this way and that

among the wine glasses a water glass bubbles un-drunk the evening light bleeds into us over us through us the aching bee stung with visions of death undetermined the word concrete falling from the sky the black sky above the himalayas who was it spoke of the wisdom of her dog its simplicity complicity the revelation of some truth that seems like paisley in an empty sort of way colorful too again the bleeding light a sea of oranges bobbing like the gladiators eyes his lopped off head smiling still speaking saying babbling "fu.." then ending tongue stuck out a crow alights and caws they always like seagulls go for the eyes are the doorway into the emptiness of souls spilled forth a multitude of things draw me in all directions perhaps they do others too they grab them though and shape them into something that has so far eluded me but that's OK a dog chews the dried ear of a pig.

the lifeboat's last voyage

a lifeboat upside down on a sidewalk scraped along the bronze of its gunwales beginning to shine layers of paint peeling off he dragged it behind him approaching the wall finding the door that was locked he hurled the lifeboat against it all of his dreams spilled out the glass jars shattered things lay in puddles that were once in jars things bleached brown instead of green a lamprey eel dead reeking of formaldehyde the fluid clear repulsive yet vapors rose that once were dreams a wind drew them through the doorway over the fragments of the broken door out into a field on the other side so incongruent - a field he followed the vapors through the doorway finding a desert instead a severe light beating down the still coolness of timeless morning sands winds whispering whispering whispering.

Broken

words
a trail
leading into forests deep
and tall and wide
into the hollowness
full of detritus
leaves
sticks
jaw bones
in them interwoven layers
and layers of pages of words
word after word telling of things half remembered
nearly illegible
the rain and the snow
the winds and the sun
the worms and the grubs
composting
transforming
waste into nutrient
seeds
taking root
saplings
growing year after year
reaching deeper
further
thicker
drawing sustenance from the words
and though indecipherable
the trees
at their zenith
in the height of summer
are beautiful and timeless
and whole

The First of November

In the dim sunlight of Fall some red, yellow, brown leaves cling to the nearly barren branches of the Oaks. The sky is gray, but still in the height of afternoon, between the chill gusts of wind, a meager warmth lingers. I close my eyes and face the sunlight and feel its gentle touch upon my cheeks. On opening my eyes I am welcomed with color. All is quiet and in the stillness comes a peace. The simplicity and wholeness of this gift fills me with awe. It is good, and right, and holy.

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.