Time Bitten Memories

Rhododendron and fresh mown zoysia grass,
Fragrant halos that come undone,
Fumes of creosote oozing from poles
Sweating tar under a scorching sun.

Sap on sodden pine needles
Glow wistfully like amber tears
That fall through vaporous piles of leaves
Decaying beneath layers of years.  

Oil stained sand behind a gas station,
Dew soaked chat on the tracks,
Draining colors of autumnal dusk
Into after bedtime black.

Solar apparitions in purling glass
Diffuse through Venetian curtains,
Star chip white bespeckles the night
Where no warmth of color is certain.

Splinters of hope and anguish
Peel like paint off the ironwood transom
Of my family’s boat, set low in the water,
While our spirits hold fast to the stanchions.

Our mother’s love playfully chases us
Through the biting measures of time,
Silhouettes run and ripple down rows
Of linen memories that dry on the line.

Gadaffi, Diamond, and Me in the Basement

Neil Diamond can save the world…woke up this morning from a dream in which Muammar Muhammad al-Gaddafi is living in my childhood home basement. It is a finished basement, with a low ceiling, and it smells like the faint flatulence of cinder block.   So, Muammar, he sits there silently for days on a metal folding chair besides a vinyl covered card table with some bottles of water, Pez, and some old fashion donuts on a paper plate.  He is mostly still, looking up once in a while to reflect on something distantly beyond the corner of the basement and then he looks down to jot some notes on a scratch pad.  I’ve hesitated some tries, but I cannot engage him. One day, a song begins to play on the radio – but the acoustics in the basement are clear like I was hearing it in my head; I start looking at him (non-amorously) and I start to sing, “…hhhands - touching hands —- reaching out—-  touching me, tuh-ching YOU…” and then he stirs and turns his head to look at me, at first like an old steel shed riding mower, his engine sputters and then he kicks over and he begins to mouth the words meekly escalating into full bravado, “Sweet Caroline, DAH DAH DAH, good times never seemed so go, SO GOOD - SO GOOD - SO GOOD…I feel inclined….DAH DAH DAH…” and he speaks over the song, “I remember LISTENING to this when I was MUCH YOUNGER…!”

The Genie is out of the bottle, I recommend we start blasting “Sweet Caroline” over the war torn regions of the world - where rickety old tyrants and despots can listen and reflect and turn over like old riding mowers…. (HEY, I SAID IT WAS A DREAM!!)

Harvest (in progress)

It was the Autumn of our lives
A breath, a breeze, a voice
Aging planks, abandoned ploughs,
Reaps options,
and sews a choice

And so the logic is stressed
As one and one yields one.
Whether we stroll
or trudge in from the cold
We arrive bountiful in a boundless home.

In a test of trust, is a trace of rust
trailing tears down a face of steel
With the season at low
I waited for snow
Pacing wish trails through a fallow field.

For a kiss becomes the fabric
Held together by seams of faith
When Winter is done
The foxes will run
Softly in vernal equinox landscapes.

The earth turns in a moment beneath us
While the sparrow flies sweetly alone
Past the larks
And into our hearts
Now empty where our crops had grown.

We’ll gently cast seeds along furrows
Through summer warmed soils at sunset
Safe in the ground
To emerge with a sound
Of a choir that brings in our harvest.

Lovely Dreaming Foxes

We agreed at 3am on this one thing…we were silently pondering in the darkness; soul kisses and caress cast sparks around us like embers flicked from the flames, soft floating down in the blackness, like crying stars or what could be the eyes of lovely foxes falling asleep in the forest.  She says what I am thinking, she always does this, “I love you, isn’t enough as an expression, to convey what is going on inside me."

Lying there exposed below the weight of the cosmos, I close my eyes, imagining my curled up dreaming foxes, when she appears; clarity in crisp blue jeans, poised with hips sweeping up imaginings from the forest floor.  My lover is standing on a cold brick sidewalk of a city affixed firmly to the soles of her black suede boots, as if the earth would fall out from beneath us if I were to lift her up.  Strokes of mahogany hair, with striations of brushed brass.  Her eyes seek the depths of mine making me a mystery to even myself, and they were like the hematite pupils of lions looking out from holes in the foliage of a verdant jungle. Our gaze meets gently, and then rips open the promise of time, expelling a breeze, and little parachutes of hope float off like soft threads from dandelion blooms. 

Where does our love go today my dear?  Oh, how she stood there in the frozen sparkle of air while her warm, moist breath slowly spiraled out and suspended around her lips. I could feel the spires of frost that nearly had moments on her tongue before they melt in that mouth. I love her so much, that my imagination cries for a voice – beating the chest of eternity for just a shaved second of time before it disappears into the clouds of passion.  I wanted to just walk up and inhale that mist – arriving on a voice that came on the crest of sigh after sigh…  I followed the contours of her hips, she spun around toward me and the moment flashed and froze – like a spirit swallowed up by the darkness.

Bone gripping, I shake with awareness, its presence is lulled from the shadows, sucking the dampness from our skin, leaving us brittle and shivering…the presence of another is called for.  Cold makes us lovers, narrowing that space through presses…bodies fall into the sheets…warmth from sun flees, and our bodies are drawn together.

Trails of life in the crystal powder, white nights, desert, colors seen in the moonlight, tree limbs, dendrites encased in blue crystal immortalize.

The Messenger

I slip an arrow from the quiver
Oh last messenger please deliver,
This note I’ve written from my heart
And without which, I’m only part  “
I licked the feathers, drew the bow
Closed my eyes and let it go.
I hear the fibers resonate
A gentle sound for such a fate
Point, then shaft, then feathers fly
A line of hope across the sky
I open my eyes but lose its sight
A glowing arrow, in waning light
Wishing all its time aloft
I’m unaware the note slips off
Falling gently through the air
It softly finds an archer standing there
Drawing arrow and preening feather
She pauses and begins to read the letter
A kiss of words to hush the shiver 
Returning her arrow to its quiver.
In her heart, she bears the note
While my heart longs for what it wrote
Oh messenger please hear my prayer
Return my note with an archers care.

Sunrise in Infinite Moments

Two lives pirouette in a pristine moment
Slipping by the sentries of time
If all were dark, one star, one spark
Would inspire their hopes to align.
 
A quarter moon floats in the northern lights
So many years ago
Lighting her path for a wayfarer
But not this body, as so.
 
His pen hastens echoes in silence
And for her, no words, no need
His every sentence a hour, asks
Why sooner, can’t it be?
 
Souls spinning dreams at their nexus
Hearts and minds that do not forget
The sound of a voice calling them home
tis mute, softly desperate.
 
Facing paths of thorns, fire, and rock
Mountains along the way
Gathering forever to fill the void
Of an instant held at bay.
 
Her eyes are liquid constellations
His words are steps, they start to climb
Steady and knowing, like diamonds and garnets
To forever remember this time.
 
The sunrise pulls them in weightless,
Free, and one, in the other’s presence
Her eyes fill the void of a lifetime
In Three minutes, and thirty nine seconds
 
(a collaboration!)

Blowing Bubbles

Not every memory is worthy of rescue
Each an iridescent bubble,
Bobbled on the breeze of time
Landing gently on a finger tip
A nostalgic prismatic sphere
caressed by spires of starlight
but no hero is so sweet
as to save every memory.
No memory so worthy
That it will not at some point
Release its contents
With a muted pop…
So, when our dreams are just too tired to come true,
We have to wake up
And start blowing some more bubbles.

In the Littoral Zone

Precious chance for a lonely thought,
Loose, slip-fades sinuously free
A melodious stream of nostalgic mist
Off an Arabica sea.
 
Curiously exhaled from dissonance
In an amber lit café.
He imagines himself a sojourner,
A wayfarer without a way.
 
Long shore drift en echelon
Long minutes march by metronome
Long is the spellbound beachcomber
For an island all his own.
 
Long is the dream of an inland man
Lost to his seaside girl.
Diver down where the standard waves
Swimming dizzy for a polished pearl
 
Light from her eyes plays on sea glass chips
Tumbled in the curling waves
That crest and break on a beach that waits
for a wish he once had made.
 
The surf is heard like a lingering kiss
breathing ripples on the smoothening sand
And just as the whisper and simmering fades,
Another promise swells, tumbles, and lands.
 
The ocean is love running breathless,
In a race between the moon and the sun,
Causing tides to surge across the poignant curve
Of an incandescent blue horizon
 
A tranquil star contracts and bursts
In pulsing neon spires
There’s forever a star expiring
While life glows like embers in the fire.
 
If this writer could paint, it would be a portrait
of the empty space next to him.
Awaiting the image of a seagoing girl
Dancing waves on a canvas of ocean.

Perth, Australia

I pressed firmly into my seat, as the massive jet slipped gravity.  At 300 kilometers per hour, the runway in Melbourne fell away, music already in my ears, companionless as usual.  We banked hard to the west, rising above the smoke of widespread wildfires, breaking through into cascades of sunlight drenching flowers of billowy clouds.  I have no expectations – I’ve landed in LA, San Diego, San Francisco dozens of times – this was just Western Australia. Perth.

I inspected the Australian skies through the jet window – imaging your companionship.  And when we landed and disembarked, I could almost sense your anticipation and figure moving behind me – I turned out of the jet way, and you overtook me from like a wave making a break for the beach.  Awakened and anxious to get out into the streets, I became thirsty, but no drink would quench it.

The breezes eddied behind passing cars, stirring some fallen eucalyptus leaves that softened under my soles.  Limbs of willow trees, wagged and formed breathing shadows of you in my path.  I can smell your hair and the perfume lingering on your shoulders, but I can’t see you. 

One ticket to Fremantle – a few steps off the platform, I’m sitting on fiberglass seats staring out a thick plastic window – with little stress fissures in it that channel the sunlight into scintillating whiskers; the train lurches and we are off to the port city, Freo.  I imagine our hands touching, grasping the steel pole as we sway through turns in the track.  I smile secretly with closed lips, and close my eyes – lifting my head to feel the kiss of my companion. 

I reach for you as we enter a maze of open streets – and you slip through my fingers.  I’m disappearing into passages between colonial buildings, coming out onto terraced patios, empty handed but filled with a vision of red, and white, and yellow peonies in dashed rows of tidy flower boxes.  Before me is a single drink on a black wrought iron table, glistening beads rolling down uncontrollably as the seaside air condenses on the cold glass.  I imagine your soft visage and mane, softly quivering in a breeze amidst alfresco cafés.

The bustling marketplace is filled with new faces and lively music and curios and crafts in busy blends of yet unnamed colors.  Faces are moist with a light sweat, smiling – crowds of companions, sparked and animated, with embraced arms and sacks of mutual adored memories in progress.

I turn to my missing companion – a soft face browned by the love of sunlight, lips moist and full of life that move in to fill my mouth with the quenching sensation of hope.  Her identity eludes me, but she drifts freely before my eyes, plays symphonies in my ears, and we sway through time in the exchange of our breaths. Each beautiful epiphany, electric experience, is the same bright star by which we both navigate home to a kiss.

I dreamed of our time together on the flight home to the eastern seaboard.  And when I walked out of the jet way, I was clinging tight to her memory. I was no longer thirsty.  I thought to myself, I only know she gone, when I cannot turn to her to say hello; and I mostly miss her if she isn’t here to kiss me goodbye.  My companion wasn’t missing – she was waiting.

Lines in the Sand

Sleepy words awaken
Like a stirred morning child,
Wincing through lashes at clarity
Betwixt dreams and noises outside.
 
They skip through their days
Slipping from grasp
Of convention, imagination,
Institution, alas
 
Like clay, paper, and notes
They become idle matter for craft
Until love cast the canvas
The artists, at last
 
As sketches and phrases
Lift illusion from pages
They carve blocks of hope,
Soulful forms, tall and ageless
 
Loves art, once feared
Had slipped through their hands
Appears simple and golden
Soft lines in the Sand

Strange Numb World

Like a once broken promise, she came to me
Out of my past, across forever seas
casting her truth into the furrows of dreams
Sewing intimate seeds that hushed the screams
 
And unsolved riddles of throttling fear
That one day next, 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.

Seasoning

If silence and solitude were to have weight
they’d account for these hills, held fast in place.
Which draw a chill from this glaucous sky,
into fleeting cold winds, pulling tears from my eyes.
 
Chimney smoke mingles above the roof tops,
and can be smelled across empty playground lots.
A stolid chill dons a winters dusk shroud,
as the sun slips away behind dull distant clouds.
 
As they stew over secret recipes
These families are conjuring remedies
which season more deeply in winters love
so thicker runs the courses of blood.

Bare tree limbs reach up as dead hands on a clock.
Near a merry-go-round, hunkered down like bedrock.
Ruts from the rails of a Radio Flyer
Trail a lone child’s footprints, both frozen in mire.
 
As I shiver alone in my questioning state
Unsecured and open swings a gait.
From unseen origins they fall from the sky,
these snowflakes that soften with tears in my eyes.
 
I’m not sure if ever, or otherwise when
our journeys will deliver us convergent friends.
But the lessons we harvest from each seasons end
Make for savory spices when the next one begins.

Love

It doesn’t fail

It always leads us by the hand

Faster and faster pinching into the folds of 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

Off Urban Rap

I’m not drunk, maybe besotted, maundering, inebriate savant but ne’er  vapid.
I’m loquacious, beset on periphrasis, riddled with circumlocution, and bullets from the execution.
A scribbler of belletristic prose, with a dent on my nose.  I’m a fallen saint.  I’m like peeling paint. 
You wanna paint me over and over again. 
Trouble on your mind, sweetly unkind, tiny little truffles melting in the corners of your mind. 
Did I say truffles, I mean trifles.  I’m getting pulled for a speeding profile,
writing while intoxicated – can’t type straight, but my thirst is sated.  
Is this what you want, in your checkered restaurant – serving up Hume and Descartes
with a side of Kant. 
Knit wit, purl two – back to bed, pillow filled with glue for my sodden head…
never took a sip, but I drank too much, not a drop of booze – on this Double Dutch Bus. 
I’m perfectly sober – I said it over and over, but you keep painting me and you won’t have another.  Because I’m easy to see, but you’re hard on me, the more you see through, it’s your own reflection,
I’m invisible to you. 
I’m not hear for dating, or mental masturbating, it’s just self-medication, it’s life we’re debating. 
Don’t get so berated, drink my words, get sedated – be a friend, kiss a friend, it’s not overrated.
Philosophize, look in my eyes – close your thighs, I’m not like other guys – it’s gnats and flies. 
I can empathize – looking into your eyes I see, you understand, I’ll go drinking…
sand pouring through your thirsty hands.

Several Friends Stopped By...

Several Friends stopped by in my dark hour. There I was…in the hole:
Apathy – looks down into the hole, with those big blue eyes to ensure me everything would be just fine…, she shrugs, and she wanders off.
Sympathy arrives – peers over the edge, eyes red and puffy – and issues quivering words of lament…sniffles and withdraws - he’s gone
Charity – shouts down that things could be worse, suggests my donation would help, so I toss up the change I find deep in my pockets
Empathy – stares over the hole anxiously - the spreads a broad smile and jumps right in with me!
Enlightenment – shakes his head smugly and throws down a flashlight so I could better see my troubles…just lots of dirt…the batteries die
And after some welcome solitude, Free-Will shows up…silently lowers down a thin and feeble string with a note that reads simply… “YOU CAN FLY”  

And so I did.  And as I looked down from above to scan the terrain, and saw holes everywhere.
So, I started cutting strands of string…and writing notes… Here’s one for you…

Winding To a Point

A child stooped low and picked up a stone
About yay big, with a rounded edge
He could find no reason to put it in his pocket
So he jumped to his feet instead.
 
The boy’s eyes narrowed as he thought of this stone
About yay big, with a soft smooth face
He could find no reason to keep it in his hand
So drew back his arm and aimed.
 
His thumb and forefinger curled around the stone
About yay big, and obsidian black
He could find no reason to wait any longer
And his arm sprung like a steel trap.
 
The youth caught his balance as on went the stone
About yay big, with a glistening sheen
It skipped once, twice, and it lost momentum
Disappearing in the ripples of the stream.
 
So are the thoughts of aging men
Holding dreams in the palms of their hands
They cast their stones along the surface of time
And spend their lives trying to find them again.

Flesh

Earth pulls up its collar as the sun sets
All things cooling, creak,
the most quiet is flesh.
 
Pouring life through the waist of leaded glass,
Countless grains two souls, in the talus
As fabrics glide, fiber and mesh
Warmth and velvet
The most soft is flesh
 
Peeling life, the mist from the rind
Freed and immortal, sprays silent and fine
Sweet nostalgia, upon palette, breaths
Fueled by scent
The most fragrant is flesh
 
A grape on a vine, in the rain, dew, and brine
Sea mist, on the vineyards, a portrait of time
My words are as fleeting, as love is endless
As lost as Latin
The most seen is flesh
 
You elude the patter, of fingers on keys
Uncloaking the letters shows a poets disease
Swirling in air, our winter breaths
Warmed by our mouths
The most tasted is flesh
 
Of all the senses, most fathomless
Least endeared,
You are my “now”
My forever
My flesh

Byzantine Kiss

Her whispers writhe upward, warming my lips
Chased gently by thoughts, and fingertips
Which pulse over keys, sewing words onto fields
Of love thirsty parchment, tenderly peeled
From shavings off banyan trees, twisted in time
Woven from tangles of roots and vines
That glimmer and glide on the twirls of her hair
That coil around dreams as they swirl in the air
And reciprocate whispers that blend into sighs
Reflecting like moonlight in opening eyes. 
Honey silk visage and java, like brindle,
Eyes like flint against frizzen, will kindle
Fire in the heart, calling men once missing
To a resplendent nexus, of lost souls kissing.
Arcadian journeys of body and mind
Sing from fathomless depths of space and time.
Geography traversed by her steps, sublime
Bearing piedra de ijada from a far eastern mine.
Electricity leaps in passionate arcs,
from skin to skin in dendritic sparks,
That strobe over rhythm beneath the sheets,
as lovers listen and friction speaks
in syncopation with shuddering breaths,
from sodden mouths that sweetly press,
And I close my eyes in synchronicity,
but even closed, it’s her I see.
Tasting the salt of a single tear
A harbinger, for the moments near.
High on the hum of hopes embrace
as rapture and destiny hasten the pace,
I open my eyes to watch her go,
but once inside it starts to grow
into a poem unleashed in my heart,
By a byzantine kiss, after lost lips part.

timeless through the ages

What is timeless through the ages
Is conveyed in the pages
Etched in stone or vinyl
And what has a beginning
Will reach many ends, but none
Is ever final
The hope you seek
In the words I speak
Is far deeper than meaning can reach,
The paradox is
That hope doesn’t serve a future
As much as it does the present
Abandon sight of its sign
And have faith that it is here
What of me next
We ask of our sages.
Will I thin to a point,
And be lost in the vagueness?
All of our choices
As we sort through
Pained and conflicted voices
Succinctly describe ambiguity
Hold on

TREE RINGS

 

Our moments collect in concentric rings about the nexus
Of a first embrace, adorned with Autumnal colors and scents -
We lovers blend, cupped gently below the stir of flecks and dapple.
Each leaf high up quivers in the bouquets and knows when to let go,
Fly and fall to earth.
 
Whispers from a rustling canopy climb down the bark encasements
Of these tall and somnolent trees, thirsty leaves that clatter and kiss,
Wink awake – brilliant - hold our gaze and suspend our hearts.
In a pirouette amidst the amity of recollection and premonition -
We shimmer in an iridescence of saffron on copper - remember this.
 
Moments light up, each one, for just an instant, the last of our lives;
Each conveniently the beginning of forever and forever smiles at us.
Rippling across the cycles of solstice and equinox, we radiate –
A nostalgic procession toward unmade memories, like tree rings.
We fly and fall in love.