A prisoner to words
they cage me in
confine my thoughts
they dictate who I am
and what I can do.
What is it that they want?
Why am I enslaved to them?
They are my master
and yet I cannot find them
they do not comfort me.
A thousand bear no weight
and yet they are so heavy some of them.
I cannot pass time without them
and when I cannot find the ones I need
I must sift through them
as if they are tens of thousands
of pails of sand.
When I seek solace or peace
and try to put them away
they barrage me like hailstones.

Waters Arrested

Behind a pane of glass on the cluttered bookshelf sits an old black and white photo yellowed with age of a river lined with trees clothed in all their summer foliage, her waters arrested, the forest still and silent. The waters have long since flowed away, the leaves of the trees fallen long ago, now dirt. The summer breezes gone utterly away. The river still flows, the winds still blow, the trees yet grow. The fading image on yellowing paper will one day be no more, it is dead and decomposing, but the waters will flow forever, birdsong borne on the wind fills the forest perennially and long after I myself am gone, others will come to photograph the river's waters.

Most of All

But it was the sky most of all...
The sky was dark
the sky was dark and burning with stars
The sky was vast, it went on and on
and on.
The sky bled
the sky bled away color
the sky drained into darkness
the sky drained away into darkness and spoke of infinity
The sky of infinity
was silent
The sky, silent
spoke
The sky told of things
that were and are
the sky told of things yet to be

The sky was free
but it cost everything to know
The sky sang me to sleep
the sky called to me in my sleep
it woke me up
The sky said...
what was it that the sky said?
the sky, it said...
what?

The sky it said and said and said.

The sky
the sky
Why?

The sky I lost

The sky incoherent

The sky went far beyond me
above me
the sky ran beneath me
The sky ran like a river
washing it all away

The sky like sand ran though my fingers

The sky blew away in the wind

The sky was the Earth

but it was the sky most of all
that saved me.

November Nights

The howling winds, they all call out to me. The Big Lake roars, the weather turns, it is always turning, turning, turning, bitter cold. The trees bereft of leaves a spiny mass of gray, here and there interwoven with veins of birch virgin white, rattling on the ridges as other colors fade. A lone yellow leaf clings to a branch. I seek the solitude that comes with these November nights that sang me to sleep when I was newly born.

Sometimes

Sometimes
I only want to hear the voice I have forgotten,
I only want to sit in the stillness of a meadow
with the late morning Sun upon my back.

Sometimes
in the evening I linger to watch the stars come out one by one.

Sometimes
I awaken far away from everywhere in the middle of the night mouth open in awe
beneath the myriad stars riddling the Universe.

Sometimes
I fall asleep oblivious to all.

Vision

The clouds drift by, the sun rises and sets, the moon follows in dizzying circles. Seasons wax and then wane and it means naught to me. I have been rent into a million shards scattered here and there across time; the past, present, future. In my soul I have endued all of nature with a voice now silent. It is as if the world has turned to glass, it is frozen and inert, and I a vapor that passes through it invisible and unable to affect it. I am full of words that I can no longer free. Light is now refracted, separated into its component pieces, and incoherent. Winds moan, rattling the glass branches of trees that ring out as they shatter and rain down. I stand beneath hoping that the fragments of glass might pierce me, so that I could remember what it is like to feel, but I am a vapor and the winds carry me away. In the broken light I see the reflections of dreams of what was and what might have been; fractured, mingling, kaleidoscopic. And that is all there seems to be.

The Front

At the last hour of day
I lie awake in my departed father's old bed.

The night is cold, and Summer's end approaches.

I close my eyes and remember
how afternoon's warmth slipped away—

We were clearing dead branches felled by last Spring's storm,
breaking them up and burning them in a small fire.

Why do clouds look like cotton?, asked my son.
I attempted to answer but he was already lost in the sky.

It was one of those Summer afternoons
when you could sit with your face in the Sun
and convince yourself that things would never end.

The kids had lost their fascination with the fire.

They ran off to pester their grandmother for the grape popsicles.

Alone, I turned my attention to the sky
at the severe white of the billowing clouds.
I spotted at a vast height ten barely perceptible silhouettes
they were birds of prey gliding, not in formation,
but in a rough arc of uneven points.
Independently, each had found and claimed its own place.

I stared, not yet understanding, bewildered.
Then I saw a great mass of shadowy clouds behind them.
The birds were gliding on a fast advancing front.
I stood there lost in the spectacle,
caught up in so singular a vision.

In the evening my sister told me how as her and her family were out boating the weather surprised them.
It had appeared out of nowhere.
I told her how I saw the front
presaged by the shadows of birds of prey.

Over dinner mom, now 83, stated,
Just because it's Labor Day doesn't mean that Summer has ended.
Fall doesn't start until September 23rd.
I thought to myself that she must be tacking on a day or two.
She obviously hadn't noticed the change in temperature.
I spoke of the dark clouds rising over towering pines
and recalled how quickly they came in from the north.

The clouds had rolled in at the exact moment I thought to myself
how it might be a good night to sleep beneath the stars
and share with my children
the wonder of waking in the middle of the night
to find the myriad stars hanging overhead.

Before going to bed I went outside
to make sure the fire had died down.
The clouds hung low,
the sky was starless,
the children had gone off to their cousins' to sleep.

Alone, I crouched over the embers of a dying fire
and attempted to warm myself.
The winds howled through trees.
In the distance, over the hills, the Big Lake roared,
its violent waves, coming early, beating on the shores.
And I there in the darkness
left with one echoing word 


Goodbye, Goodbye, Goodbye.

Words I Used to Use

I have forgotten the words I used to use
words scrawled across pages in journals gathering dust
layers of pages bound within journals crammed into bookshelves
layers of writing like the rings that you can count in the trunk of a cut-down tree
layers of sediment compressed into rock which you can crack open to reveal words now unfamiliar
words as indecipherable as the dreams that you may half-remember when you awaken
words like dreams that try to speak of things you can no longer quite recall.

Afternoon, half a world away

Forevermore whenever I ride my bicycle down any road lined on either side with a colonnade of old and stately trees, I will always be riding somewhere else. I will be riding in Zanzibar half a world away, between Stonetown and the east beaches, in the middle of nowhere, sheltered from the fierce light of the equatorial Sun beneath the shade of ancient mango trees, pedaling in the still silence of a torpid afternoon.

Woman finds giant sinkhole under her bed

As the old woman lays sleeping, there comes a sound from beneath her four post bed, a sound coming from beneath the blue and white tiled floor that looks like a checkerboard. Beneath the rusty bed, beneath the tiles that are perfectly square, the sound of the earth falling away as she sleeps, a sinkhole grows; a perfectly round hole in the great sphere of the Earth. The scraping sound of a few of the tiles falling away as they are swallowed by the widening hole awakens her. She listens to the echoes of banging rise from the depths in the darkness as the tiles collide with the walls of earth.

She does not yet know that what was once firm and solid is now gone; a deep chasm in its place. She lights the lantern on her nightstand, puts her pale bare feet upon the smooth cool floor. she kneels and crawls on hands and feet to look under her bed. Bewildered, terrified, she discovers the hole and in the cool damp air the taste of dirt that smells of decay. Timidly she lifts the lantern over the hole and peers into the depths. She sees only darkness.

"Helloooooo?" she calls down.

Her call is swallowed up. Suddenly she is horrified. The lantern slips from her fingers. Paralyzed she watches the lantern's light travel down, down, down.

Fading, fading, fading.

Becoming

a single

point
.

diminishing in luminosity until like a dying ember

it is gone.

Her arms and legs give out.

She topples in, somersaulting slowing through the cool damp air. It whistles in her ears.

Falling.

Accelerating into the darkness, she is too bewildered to mind.

She loses consciousness.

She gains consciousness.

She sees the light of her lantern, and struggles towards it. The air is hot and humid. The walls are fleshy, they contract around her thrusting her toward the light.

Slowly.

Painfully.

She is born.

poured out

I am poured out, all my waters I have poured out. I have poured them out on a parched and barren land with an insatiable thirst. I have poured them out and not one seed did grow. Not one seed. I am an empty vessel, and the land has drunk me up without effect, but my waters flow on, through the sands and are purified. They've leached out the salts, and the toxins, and have left them behind. The fierce sun in the burning heat of afternoon has evaporated the waters, and have made them vapors, and the vapors rise, and unbound by the limits of shape, are free. They dance in the heat and dissipate into the heights, high into the rarefied air, and coalesce into the great white clouds which are pure and untouched. They merge into one with all the other waters, and like tears rain down in other places. And the vessel? either someone will find it and fill it once again with waters or they will not and it will eventually over the eons become one with the barren land and so affect it.

I am borg

Technology has finally overcome me. It has won. I can no longer experience a moment that does not have to be photographed or videoed or tweeted or blogged. I have become subservient to the gadgets. I am always charging or rebooting, or cycling power. I am always updating, always upgrading. I need the flat screen, I need the newest app that provides augmented reality, the information that my tired old brain can no longer hold. Speed dial keeps me going, and now the phone is ringing, and there are messages in my inbox, and there are so many things that i need to buy, and i'm too fat, and need to sue someone. So many beautiful young woman are eager to meet me, and need my bank account number so that they can wire me millions... I need to feed my puffles, and farmville needs my attention. My ear buds cannot bear to to sit silent, I need my podcasts, my mp3's, my flv's. I must fill my time with video games on my LCD. I do not own the technology, it owns me. It has stolen everything that I used to have. I have had to become my own documenter, I must feed my facebook page. I have been reduced to a profile, to a QR code. The fucking TV blares its chatter deep into the very center of my being. There is no peace no stillness, all is in motion, and is being continually monetized. Upgrade, pay online, enter your credit card, join the cloud, make your life easier, you deserve it. Surrender. Resistance is futile.

unraveled

An unraveled thread from the center of a gutted baseball in a tangle blown by a June wind that seemed too damned cold, It was once the heart of something that can never again be re-made, that can never be as it once was intended to be. The Universe unfurls that way, into chaos from some kind of order that never established itself. To find meaning in something that makes no sense, that is unintelligible, is senseless; but we busy ourselves with so many unintelligible things that we ourselves are incomprehensible. The writing of words into the nothing-void of the million blogs is but foolishness, but foolishness is at least something, and something must (anything can) fill the greater void that consumes all the light in my life. It is more an endurance than a life, a grasping at grains of sand that slip thorough fingers and are blown back into the infinite sea of the desert. Grains of sand are something, and though I grasp them I cannot claim them. Claiming anything is senseless. All things encumber, all things however small weigh you down. Thoughts possessing no mass whatsoever are the heaviest of encumbrances. Words are just a pouring out of thoughts, words take with them the thoughts they are composed of. Let me not claim these words but rather throw them out so that the thoughts they bear will be cast out with them. I seek a state of no-words, non-thought, stillness, a desert of thought, where words are the grains of sand, and one or the other of them is just as meaningless as the other. I have lost something and I don't know what it is, I can't remember it, perhaps it is my way. One thing is certain - I am absolutely alone. None can know where I am, none have ever been here, and none ever will. Hoping someone could is the cruelest, most wicked of all self-deceptions. Every moment is another moment that I speed away from the whole of the world faster and faster with a gathering acceleration. I am thrust right into the center of the infinite void. Any direction that I turn is as meaningless as any other. I have arrived at alone-ness. Who will have even attempted to follow me this far? It is a road none should travel, and yet I must for it is my road; if it leads to nowhere so be it. God has given it to me to travel. I must learn to be at peace with it. I must walk on. I will walk on through the gathering darkness, and growing cold; through the echoing silence, and widening emptiness. The Desert has claimed me, the Night has put its hand upon me. I have no tears to shed, no hope to sustain me. I will go on without hope, with only my determination to guide me through a land that I am an alien in; Wearily pushing onward until I collapse, and am again roused, to rise again and travel on and on.

oh oh how I dream

oh how I do dream things long passed
oh how I do dream long
oh how I long
oh how long passed
oh long passed things
oh long passed things scattered
long passed things scattered here and there

A Mother’s Day Orchid

The purple orchid I bought you in May
has long since dried up and died.

The peas you planted in its yellow ceramic pot
fared no better.

Here I sit considering the lost orchid
feeling the coolness of the smooth wooden floor.

Let’s throw out the stale gray soil from the pot
wash it out, dry it off.

We’ll set it upon the mantel
above the fireplace that we no longer use

Then fill the yellow pot full of pennies
that will clatter through our fingers with the sound of prosperity

Pennies we can cast out for our children
across the back porch

Although the cement is cracked
And uneven.

Let them think
that they are the richest children in the world.

Let’s do it
just to hear them laugh and giggle.

I swear you won’t regret it
fifty years from now

When you’ll still find that laughter
ringing in your ears

Ringing like the raining of rain
that waters a purple orchid deep in the forest.

Settling

Distance and darkness
dust covered words.
The continual advancing of time
brings these about.
What once was new
becomes broken and worn
whether teacups or vertebrae
or thoughts that I think.
A wedding ring lost
slipping off of my finger
in the bay where i swim
a simple band of gold
disappearing into the darkening depths
settling into the mud
returning to that from which it was forged.

22 Memories of Fall and Winter passing.

I.
Evening finds sunlight lingering, crisscrossed with the long shadows of naked oak limbs; fingers of ice crystals stretching out across the surfaces of brown opaque puddles; last year’s dead grass flattened against the face of the fresh exposed earth, like a newborn’s hair; birdsong.

II.
The road is long. The road is straight. The road is narrow.
The plains I travel over are broad, flat, and unchanging.
The sky overhead is laden with a sheet of silken cloud.
Miles, miles and miles I drive thoughtless in darkness
behind the headlights’ monotonous beams.
Suddenly
a flash of motion, frantic, a fawn darts in front of me
startled I can’t avoid it.
God spares it.
Long afterward I’m haunted by “what if…”

III.
My mind was as white and inert as fields and fields of cold white snow
until after much passing of time, lost in contemplation, I at last did see the snow.
I began to understand that it is through the random senseless falling of so many snowflakes and the relentlessness of mindless endless winds that such intricate exquisite patterns arise upon the surfaces of drifts.

IV.
The Sun shone so brilliantly that the sky burned blue and the fields blazed white. That it was a frigid three degrees was to hard to grasp until you turned into the winds. With the crisp air came clarity, a keen realization that life possesses an undeniable veracity. In the stillness of the moment all was beautiful.

V.
Snowflakes fall in the stillness of night silently blanketing the land. Each one a masterpiece unique, not just each snowflake falling here and now, but each one fallen anywhere ever since the first one ever fell, snowflakes that lose themselves in the mass of the whole, each one a poem undiscovered until one at last lands before your eyes and tells you everything.

VI.
A yellow house seen through the falling snow
I remember the forts and angels we used to make.
The blue sky seen through the naked branches of winter’s oaks
I remember a snowmobile ride in a forest where I first saw my sister smoke.
A doorway illuminated by a lone bulb in the darkness of night says “Come in from the cold”.

VII.
We can choose to change or not
we can either be intentional about what we will be
or believe that change is unnecessary and unwanted.
Be that as it may, change occurs regardless
imperceptibly or in an instant
towards growth or decay.
You decide.

VIII.
It rose brilliantly illuminating winter’s longest night
ascending to its zenith where a darkness came upon it
extinguishing in shadow black its lofty light.
Ocher as blood it turned as if it were dead
and the world grew dim.
In the quiet I pondered Christmas and the Cross
then the shadow ebbed ever so gradually away
until at dawn it entirely vanished.
The Moon had set, the Sun had come
utterly vanquishing the night.

IX.
Mighty is the Oak
Great is the towering Pine
Both slumber undisturbed
roots nestled beneath a deep blanket of snow
The little brook acquiescing to every stone still meanders on its way.

X.
Morning finds us waiting with Ben for his bus
catching snowflakes on our tongues
looking east into a blue sky, up at a soft white cloud
the Sun not yet cresting the tree tops, painting the edge of the cloud yellow
December's chill upon our cheeks waking us to the wonder of a brand new day.

XI.
The gale casts before it an endless snow, falling steadily, obliquely, from a great mass of clouds occupying the gulf above the bay, a space once inhabited by Summer’s lazy breezes, by the setting Sun’s soft glow, a space now darkened by the blackness of Winter’s long night, by the oppressive weight of clouds pressing down upon a weary shore buried beneath the pristine whiteness of a new fallen snow.

XII.
The tree I used climb
the tallest tree sitting on the highest hill
bent and formed by November’s gales
against whose trunk in summer I used to nap
from its topmost branches I’d survey both great lake and small village
years ago branches lopped off
dead trunk towering against the sky
a monument, a testament to childhood
fell
finding it laying there on the hillside
I sat in its heights one last time
remembering.

XIII.
Traveling across the stillness of forested roads beneath old oaks and their canopies of naked dark branches. Arriving, waiting for arrivals, the opening of doors, welcomed and welcoming. Inside, the soft glow of a fire. Outside, chill winds casting before them snow. Spaces filled with long familiar voices, aromas of nutmeg, cloves, garlic.The stillness of night gently parted by the quiet grace of a piano.
Thankful.

XIV.
There was, wasn't there?
Entwined in twisted roots of an old oak.
Between that star and the little red one.
Buried in the limestone heart of Stonetown, down a labyrinthine side street.
Scrawled in illegible handwriting on a yellowing page written as the red sun died one evening on a train out of Mwanza.
In the gentle coo of a mourning dove in evening's soft sunlight.
Hidden in the voice of the wind.
There.

XV.
At the end of the last street, a light pole rises into the darkness. From the worn crooked pole an incandescent bulb casts out a feeble circle of yellow. Beyond lays a barren field. Winds howl. Autumn acquiesces to winter. There’s nowhere to go from here, yet look, beyond the road, pole, and field, into the night. A crescent moon hangs low, smiling down on me.

XVI.
I look out the window and see the Moon sitting atop a black mass of cloud, like a immense cyclops with a glowing white eye and a gray head of hair. The winds howl, the lakes roar, the trees rattle. I can't wait to fall asleep and dream.

XVII.
Across the field in the early evening when the low-lying-Sun casts its light upon the forest's Fall raiment I see an entrance beneath the trees, a dark passage into the heart of the wood, a way revealed, never before seen, beckoning me, bidding me come, drawing me away from the world of man.

XVIII.
Outside at this late hour a soft white moon, nestled in a faint gray blanket of cloud, is cradled in the dark arms of a great oak, its leaves swaying in October's capricious gusts. Inside in the fireplace only embers remain, waxing and waning in the darkness of the room, all that remains of the blazing fire we sat around.

XIX.
The Sun had set. Long horizontal bands of wispy clouds remained, peach-colored and pastel orange, glowing in the still-yet-azure sky. Thrust up between it and I, jabbed the dark silhouettes of narrow dead pines cutting me off from the light. I lingered and watched it ebb away until the first few stars appeared.

XX.
If all were maples, and it always October, would I notice? Would I stop dead in my tracks, awestruck? I know soon the time will come when yellow leaves lay plastered against the black asphalt by a driving rain, but that in its own moment is also beautiful.

XXI.
As I rode home this evening in the shadows, at the feet of the mighty white pines towering above me, I looked up to see their outstretched limbs reaching into the heights. They were aflame with the remnants of the sun's tangential rays, still glowing golden full of light. Thus began the day's descent into the ever-waiting hand's of night.

XXII.
Ah you Sun, regaling yourself with royal cerulean, claiming this cool Fall afternoon! Colors riddle the hills, violent reds, yellows, oranges bursting forth as if explosions, caught in full flower, arrested in time, juxtaposed against Summer's fading green slowly swept away before the dread Boreas. I ask of thee only a moment in your light to rest and warm my face, a few more ripe tomatoes, and a honey-crisp to savor.

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