laughing current, lifted, lost,
diamonded by sun, then thinning —
moving too far,
too fast,
which is exactly how bubbles learn what they are.

Poems/prose ©Misky 2006-2026.