Positive Vision Quest

Dig your many trenches of attrition where you must.
The inside job comes right from the gut
and nowhere else.

Happiness is when what you need to do
and what you want to do become
one in the same.

A sudden collision of ideas, opportunity
and confidence.

The dream world brought to life.
Your greatest success.

The Children of Long Division

The invisible man lives forever,
forever in the eyes that search for him.

He lives forever because he is never seen
and by consequence, always sought.

Journeyman

the cars are parked,
some on the street and some in the winding stone drive,
I can hear the laughter from inside, a party,
someone coughing up a real throaty rejoinder,
and later by the rod iron cemetery it is cold and quiet,
the flowerless dead no longer able to play with their hair,
with various extramarital lovers;
the surrounding buildings all with lights that keep
going out so that I find myself down by a ravine
watching the smooth erosion rocks
peak over the surface of rushing water;
a few hundred bats squeaking their way
through the buzzing winged-insect tumult above.

Ryan Quinn Flanagan is a Canadian-born author residing in Elliot Lake, Ontario, Canada with his wife and many bears that rifle through his garbage.  His work can be found both in print and online in such places as: Evergreen
Review, The New York Quarterly, Bourgeon, TheSongIs.., Cultural Weekly, Red Fez, and The Oklahoma Review.

Image by Chensiyuan, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons