Dust


Dust drifts down from the ceiling,
like an invisible snowfall of deathly
gray, invites the mites that cling
to our clothes and our skin, beastly
little hitchhikers, bloodsuckers,
crawling eaters of shed dead flesh.

Think about it:

It coats our food, floats in our drink,
gets sucked into our lungs with every
living breath. And we come from this
in the beginning and return to this
in the end, so who knows- in this breath
you could breath in the remains
of some long dead ancestor,
and with the next an animal that died
on a road nearby several months ago.
You could be eating a turkey sandwich
with the remnants of an old book sprinkled
into the holes in the bread’s surface.
Right now your hands could be coated
with all that’s left of a Victorian house
that used to stand on the corner.

Wash it off but it returns again, an infinite plague.
There is no escape from this.


Don Kloss is a fifty-something poet, musician, insomniac and harvester of the seas. His work has appeared in such publications as The Edison Literary Review, Voices Of Reason and Chanterelle’s Notebook. In 2006 his poem The Ice Pick Surgeon was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. When not chasing his muse he can be found either on his mountain bike or in his canoe.