Epitaph of an Astronaut

Please don’t bury me in lifeless dust beneath the Sea of Tranquility
my life was anything but that.

When I rode atop the ball of flame
that thrust me high above everything I knew and loved
I yearned to ride another, and another
until at last those flames engulfed me.

Bury me beneath the crater Tycho where long ago a mighty rock impacted
its shards strewn across the face of the moon, etching it with scars.

Let me rest there in the light and darkness.
For though I loved the brilliance of the burning sunlight
I have also made my peace with the unforgiving cold
of the dark side of the Moon.

Chapter from an old Hyperlinked Story

You turn your back on the egg, and investigate the table. On the table you see a message written in the dust, "DON'T EAT THE EGG." Smugly content that you have found some kind of hint, you realize that there is something odd about the room. It has no doors, or windows. There are just four brown walls, a ceiling, and a floor. The floor is covered with black and white linoleum tiles. A single incandescent light bulb dangles from a frayed cord running from the ceiling. As you are so studiously taking note of everything, you turn your attention back to the stove, hoping to notice something that you had overlooked. You stumble back against the table, shocked at the size of the egg. It had been growing all the while you were investigating the table. It is now the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. As you watch, you can see it growing. Its rate of growth is accelerating. As it falls off the stove into the center of the room, you wonder how you could eat it if you wanted to. Suddenly realizing that there is no way out of the room, you are more concerned with being crushed by the egg...

Nameless

Earlier than 7/25/2001

Walking in the rain on the glossy pavement listening to the raindrops pattering, draining into dark sewer drains. The dead leaves well up around grates, the waters back up. The gray sky overhead is continual, endless, calling out to no one. On and on I walk. Overhead the straight line of a telephone pole rises out of a chaotic random jumble of tree limbs and branches that are leafless in early December. Cars in the distance flash by with a hiss in a streak of light. They are far away and nothing comes near, nor approaches, nor fades away. There is just the night and the glow of the nearby city reflecting in an ugly brown color on the clouds that are hundreds of feet thick. Nothing comes in or out of them. My footsteps fade in silence, the constant trickle of water flowing. Damp moist dark lawns of people who I used to greet on the sunny summer afternoons are empty. Where are they now? Not even a trace of light comes from within their houses, their homes as quiet and empty as the night. Was it really so late? I did not notice. I walked on, wondering how far I could walk without thinking. The puddles along the curbs glittered with the stray light of the streetlights reflecting recursively off of every wet surface, so many mirror-like surfaces. The light eventually dispersed into the opaqueness of the air thick with moisture. Do you know that air which contains moisture, water, is less dense than dry air? What that means is that moisture laden air rises and rises until it cools, then the water condenses and falls back upon the wetness. I had walked long enough to begin to feel the wetness of my hair. My coat grew heavy. I did not care. I turned up the alley. Wires ran in soggy arcs from pole to lifeless pole. The asphalt below me lay black and hard, shadows mingled with themselves there. I walked along a wall, a straight wall that I would never see beyond, never cared to see beyond, I wasn’t even aware of anything but the wall leading me on like a passage in a maze. I did not follow it rather it ran alongside me isolating me in the silence. My shadow grew long in front of me, then, as I approached a street light, my shadow began to diminish. It went that way for blocks, I noticed only my shadow waxing and waning beneath my feet. I did not want to count the number of times, but at least I knew that time was passing that way. I was in the midst of monotony, swimming in the deadness of not-thinking. Stimuli were gentle, undemanding; the rain, the stillness, the soft glow. I could feel my breath condensing upon each exhalation. Beyond me, far away, people were living their lives, but I was walking the streets, the alleys, trying to outpace myself. Could I walk away from myself? No, but I could distance myself from thought, as if it was smoke rolling out of the exhaust stack of a hundred year old steam locomotive pushing through the weight of the blackness of night in the still virgin and majestic forests it was helping to destroy. The alley was devoid of trees. The odors of trash lingered. Then it came, the memory of conversation.

”…It’s a dysfunctional community.“

“I’ve never known a community that wasn’t”

“I know one, The Nez Perce in Washington State had a functional community, at least until the US Calvary came and gunned them down, and beat their children’s heads in with the butts of rifles.”

“what?…”, She did not know that I was still angry about something I’d read.

I walked on. There is a peace in the Bleakness, in the nothingness. Nothing is required of you, you are not good, you are not evil, wise nor foolish, right nor wrong. You are nameless, and unspoken of.

On the Tip of My Tongue

The words have gone, bled away like blood spilling from a fatal wound. A dark pool that only serves to remind me of the futility of anything I’d hoped to do; a dream that was never dreamt; a civilization that was lost and buried by a jungle, and never discovered. I am here with something on the tip of my tongue that seems invisible and impenetrable all at once. If I try to dwell on it, it flits away like a hummingbird, if I try to grasp it, it tumbles into a bottomless sea like a rare diamond. There is no hand upon my shoulder, no quiet voice against my ear. The future is as far away as the past and I am stuck in the here and now. My head is as heavy as my heart, my thoughts as heavy as my feet. I sit and rest in the middle of the desert, and one direction is indistinguishable from another. If there is a path it has been rubbed out, I cannot see it.

The Sound of a Snowflake Falling

Outside in the night's darkness beneath the weight of an endless mass of cloud, the late winter storm has laid down its bitter cold veil, an eerie white cast upon all that was sunny and green. A gathering silence grows, an oppressive peace, a stillness. Inside, beneath thick blankets, I hear my own heart beat, I feel the moist warmth of my breathing. I lay there hoping to dream. I'm almost certain I can hear every snowflake as it lands.

*originally posted on my MySpace Blog Apr 6, 2007

The Other Side of Polebridge

Driving across the fire-eaten earth, brown earth with the black stakes of burnt pine trunks stabbing the orange dusty sky. I felt silent and still as if all motion was arrested by the aftermath. Nothing stirred except the shadows of the dead pines that grew longer in the reddening sky. The hazy ethereal globe of the dying Sun wavered massive and fierce behind the barren stakes, black stakes stabbing the orange dusty sky. They were like iron spikes arranged by some random force, spikes driven here and there in the sandy lifeless earth, marking the graves of souls that no one remembered. Dry earth, dusty earth, sterile and empty, quiet and so utterly lonely. The Shadows, chained to the spikes, reached out towards me. They sought to cut me through and divide me with their dark sharp edges.

*Originally posted on my MySpace Blog Feb 27,2008

Freezing and Thawing

It has come. The gray time, the black and white land, the sunless twilight on either side of day, the wet fecund mud. Before anything grows what was frozen in months of ice must thaw and begin to decompose. The winds blow damp during the day and frigid during the night (in the black of night when all that was beginning to thaw re-freezes). What is there? What hope? The fireplace is old and there are no logs. Many men have died alone on nights like these of hopelessness, dying on the verge of Spring, after a too long Winter that had refused to let go its interminable grip, dying on the verge of Spring, laying dead on the hard frozen earth, outstretched hands with fingers only inches away from a dab of purple, a crocus bud that appeared the following day. It is hard to say if it would have signified hope had it come a day earlier and thus saved a life, or if it signified man’s spirit in the corporeal form of a new flower just beginning a new life. Perhaps it was both, or neither, only indicating the horrible inhuman character of nature in that nature cares not that men live or die or suffer loss. Flowers grow where they will, requiring the decomposition of organic matter, mindless of what was before, and are we men any less dumb? Do we know the sufferings of those who came before us? Or of those that are so far removed from us that this very minute are suffering and dying while we sit complacent and unaware? Pause for a moment, wait, be still and seek awareness. Now, before the wonder and fury of life arises once again to flourish upon yesterday’s frozen earth.

*Originally posted on my MySpace Blog March 17, 2008

Memory of a Cabin

There is a thing that seems too long ago to feel. There is a feeling that is so long ago you don't remember. There is a memory… of something …its there… just under the surface, the surface of everything that is and was. Then there is tomorrow, what is tomorrow? Well, really its everything, because all that was is just a memory of a feeling so long ago that there is nothing left. I speak in circles, in circles of circles. I sit by a pool of still water, and cast pebbles into the pool and ripples radiate in rings, and they intersect until I am lost in them all rising and falling. In a moment the leaves that were greening the maples on the hillside are now yellow and red. They litter the footpaths that used to be roads. My father used to speak of an old log cabin way back in the woods that used to be cabbage fields when he was a boy. As we walked in the woods and he used to remember where he led the cattle into town, we would sometimes look for the remnants of that old cabin, but we never found them. Even as I grew older and wandered the woods alone, I'd follow old overgrown drainage ditches, often through dark mucky swamps. I'd climb tall trees to look down into the swamps, always looking, always hoping to find any evidence of that old cabin. Time and the constancy of decomposition in nature have won out over my determination. I have even begun to feel the time hang on me. Its been many years since I have even thought of the cabin that was probably gone before I was even born, but I can still see it clearly, as it was the first day it was built. I wonder how long ago I stopped seeing things as they are, and started seeing them as I remembered them. There are many places that are full of ghosts that I'm not even sure I even notice. There are places that I'll never return to because they are gone, because, though they are still there, they are so different that they are lost, and returning, I'd see that they are lost, and the only place I can find them any more is in some rare dream where they are more fantastic than they really were, and I choose to remember them as they once were. I can close my eyes and still see them, more and more places, and people the way they used to be, and the danger is that in closing my eyes I may never choose to open them again, or worse, believe that they are open when they are really closed. Sometimes the thread that anchors me to the here-and-now seems so thin, so frail. Sometimes things seem to get so bad that all I want to do is close my eyes and pinch off that thread between my fingernails, but always there is tomorrow and tomorrow is a new day, and with a new day comes new opportunities, new hopes. As long as the Sun shall shine there is hope. And I know without a doubt that I know nothing, especially of what will be.

*originally posted on my myspace blog Nov 1,2008