Pacing indoors frustrated new pages not working stepping outdoors to your own
Let-Me-Just-Get-Through-Today chorus head down walking a worn route of sameness pit of the stomach meeting the sadness of Sunday in the quiet and nowhere to go

In the time standing still
Yet always moving
A deadness and despair
In the late afternoon
On the empty streets
Looking at windows of houses
where you don’t belong

Stuck on base with no chance of getting home how to escape the creeping numbness
that stretches out like the late afternoon shadows

What happened to the lying down
On soft grass in childhood,
Spreading your legs out freely,
Where time means nothing and
There are no demands?

Sinking with the hours as quickly as the sun going behind a cloud, a drop in the pocket not as a winning shot but as a scratch, a gutter ball at the alley

The inevitability of losing
Another week used up

MARK DONNELLY is a professional writer of poetry, drama, short fiction and non-fiction. Two of his poems were included in recent anthologies published by Pure Slush, and another appeared in the “National Beat Poetry Foundation Anthology 2020.” Mark grew up in Queens and in South Huntington, Long Island, and moved to Northern California in 2021.