Wednesday, November 30, 2011
The dissolution of this illusion
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
NOW is about time!
It's amazing how often we relinquish the joy and anticipation and tears of appreciation for someone's good fortune, especially our own, because we question, "why now? why not then? but what about this? but I --- dot dot dot!" bla fuckin bla!" There IS PURE joy...but before you set you mind and precious energy on proving me wrong, here's the deal, you dont even get the privilege of being MEDIOCRE at making that joy; how dare you. Joy is a gift (ah - doesn't matter who it's from) , be grateful for that split second of it...the past is just a bunch of "Joyful NOWs" that you should have clenched with all your heart rather than f'in them up. And so what if you did! But you keep throwing them away...so much so, that you have the audacity to say that all the past is gone and you've nothing left. Any time you choose my friends, any moment you choose, is your forever NOW. I suggest you stop wallowing on the razors edge of "yeh but" and "NO" get all over "Hell yeh" before "now" get's here "later" than "sooner." I have no time for later, less time for the past.
Monday, November 28, 2011
What the hell happened
More like an insect than any other advanced form of life...hidden, quiet in the dark, only coming out to do something "functional." Hate the internet...I need two things, a big rock and someone to blame for its invention - so I can throw the rock, at them.
Saturday, November 26, 2011
Stars (3/16/05)
To feel a tear roll back
I never saw you, but I knew you were there
Obscured by the fog of a bad day,
Engulfed by the sun
A sailors moon
Chasing Away clouds
Reflecting off the
Hearing nothing, never sounded so bad
Darkness, giving up, are you there
If so, leave me alone
I’ll find you, it’s better that way
Discovery
Falling star, beautiful as it burns up in the atmosphere, catching fire, burning out, maybe making it to earth, or just becoming part of the ether in the atmosphere.
What is left for me in that universe
Can I share
That last falling light, disappeared, plummeting into the ocean of your soul,
How many stars fill your heart
Was it gravity
Failure to fly
Or a homecoming for the those that have never been
Arranged, placed gently in the heavens by the angels
Shuffling with the music of God, solar winds
The waters rippled as if the
Throwing the silken blanket of
Catching the stars
The stars, reflecting in the dew drops on the grass
--------------------stuff below –drafted from last night - ----- need an extension, I have anthrax---
Suspended in their infinite depth
The light reaches us years after the flame ignites
And we smile and muse at these tardy dispatches
Odd, that only long after we are gone from this world
Is the moment of our acknowledgement reciprocated,
Even after they too are extinguished
So this comedy of mistimed love affair continues with the heavens
We, exchanging smiles with a face we know is gone from existence
The conundrum of returning to a sender who is no longer there.
And here by the fire
In this sandy pit
I listen to the waves run to the shore
Tattling tales from far out on the ocean
Who’s great arc bends the seawater over the distance
Around the horizon
Where whispers from distant shores are heard in our imagination
Lost at a sea,
The Transcontinental chasm of misshapen, asynchronous anecdotes
And you and I are mired in this mud ball
A human conglomerate
Spinning around one star
while so many others beckon from beyond
And out of nowhere, I love you
Illuminates, the rise and fall of the sun light
Like the end of an intermission
The sun sets, as the encore begins
The audience of stars rise, clapping not loudly
Yet their applause flickers in the distance
As my light plummets into the western ocean of you soul
Yours rises majestic in the east
And for a brief moment,
The runner from the dusk sun is connected
To the glow of dawn
The gap lessens and we don smiles
Not for the fathomless distances of interstellar space
But for our closest star,
a mere 93 million miles
We are as close as close can be
Like the bespeckled heavens
We make patterns, we forget them in the day,
until the darkness comes
Indonesia (it took a while to grow on me)
The entire city thus far, smells like a casserole of garbage riding thick on the humid night air - freshly hosed down pavement, reeking with diesel exhaust, raw sewage, old dishwater, and smoldering fish grilling for hours on filthy hibachi’s.
There is just a cacophony of vehicles and voices – there are as many 500 rupiah pieces as there are kids willing to work for one…and they are. Millions of dollars to be earned by billions of people.
Silence
The open space of thoughts
The elixir of two souls
Universal, it is always there
Even as sounds play upon it
Taunting
I am in that silence around you
Stay and tease me
I need your company
You and the tapping of my fingers on keys
PRODIGAL LOVE (explained, 10.18.2004)
Amidst the raucous chorus of soul-work,
A shard of sweet harmony bristles.
As love is carved by reckless masons
Beating down mountains with chisels.
I pictured a million souls all singing at the same time. Their own tunes, melodies, sole voices…like a orchestra warming up…each is wonderful by itself but few work together…unconducted. Yet I wanted to find hope…that one little sound of harmony from the din of “soul work” out there…even our other “soul work” before we found each other. All these souls, mistaken for “mates” claim to be in love and beat down every intuition; claiming to be artists of Love…they are only masons, craftsmen making something. I find there is a great chasm between those alleged soul mates who are simply craftsmen (masons) of the love they have and those who are true artists.
A lumbering sledge hews an icon of love
Which void of spirit, may still fain sublime.
A chain gang sings, to forlorn swings,
Pounding love into fragments of time.
So I keep with the visual of people working so hard to build love through all these conventions and icons (possession, wedding rings, misthought gifts, bla bla). And even you and I have built these icons with certain others….and while it may be love as “hewn”, it can still be void of spirit while seeming something deep and wonderfully mysterious. It doesn’t need to be. We do this…partners tied at the feet by chains, swinging the old love battle axe to the rhythmic sounds of basic moaning and lamenting…hoping to really refine and sharpen the love we “made” with others…but really only pounding love into fragments…over time. Meanwhile…someone out there is made for the other…I do not consider you my cell mate…we’re not part of highway chain gang…and we move to wonderful songs of promise.
So the dust rises up from the quarries
and the road cuts of paths left behind.
Course calluses tell that loves journey
may not always be poignant or kind.
I pictured the white smokey chisel dust I’ve seen in the mining operations in the distance of the desert and coal operations in PA…a long time ago. I picture the mountain road cuts…from the blasting of paths through mountain landscape. I look at my past and then at the calluses on my hands…I’ve become accustomed to the adage, that love takes work, it’s hard, etc…I don’t subscribe that this is true and would not explain love like this to a child…love is not always poignant and kind…I suppose in its blasphemy, we “behave” in love…rather than flourish in it as happiness.
As each laborer leans toward the other
Sieving the talus of trouble,
In their eyes, gleans a flame reflected
By a glimmer of hope in the rubble.
Then I picture us moving toward one another as we look over all this short work made over a long time. The mistakes, miscalculations, the “trouble” we have of not being happy or in love with those we are “supposed” to be in love with because we were handled a chisel and hammer and told to make it work. So we sort through the rubble and in each others eyes, I picture the reflection of fire light from the cavities of wrecked efforts…and it’s that reflection in your eyes that brings me hope that after all the dust has settled, after all this “work” we have love saved for us by the pure nature of who we are, rather than contrived by us like craft…I guess so long as it’s art, I’ll make love.
Two destined souls, now shimmer
Through the ages and journeys apart
“How I’ve longed the return of this prodigal love
To the warmth of the home in your heart.”
Well then, here we are shimmering bright after all this time and after separate journeys. And I picture this reckless, rebel love (working mason with a misguided passion to slam square pegs into round holes), returning home over the hill (dark clouds behind me in the distance). I’m here now safe, ordered, and warm in a real “home” (not a house) that is only true so long as I’m in your heart….and yours in mine.
Out of my past, across forever seas
Recasting truth into the furrows of dreams
Sewing intimate seeds that hushed the screams
And unsolved riddles of throttling fear
If one day more, hope would not get here
Over rolling swells, far from land
Spices and driftwood and contraband
Like caramel drippings from a Dali sun
Her eyes cast the color on taught sails of muslin
She sweetly falls soft through scents and caresses
Like a settling snowflake on winters dried branches
She is more than a feeling, brighter than sight
She is the stir in the morning to my withering night
And I recall her breath, a fathomless deep
landing home in the heart, from a precipitous leap.
But the bitter serenity when out of my sight
Is her touch to my soul like raw senses at night
I spiral away, she’ll not get here in time
To keep me from falling deeper in mind.
In this strange numb world, it’s just her and me
Afloat on the tears, of wounded poetry.
Life in Three (explained in 9.8.2004)
As is known to happen occasionally
A moment of tranquil lucidity
I glimpse my life in sets of three.
Guilt for fucking everything up…sometimes I’m so far in it, I can’t quite figure it out. But there are moments when I gain perspective and I cast an inward eye. I’m sitting on a plane when I wrote this…give it’s a propeller aircraft, it was a short lift…probably having something to do with work I was doing with the marines. Whatever it was, flying always used to allow me to drift a bit. It makes me feel better.
The props spin hard, a deep numbing sound
And lug this fuselage across the ground
Now entranced, the runway fades
Chastened by the slicing blades.
We are taking off and I’m drifting…I looked through the blades and watched the runway fall away. I guess this is a form of meditation for me. Purely selfish. I never liked propeller aircraft…gives me a sense of vulnerability. It’s a little un-nerving in high winds, short landings or take offs…I think the guy sitting in front of me was the pilot. Maybe I was in New Mexico.
I murmur the names of those I love
And ask safe passage from all Above
In combinations of tender prayer
In quiet voice, into the air.
I am praying for safety…pure and simple, I’m preparing to say goodbye in case we crash. I do this from time to time.
As I skip in flight through altitudes
Or run a path through latitudes
Or longitudes of forest green
I recall sounds and smells and things I’ve seen.
And so I move on to meditation. The same sense of euphoria I get when I’m running latitudes. In the desert, I ran the mountains a lot…thousands of feet elevation distance ( I guess I call them latitudes – wrong term). As I’ve said many times, smell is a big nostalgic drug for me…I can remember the most peaceful of lifes events when I’m alone, in peril, challenging new places with consciousness.
Body Triangle:
Our encounter is through complex webs
Two paths split through walls of guise
We slipped the grasp of the mundane
In the covert moments of Life’s Sighs.
I try to do things in three’s here. The triangle is architecturally, the most powerful shape. I seem grasp that here. Not sure why I called it the body triangle.
I’m not sure why people come together. But I think, as a friend once said, we draw people around us in order to fulfill the promises of life’s lessons. Nothing is chance…we try to pretend, we go numb, we disguise ourselves and we never meet…or perhaps we eventually do, it just takes longer. Destiny, finds us. The more we resist, the more mundane life is…a sign is an expression of acquiescence…a giving in to matches that God makes for us. We have many mates in life…we have many soul mates. We have one life mate…the most expressive sigh I’ve ever known has been a kiss; and that, without any hesitation, is her and has never been nor will be anyone else’s.
Something I wrote in my past, were glimpses of my future. I wrote a poem about war, when I was 10. My mom found it the other day…never did I think I’d be a soldier. I became one. I disdain war…why did I join a side.
My children, friends, and family
And tragic lust and love’s broken ties
Lo, rock-a-by stars through speeding blades,
you there in the restful ends of my Life’s Eyes.
I lament here. I lost my youth, I hate divorce, I missed my friends, and my immediate family was scattered from corner to corner. I chased lust and love and I failed. I was and am so sorry to have let Him down.. I don’t like hurting people…and I’ve spent most of my life breaking myself down to prove it. I had no idea how far I’d go into ruin. I’ve brought a lot of people down. I just want One shining hope in my life. I’m not sure I can find it…I realize, it’s not mine to find, yours to find…but rather, ours to find. That is a scary proposition…because if we lose each other, we fail to achieve it and we find we were all wrong. This was a night flight I guess, because I’m seeing the stars through the blades of the airplane…I’m sleepy. The restful ends of my life’s eyes…as far as I can see forward…I’ve been deceived by my own love; by my own eyes. There is no You in the end…there is an Us.
I ask for forgiveness From All
Taken for granted, transgressed, spat with lies
In Gods cradle with you my heart
Our children friends and family…Life Size.
I want to be forgiven, but I cannot bring myself to ask for it. I have hurt people…and in doing so, I hurt myself. What will it take for me to be forgiven? Why can I not have my choices…why have I had to feign acceptance?
Prologue
Like a mantra, I recite all your names
In parallel this happens all the time
I roll swelling seas and catch the shores
And see the threads of love that bind
I was thinking of all those I know, knew and care for and pray. I suppose I worry too much about the past and people in it. They are not in the past…they moved on. It’s inaccurate to consider someone as “the same person they were.” I remember ocean swimming and how as I swim over the swells, I lose sight of the shoreline and I’m quite alone and remote – lost at sea for a moment. That feeling when I the shoreline rolls back into view is odd…all I feared, felt guilty about, loved, and toiled over are there and somehow provide terra firma. I guess I am trying to embrace the past and my failures. Not a popular stance with some people…many of us wish the other would not only forget the past, but somehow ignore it and extract it from our ‘essence.’ It can be done, but it is through tenderness, not amputation.
Disguised as ropes and chains.
I slip through fields I’ve passed
My companions gone their separate ways
Like things not made of things that last
I remember feeling trapped and desperate in some relationships. I remember wanting to stay but being cast out. I was thinking about Sandy probably…and my good friends. Things not made of things that last…it’s hard to assess the materials of the present; things come and go. Parts remain, others disappear. I’m musing here.
I wander in soliloquy
Inspired by you and ours
No matter how complex the journey
I find you through Archimedian stars.
Soliloquy is an oration to oneself…not heard by others; that’s how I mean it. Hamlet engaged in frequent soliloquy. Idiot. Inspired by you and ours is who was in the present at the time and “ours” is family and friends and companions past. Life is a journey…at that time, I was bent on those sardonic Aerosmith words. Archimedes was a great navigator and postulated (I think) that there was a central point of revolution (the sun). I remember hearing a professor call something an Archimedean point. I thought predestination was limited…we have a pre-established smattering of stars, we have choice in how we connect them and who we end up with. I guess in predestination, we are always free to make mistakes, but we end up at the same place eventually. The “you” that I searched for was a ruse, a myth. What I seek, is an “us”…. And by fate, she connects the patterns the same way and here “she” and “I” are…beholding an “us.”
We are the Archimedean point…one is really two, is really One.
It Just Hurts (7/27/05)
Something cold to drink,
something like ether to reflect on.
Across the vast sea of hope and possibility,
The bounty and debris of shipwrecks
Drift in and out of contact
Here and gone, here and gone.
In the views interceded by ocean swells
He walked out into the waves
And the wind swarmed in to keep her company
A figure poised with grace in the sand.
The moon was running up from below the horizon
Rushing to cast light from the east.
And as the sun set in the west,
Their breathing slowed
Unfelt, inaudible over the intertidal.
Not even did the ocean understand.
The spirits on the dunes
Watched over the two silhouettes
Looking out at an empty ocean
We're different now, but "different" isn’t gone.
Ignoring the Breeze of a Promise (1/21/06)
I turn my face into the pillow
And shield your light
In it, tonight, I find only darkness
The phone rings,
And you seem only feet away
Oh if you were,
Only the thin skin of our lips
Would keep us apart
We are flightless in a gilded cage
The latch was forgotten
By the metal forge
A cruel unintentional mistake
Every once in a while
We share the cell
And a kiss teases us
With freedom
Children dance around us
In years not yet counted
They will forget today,
Today, when we parted
And they revved their toy cars
In a patch of sunlight on the carpet
And what was a lifetime to them
Was only moments ago for us
And in a moment, you were long gone
There is a brick office building abutting a lot
Where a barn once stood in the woods
We kissed there,
We defended there,
I will never forget the never-endedness
Of you.
I’ve seen memories come back to haunt me
I’ve aged and cried the same story
Again and again – nothing changes
Except the cast of characters
I am the longest running show
In the Little Theater of life
You will never come through that door
On your own accord
And throw your arms around me
And the seasons will come and go
As our spirits atrophy in the cast iron
Prison of “…love you a lot, but not enough…”
I would take a bullet for you
Even when you anger me.
I hope it only glances me
Because I want to live another day
To feel you, be it heart break or home.
Poem fragment 2 (2/15/06)
If these clouds would only clear
A tear
When loving you made no sense
An obsidian sky
Love comes in from horizon
In finding nothing
I love you, I love you, I love you
Why is it that we create,
There is a rhythm in life and we bend around the syncopation
The sunrises like a new promise,
Full of hope
A melody and we pick the sequence of notes
Love doesn’t fail
It always leads us by the hand
Faster and faster into the night
And we let it slip through our fingers
And watch it run ahead, disappearing in the darkness,
Leaving us itinerant under an obsidian sky
poem fragment 1
Against a slope before the rivers
And you came to me
In fragments of mist
Dew arriving for an evening sit
And as you landed gently
On my eyes,
The light shimmered
Collecting
on a hill
In the mist
As an orb gently landed.
Visitation
My Brown Eyed Girl
I scan the storm clouds from the dock
While you sail the surly sea
Is there time to think of me?
Waiting in the winds and rain
Enduring time and wincing pain
Enter Poet
The paint is worn, the iron rusts
The planks are laden with salt
The barnacles burry the pitted wood
Still my love exalts
And I wonder who your captain is
Who steers the ship for you
Who navigates the stars
And who will see you through
Our love is like the waves
Always heaping upon the sands
Thrashing, churning, and sifting
Time hewn by loves strong hands
And in those brown eyes the sun breaks through
And illuminates your route
Is your ship coming home
Or have you just journeyed out?
JUNE 3, 2005 Balcony Musings
And so the bottle opener from the Bahamas easily opened the bottle of Red Stripe from Jamaica. There begins the longest 50 minutes in history. The bright star or planet, whatever the fuck I’m told it could be, just edged past the corner of the building into my view. Twenty thousand lightening bugs and one BP gas station parking lot away was the only single flashing piece of modern technology in the town of Jefferson. The brights from that car, even that far away, actually allowed me to read on my beer bottle, “For over 75 years Red Stripe has embodied the spirit, rhythm and pulse of Jamaica and its people.” Only now do I read by lamp light, that it was imported by Guinness USA in Stamford, CT. Jamaican beer, imported by an Irish brewing company with an office in Connecticut. But see, there is no irony in that. Not a slippin drop.
I honestly had no frigging idea why I was out on the deck tonight. In fact, I don’t know how I even got into this walk out level basement rental on 25 elevated acres over the Potomac. Oh, well it wasn’t my deck, it was that of one of the other wayward souls on Marl Lu ridge. I was just enjoying the weather from a venue 50 feet higher. Two divorces, four pregnancies, a half a dozen graduations, and 3 Red Stripes down the dusty road of “halfway their,” and I’m figuring, who in the hell owns this computer I’m typing own. Like a wriggley’s spearmint gum wrapper, or one of those aluminum beer tabs later, I’m trying to figure since when is Bill Gates solely the reason for my ability to put ridiculous fucking thoughts down into binary coding. And why are plastic beer bottles available to m? And I’m not talking about the now, hell if YOU are reading this, I’m making money – nothing ridiculous about that. Or I’m dead.
Hm, it’s just odd how it all comes together into a thousand pieces. The guy who invented number 2 pencil lead is mindlessly poking at his mashed potatoes with his chin resigned into the palm of his hand. What did I do wrong? Nobody carries a pencil anymore.
Note to Self
Our heart rates slow and some of us want to disappear into the woodlands for a spell – where we can write or paint or compose a masterpiece without the interruptions of so many pragmatic options. But a long spell turns out to be only a punctuated series of moments – minutes and hours where we create our masterpieces. I would love to just hide out for a month and write.
Rose Petal Rejects
Constrained by modesty, you resist too much fascination with your own observations…that is the impetus for the ionic bond of human nature - it is this gentle downplay of ego, that enables us to discover within another that which fascinates us about ourselves. Self love, projected outward holistically and purely toward others is just love. And in the musical cross-stitches of projected love, two chords will find harmony in the fabric of life.
You let go a myriad qualities in whatever your medium of choice…in numbers inversely proportional to the odds that each will meet and intertwine with those of another. Being ALL of you is far more important than being only those parts that mirror the important parts of another. People will fail to see you as a composite and will focus in on small arcs of light, and not the illumination. But soon, in this new found proximity, the truth of ALL of you is revealed. And the other admits, “I didn’t expect this when I saw your beacon in the dark…I didn’t sign up for ALL of you…” and they draw up their anchors and drift on…
You quietly relinquish to being alone (you’ve failed at doing this at least a hundred times). You realize that being alone is ideal to being an attentive witness to the marvels of nature and mankind and yet it brings this uncontrollable desire to share it with someone. In the desperation of sharing, you’ve missed many a sunsets moments, looking through the lens of a camera rather than your own eyes. You’re learning to record beauty in your mind and be happy with that. Yet as much as you fail to accept being alone, you also fail to find that someone with whom to share in the mutual aloneness of experiencing the magic. Okay, that’s confusing. Frustrating.
Your companions have little tolerance and patience for your proclivity to stop and spend 15 minutes staring silently at a lit up water fountain springing up from a lake at night or slide away into the soliloquy of sunset. But you love to capture it and spin it with belletristic prose and dose it back to them in writing…and some people are happy reading your accounts more than they are to join you in the appreciation.
The ad reads, “person seeking alter ego embodied in another.” Relationship objective: stop the writing and solitary art and just experience… would the discovery of your alter ego make each of you superfluous? Don’t think so. No, you think, strangely enough, that each of you would seek the gentle deviations within the other and aspire to understand those. This is the alter ego seeking to free itself, of itself. Hm, perhaps the ultimate romance may be the separation of the self from seeking itself – romance of this kind engages the discovery of new paths within the strikingly similar world of another.
A “recluse,” a shut in. This doesn’t prevent you from being discovered – in fact, it’s those perfect imperfections of being a recluse that seep through the cracks in the foundation to find another. An objective is to pay attention to detail…look for the glowing fissures within nature and mankind, for there awaits your companion. Serendipity is a fortune we create for ourselves…God leaves us with just enough latitude to discover miracles. But calls us in to be sure we give thanks and the most thankful find the most unexpected fortune.
coming home
Interrupted life.
Having you, protects me from my own web.
Return to me, as you thaw,
Weathering away to smooth edges.
We are at the center, of this expansive disk,
Glimmering prism,
And the line we follow is just a circle
Contained at some distance from the edge.
Stop, wait for me,
let’s turn and head for the horizon of
Incorporated memories…
That’s what coming home to you is like.
Pale ashes accumulated behind the magnesium smoke,
of discarded memories bending in relinquishment,
Behind the afterglow of the spark,
as it burns down the shaft of time.
Of talus and terminus.
When the last ember sleeps, the stars are free at last
To provide all the light, engulfing the past
That is what coming home to you is like.
Traveling anywhere,
Is just a fancy of the earth below my feet.
Go back and be the mystery you were.
Where your chrome softens into pastel.
I’ve seen the reasons I miss you.
A broken moment collapses into eternity.
The world is peering over my shoulders and it makes me nervous.
As I trace a line along the coast from here to anywhere.
I am
I may chase my losses around with a magnifying lens
Trying to figure out what went wrong.
I wonder what went right,
I’m sure it was nothing that I had anything to do with.
I thank god for the tenacity to create
It is not a process, it is the result.
People, get up and face the light
Feel the warmth, let yourself go and bless me, bless us
Who you are is who is truly loved, what is truth?
What is truth?
It is the highlights at the end of the suns ray before it touches the ocean.
I’d rather be lost in your heart then
Discovered in the sureness of wealth.
I need peace.
“You’ll never stop me,” he screamed as he ran into the night,
Faster than the darkness could take.
The silly envelope that cannot close down the acceleration of me toward you
Let me love you to the point of being unreasonable
Do not question.
In a tender yet torrid way
I’ve seen love creep like some shadow
Running from the sun
And overtaking each and every being.
Scanning eyes – moving over the world
They talked and I watched their eyes.
I’m supposed to be with you
As sure as I’m recognized by a stranger
Befriended by an acquaintance
And betrayed by a friend.
Betrothed by a soulmate.
I will be the one – the candle flame,
The world, the cabin walls.
Golden glow, shadowy glower
Scuffling feet over the wooden floor
At some chalet in a wanna be alp.
I’m a ….hm.
The Fall
The chatter of leaves As they blow over the trail
This is the Fall of my life.
Every breath shivered
and twirled on the air,
Fogging the glass piece
Through which I stare
At lions at play
in the depths of my soul,
fierce and gentle
On other ethereal fields.
Sunrays softened on the curves of your hair.
And now stars on their nightly procession
Clatter like leaves
Across my path,
They will all join the Fall.
A godawful astronomy lesson
To feel a tear roll back
I never saw you, but I knew you were there
Obscured by the fog of a bad day,
Engulfed by the sun
A sailors moon
Hearing nothing, never sounded so bad.
Darkness, giving up, are you there?
If so, leave me alone…
I’ll find you later, it’s better that way.
Falling star, beautiful as it burns up in the atmosphere,
maybe making it to earth, or just becoming ether.
That last falling light, disappeared, plummeting into the ocean of your soul.
And exactly how many stars fill your heart?
Was it gravity, Failure to fly that put them there?
Or a homecoming for the those that have never been home?
Arranged, placed gently in the heavens by the angels
Shuffling with the music of God’s solar winds
The waters rippled
Thrown silken blanket
Catching the stars
Reflecting in dew drops.
(Poem goes no where, I need an extension, I have anthrax—-)
Suspended in their infinite depth
The light reaches us lots of years after the flame ignites
And we smile and muse at these tardy dispatches.
Odd, that only long after we are gone from this world
Is the moment of our acknowledgement reciprocated,
reaching the void where the since-extinguished star once was.
So this comedy of mistimed love affair continues with the heavens
We, exchanging smiles with a face we know is gone from existence
The conundrum of returning to a sender who is no longer there.
And here by the fire
In this sandy pit
I listen to the waves run to the shore
Tattling tales from far out on the ocean
Who’s great arc bends the seawater over the distance
Around the horizon
Where whispers from distant shores are heard in our imagination
Lost at a sea,
The Transcontinental chasm of misshapen, asynchronous anecdotes.
And you and I are mired in this mud ball
A human conglomerate
Spinning around one star
while so many others beckon from beyond
And out of nowhere, I love you
Illuminates, the rise and fall and rise and fall
of the sun light
Like the end of an intermission.
The sun sets, as the encore begins
The audience of stars rise, clapping not loudly
Yet their applause flickers in the distance
As my light plummets into the western ocean of you soul
Yours rises majestic in the east
And for a brief moment,
The runner from the dusk sun is connected
To the glow of dawn
The gap lessens and we don smiles
Not for the fathomless distances of interstellar space
But for our closest star,
a mere 93 million miles
We are as close as close can be
Like the bespeckled heavens
We make patterns, we forget them in the day,
until the darkness comes
Prey Animals (12/20/06 coming home from Australia)
In the long field, the creature stood –
adorned in a bristling mahogany coat,
dusted with honey and java.
I could only stand their swaying
imperceptibly on the dying grass.
From his flanks, a slight swirl of steam
lifted into the winter air and
without a note, disappeared into the heavy sky.
How inconsequential his state,
than the legacy of his stance.
How endless was the moment
that only 20 paces
separated us in time and species.
Yet connected, not understood.
How inconsequential my stance…
Was he dreaming what I was?
Still as the blades of grass poking through the frost,
he stood,
and I followed the contours across steep pasterns,
climbing strong foreleg,
rolling over the withers
and then across to the only sign of life
flickering in the fields that dusk.
No stone could have rippled the source of his long lashes,
the quiet waters of his eyes -
These almond pools with a shiny sliver on black,
A gold shard that reflected off a terracotta sun,
somewhere melting over the bush country of another continent.
If it were not for the fury in my heart,
I’d not have heard a pin drop into the Indian Ocean
We stared endless not in time, but in depth.
And it was so quiet, I could hear the hissing of the grasses, \
He could hear the rushing of my own blood.
But Neither of us stirred as we moved,
the missing words from this monumental sentence
transcended the message.
It was a moments on it’s way out
From the time it arrived.
And no sooner had I reached out my hand,
Then he was gone.
With only that familiar cadence –
Thundering across the pasture.
And my mortality and limitations
Lunged upon me
Ripping the subconscious from the bone
Gnawing on the flesh of simply being human.
When talking of the spirit of a man and horse
We are all prey animals.
And so we run.
Promise to be Safe (the old boat prose)
Promise to be safe
Ponder with you heart
Breathe deeply and fill your eyes
Be clarity in the sands
Venture with your mind into the white caps
An old remembrance of a boat, adorned with palm fronds and dusted with fine white sand
Resting like a native islander, who froze in mid-sleep while catching his breath
Curls of sun-bleached blue paint barely clings to the hull.
The gunwales pitted by caked sea salt and crumbling barnacles
And in the foreground, the dead keel lying in state held up by two saw horses,
On top, a bucket of shellac lying on its side, its contents spilled and dried
with a crusty brush glued to the lip - unable to roll
Nothing moves in the sea breeze, except a few ribbons of shredded gray canvas
Caught on the ragged edges of sprung planks and tips of rusting nails.
The pouring moan of the tide harmonizes
with the fine rustling grass skirt in the breeze just over the berm.
The deposited waves rush back to the sea
tumbling shell fragments, sea glass and paint chips like a tiny maraca
The thick mingling smells of palm husks, sea grass, and salt condenses in matted locks of her hair – which waltzes impersonally with the ripped canvas – flapping like the torn tips of an unwilling pirates pantaloons.
Even as every wave lifts and hoists a piece of the weathered wood out to sea,
the sand laden slumbering mass never reminds her of anything but
bright white sails catching the wind,
the glistening blue bow cutting through the water with a hiss
the lively vessels wake reflecting a burning orange sun
melting on a curved blue horizon
Free to be on its own on the endless ocean – beginning only on this beach.
Ironically, unable to renew itself
This sage of a sail boat is a modern statement to a pair of displaced romantics
For now, parted by the ocean.
Unable to lose each other along the way,
Their love, is like this boat.
Friday, November 25, 2011
Alone
I create the perfect pose,
I’ll sew a bounty of unheard prose.
So proud of my cups,
so magnificent
Ornate, but filled with discontent.
We look for toads
and kettle bearers
and the quenching kiss of wayfarers,
Who catch the drops
of saccharin rain
In hand formed vessels thrown in pain.
Love does not pour from Grecian urns
But is the absence in what we believe,
Embrace all you have
and are able to give
than all you’d hope to receive.
So Close (song me and the Boxcartel are working on)
So Close
It won’t be that much longer then
Just another lost day as dusk roles in
And the sun exhales long shadows
From a heart red far horizon.
I know getting too close to anyone
Is something you could not bear
But I’d not be here alone writing this song
Were it not for the company of your being there.
(refrain)
Because being close to you,
is the furthest thing on my mind…
and getting ahead of myself (with you)
just leaves us farther behind.
I’ve watched the endless pageantry
From the curbside like a child
These rock-a-by days as I drift off to sleep
Tracing the softening curves of your smile.
It’s way too close to a memory
Too close to a once-upon a lifetime chance
You’ll both forever hear the music,
But never again get so close…
close enough to dance.
(bridge/ refrain)
I never thought I’d get this far
was the furthest thing on my mind…
When she left, I was sure it was me
Being left behind.
And the buildings press against the streets
Etched through New York City
When the sky goes cobalt blue
and your eyes go soft as the stars peak through,
That’s as close as I’ll need to get
That’s close enough to feel you.
Just promise to keep your distance
From the hopes you’ve left behind
And love within in yourself,
What another lover seeks to find.
(Refrain)
Wednesday, November 23, 2011
Those Who Cannot Trust - Who Fear Love
And through the obsidian blackness – an occasional beam of light threads its way through the trunks to meet our wincing eyes. Somewhere the glint of that reflection is seen by another… and then lost.
The torch you carry does not provide the light by which you search, but by which you are found. If you keep it glowing – whether fueled by the laughter of your children or the love of your family – yours will catch the glint in the eyes of another.
May you find happiness in giving thanks for all you’ve received.
Friday, November 18, 2011
Infinite Paths, But One Way to Go
There are infinite paths, all of which are only crossing briefly at a point. It is best to make each encounter count, each breath last, but always stay on your path.
Theory of Creation
Why do we sometimes lose focus on those we care about, and obsess with the reasons why others don’t care about us. When process overcomes reason, when gentle gradations become black and white, when you no longer value HOW you do something because WHAT you do cannot be valued by others…you have become a machine. We as humans are not manufactured, we are created…so it is our nature to create, everything around us…good or bad. Please, go back and find the inner source of your creativity, and you will find the oneness of “how” and “what.” You cannot produce if you cannot care for yourself. You have no greater value than that unto yourself…create where it is you choose to go, and your path will appear for all to follow.
Sunday, November 13, 2011
Autumn Left a Note
She mounted the breeze
And shook the trees
Bringing our love to its knees.
“I’m not jaded,
Please look at me,
Look deeply and say goodbye,”
She rustles the rust from the waving limbs,
“…Here’s your beloved azurite sky.”
It’s raining saffron and crimson leaves
As Autumn throws on her coat
She’s gone again,
And all I have
Are the tears she left on this note.
Veterans Day 2011
Sadly, half as many more U.S. servicemen and women were killed on our own soil during the Civil War as were killed in World War II. I am certain in retrospect that not one loss of a single life in any war effected a change that wasn’t in some way deeply regretted. This regret ripples and amplifies through time. With little heed to it’s lesson. The biggest conflict in world history is that which teeters on the thin edge of our individual consciousness…balancing between what is in our hearts and minds and the power of the masses armed with bullets and bayonets … It is the political ideology of winning that makes the loss of life most easily accepted - we will forever lose the war - so long as a battle is won.
Belletristic Bellicose
The following poem is inspired by FB friend Aaron Cook (a brilliant and witty thinker and writer) who posted this picture and caption…
“Hand,foot-less man accepts fate, slowly descends into Hell….I used to know a bellicose man that, when laughing, sounded like he was downing, choking or gargling keys from an old “Oliver” typewriter. Each is tone-spicific. Whith enough typewriters and strident type-set vomitus, I’ll write the great American novel. It’s like reading tea leaves. But I say too much again…. Now I will go light a candle to Mr. Mani-Pedi.”
As with many things I’ve written, I took it a bit further in “Belletristic Bellicose”
I used to know a bellicose man
Who each day fought for a line
That led to the sputum
Of an American Novel
Gagging,
“Once upon a time.”
His pen slashed at sub-consciousness
Enter sanguine patriot
Sinew torn and bleeding ink,
Till all but exsanguinate
His body stripped of ebullience
Yet all the more cantankerous
The mind ascends the spoils of
Men
In a porridge of type-set vomitus
A tempest blows from the open novel
of a periphrastic angry man
That snuffs the lantern at Dante’s door
Without lips
or a foot or a hand.