Rose Speak

the color and bloom of a breath when you speak,
I curl around every petal
to see you as a daffodil
would only be to settle

no, I think thou ar’t a rose
In a garden rooted in love
drawn deep down from a blood red heart
blessed by a morning dove

Morning Mischief

I woke to the mischief of morning
sneaking playfully up the stairs
Now I’m not quite sure as I think of it,
But I’m thinking you were there.

Something lithely climbed into the bed
and lifted a curl of hair
I felt the lightness in my head
With a breath, but without a care.

Just like dew on a blade of grass,
Is a tear from the morning air.
Cried from the eye of tender wolf moon
Who Found it’s halo was not there.

That’s how I felt, floating on the nexus
Between consciousness and sleep
An apprehensive acrobat
Do I cross or do I leap?

But, trouble in my bedroom today
Was not what it might seem
Because as you taunted me from sleep
I awakened to a dream.

The Question to Your Answer

Love appears before we ask
To bless the future, heal the past.
Gleaming with wisdom of unspoken choices
It patiently waits for the sounds of our voices.

It quells the fears of space and time
Forever onward, leaving no one behind.
From soft glowing eyes to flames of emotion,
Melting horizons and stirring the ocean.

It teases the mind into taking a leap,
Empties our breath, filling dreams as we sleep
It tricks the heart and draws a tear
Yet sweetly sings in the darkness of fear.

And though two paths may seem the same,
The journey of love will forever change.
Shining one light on the rest of our lives
The answer is knowing it always arrives.

Do I

This moment shall never be forgotten
Here on, the first in the endless sequence of
Breathless pirouettes that lie before us
like the promised sunsets.

This moment will never be forgotten
The last in the progression of a gently walked trail
Dappled with the pattern of footprints, some solitary.

This moment will never be forgotten
Like the link in a chain that tethers our past to the unfolding future,
It is the capstone of continuity, a harbinger of perpetuity

Of All moments that I will ever remember
are those that are always next,
that wait like the new woken eyes
of dreaming foxes.

Kissing Andromeda

There is a fat mad woman
Her head pokes through burlap.
Andromeda’s prodigy
In my space, poking me with her pen.
Her lips are flapping, smacking spittle,
Waxy smears on her chin,
A protruding peach pit knob.
Drained and un-kissed lips
Wrap tight over warm pink gums.
Too late, she sees me
Abandoned by gravity,
Lost focus in her black melton.
She pauses, closes her eyes,
with sighs, breaths me
into a hail of dislodged teeth,
spewing dust tails
like cold, crazy comets.
Andromeda sways and lurches.
Our tongues touch and flicker,
While I’m mouthing
Deep muted thoughts of madness.

It's All About Teeth

Drenched – 1 part wine, 2 parts anticipation;
Waking up to 5 parts sensibility.
Morsels of Fritos and homemade chocolate chips,
Wedged and fermenting in the crags of my molars;
and it’s back to the brush;
Truth hisses and stands steaming
in the temporary halt of its journey through time;
locked to the ground and swaying as I write it.
The “now,” there is the cork of the matter. Pith.
We run ahead of ourselves, and look back
asking about the series of nows,
passing by, swelling, and then disappearing like jet contrails.
Is it truth or is it me as the sum of all the truths.
Tiny pre-summer ants,
Navigate battlefields on the sidewalk,
skirting around the shadows of flattened pistils and stamen.
I run over this plexus of stems and petals –
each day, the pink ripening to saffron
then burnt sienna then blackening on the curling edges.
Ah I run, and you run the crazy out – run the sagacity out.
Would be nice to share the dumb obfuscated silence
that only exhaustion brings; faint breath sounds,
rather than these words
that beat at the gates
and burst out like bats from the Carlsbad Caverns.

I’m feeling battish,
dipping mental bread in the sparkles of crimson
left behind in your steps,
as you ambulate over esplanade and dirt trail
the flavor makes me ostensibly awake,
but sensibly tired.
So I sleep, with clean teeth.

Ice Fissures

Spheres of air are trapped in the fibrous fissures.

A million ends of cilia resonating in my ear,

Vibrating my mind down a silent gauntlet of blurred memories.

The tether of vision slips the loop of modesty

And goes slack over a hemisphere of abdomen.

A sunbath besides a glass of naked ice, beneath a cobalt blue sky.

From behind a strangled trellis, your body fades into view,

Like a frosty exhale from the broken seal of a meat locker.

You split the air with the velocity of katydids

Teeming in the dogwoods.

Another ice cube alarms and cracks open

Just as your bathrobe falls to rest around those winged feet.

I retrace the white terry cloth contrails up the contours of your body

To where I imagine gravity pulling it off those wax smooth shoulders.

Stepping out of a plush pile of white onto the cool decking,

You just stand there, like a melting stalagmite,

Only with a bit more contrapposto,

Lightly browned and accumulating a glistening of sweat.

I hear the purling of water as you wade in.

The edge of the glass is tilted over my lip,

And through it, I can make out your rippling image,

 As another ice cube hisses and then snaps

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.

who?

Visitation

His child smiles lovingly and with admiration at his Dad, who stands at the coffee bar at Starbucks, paused and smiling back at his son.  They sit nearly silent, but at rest at home, the single Dad with the thousand mile stare, blended with compassion; His mind passes gently over the fabric of adoration as he reflects on the lives of others he sees, wishing pieces of theirs were his, seeing his son.  His eyes glaze with pensive sadness, knowing its “visitation.”  What a cold and awful word.

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!)

Something to look at. (8/9/98)

Something to cast lines at from the depths of my soul.  It’s always about validation.


But what if I could give you a sense of the overwhelming emotion that I have when a song takes me high on a peak lit by a falling star.

His foot taps to a beat that could only be described as eventually Latino.
Finger on the buttons
With a pattern of taps and presses, he can take it up or down
Or replicate life or do both.

Cold smears of clouds…too far…drip horizontally from the highest peaks…
drawn Westward by the turbulent winds roaming the perimeter of the horse latitudes.
He thinks, he'd like to be bobbled in the winds as they licked acres of tundra
17000 feet above a small peace of driftwood that rolls happily
onto the discovery grounds of a blond infant with a sand bucket and shovel.

Just wanting to be loved by the consummate authority for his essence. 
The desire to share every arc of excitement from every new discovery
was evidence that he needed validation.  He simply needed to be loved.
The electricity was intense, and the deeper in he traveled
from the orbits of the electrons and firing of synapses in his brain,
the more nothingness he found.

The writer is forcing experience down a funnel into an ink well…
Rather than drink from the fountain, he records the minutes
as the music spills all over the floor of his empty apartment.,
heard, but never really listened to.
He sits there drenched, although not a note, not a word, rained on him.

The closer the words get to the paper,
The further he drifts from the catalyst.
Its clearer now he is a robber of substance
And a graffiti sculptor.
Give him a glimpse of who you are and he’ll make it his.
You can’t have it back, you may only look.
But you’ll like what you see from the outside looking in.

He reaches for the pistol,
While, far away, the matador slowly drops his chin
Purposefully lowering his brow over the top edges
Of those deep dark Spanish eyes.
The metal is heavier than it looks,
No doubt that the density of a revolver
Far exceeds that of his shiny letter opener,
Which he has just jammed through a note,
bleeding into the grain leather top of his cherry wood desk.

An olive skinned picador gallops out
In a burst of intense hues, draws back his arm and
Jams the beautifully plumed lance into the base of the neck and
the head of the great beast drops...
and from that precise spot,
A latitude line was drawn to a location 8000 miles away.
At that precise moment,
As a silver trigger is slowly drawing back.

As the pride spills out, the bull stumbles and falls in a heap
At the feet of  the Spanish hero,
The crowd rises to its feet in a swell of cheers.
that stirs the bewildered bull to struggle to his knees, without grace;
The grace with which he entered the ring.
There cheers were like no sound the bull had ever heard.

The judge, jury and executioner,
Always at the ready, even as the verdict is announced,
“guilty of stealing the meaning from someone…larceny of substance.”
The sentence, “Death.”

There is no click heard as a gunshot
Resounds in the empty apartment.
His head snaps back, and recoils forward,
gravity tilts him from the barco lounger to one knee, then tipping.
As his body struck soundly strikes the floor,
The breath of the collapsed bull rushes out
blowing soft dust
Onto the boots of the matador.

The slow motion of waving hands and hail of flying roses in the stadium
Made the execution meaningless.
The matador trembles a smile, and tosses his hat into the air,
As it fell, a smoking gun bounces once more on cheap carpeting.

Meanwhile his father cheered as the Eagles
Ran the pigskin across the goal line with only seconds remaining.
His mother sang over the phone to a disconsolate friend,
The receiver tucked under her nodded head…
The sound of chopping potatoes could be heard
As the TV shut off in the other room.

They’d get the call on Tuesday.
His friends would “ask why,”
We loved him so much.
A girl he asked out only days before
Privately reconsidered his offer…never understanding why she just
Didn’t say “yes” in the first place.
Afterall, “He was something to look at!

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.

Essay: Love is an ever unfolding friendship.

Love is an ever unfolding friendship:  Consumed the by the most poignant and desirous lessons of love, we speak of endless unfolding as we wrap around each other in this inextricable embrace.  Falling in love is not the closing of doors or a narrowing of path, but a tremendous expansion.  I think we experience love both as individuals, and in the mysterious blend of “oneness.”
 
Thirsty, but afraid to drink:  We are intoxicated  by the other’s outpouring of words – a cathartic release of those thoughts and remembrances that comprise the fear and apprehension of our past.  Strange that as we release our fears and open ourselves to possibility, it is another fear that tries to fill the open space.  What is brilliant is that we know this – and somehow, find comfort with its shared awareness.  I like sometimes being unable to question expression before it springs forth; it’s good to know that some things come naturally.   Even with the euphoric effects of love, we are sobered by the immenseness of discovery.
 
Impetuous romancers.  Many of us must seem so misguided to those that would prefer we be on their path; and that is the irony.  The guidance of others is, indeed, someone else’s guidance!  We want “us” tremendously – and as lovers, each should choose this - and so with every “I love you so” they push open a gate even wider for the other; each also open to the possibilities left by both certainty and doubt. 
 
Cool, Sad, Odd, Choices:  A life chosen alone, cannot be experienced together.  But cool that choices made together, can be experienced alone.  Sad that we are sometimes afraid to believe in gifts presented through spirit.  And even more odd that our individual choices can seem small and alone without the company of pragmatism; the logical and (not so) independent guidance and views of others.  Our choices are our paths; they have run up along side each other.  They blend, overlap, weave, and as indistinguishable as they are at times, I still believe there are three; “yours, mine, ours.”  There is also, “theirs.”
 
Undeserved explorers.  Knee to knee we huddle and kiss and breath each other at a wobbly café table, stabilized at the base by sugar packets – clairvoyants asking questions not because we don’t know the answers, but because we love to hear the other say it.  We asked what is it we want in life with, for, from another.  “Here, let me help you with that answer,” like sharing succulent morsels from a tour de force presented on bone china, garnished with delicious accessories (soulful stares, caressing touch, flowing features) .  We speak of that which we have together until we are no longer deserved. Love and fear are race companions, running out in front of the other – trading the lead position on the journey of discovery.  Our lives, our love, are like sugar packets; shims of stability in an unfolding world that never stops being explored.
 
The paradox of gradual emergence and submergence.  It is confusing to face where we are with each other, because we are forever coming from the past, and it is that to which we find reference and relativity.  This washes up against a future that rides in on a steed of words penned and spoken from the heart.

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.

Thanksgiving: What more could I want?

What more could I want?

I have the unchained sounds of the wind brushing through the bare trees.  And the sky just pushes by on their way somewhere south of hear.  It’s very quiet except the sounds of the winds and my fingers clicking on the keyboard.  I’m sitting in my jeep parked up against a white wooden fence that delineates the pastures, the 2 acre or so sloped patch of grass that provide the food, flooring, commode, and lint trap for the llamas and goats that live on it.  The slope easily exceeds 25 degrees, and if I were to roll over the fence 4 feet, I’d be looking down into the tree line rather than out over the Catoctins.  I guess route 340 winds out there west through that gap.  Where it’s especially clear tonight, revealing the very distant lights of some West Virginia town I again guess.  Had I a companion with me, this would be an arguable point.  But as I sit alone, no one can contest me.  The owners of the “inn” where I live are gone this evening for Thanksgiving dinner.  The other displaced bachelors that live up here at Rasberry springs are also gone off with family or friends.  So, yes, I am quite alone.  My primary friend within earshot, is the wind.  It doesn’t often shut up when it’s around.  Odd, were it not for the windbreaks offered by trees and structures, it might slide over the ground without a sound.

The air turned quite cool…and the ranks of clouds show the faded orange glow of the sunset.  I fear not turn around and see the full moon hovering somewhere over my right shoulder.  I hear the Brunswick line, probably coming from Martinsburg.

The hills and farms have gone black, all but the window lights and house lamps.  Back in my desert, the ground would have certainly been desolate and … not the worst, worst darkness.

I still see the thick streak of sunset…like a thin window …if I could peak me head over the lower lege of that streak, I’d find this expanse of gold…my whole life past, glazed over, in golden mist.  The Brunswick howls - and my mind wanders in dementia to a dinner table at Thanksgiving.  Yes, it is Thanksgiving tonight and for the first time in my life, I am utterly alone on the side of this hill.  My children are happy and playing with their friends, my wife, soon to be ex, is probably drinking wine and feeling sad.

Me?  I’m just glad for my senses and undying faith and hope, that one day, the sounds of the wind will not remind me of this moment but of something new.  Lord, bless this evening, your day is done, she was a fine one.  Thank you for the unrecognizable shapes of the clouds, and fathomless smears of cool wind that tear up my eyes and fill my nose so that I’m barely….breathing right.  Now sleep comes…damn these short days of your eastern winters.  My desert, my soul mate; only in the most deep and solemn seconds, do we truly recognize each other. 

End.

Walking My Dog "Memory"

Interesting - as everything is coming into the harbor and some things will make it to their slips, others will crash against the rocks, others will just turn around and head back out to sea.  Meanwhile, all is adrift.  Yesterday I was down - I had just these memories; like an old box of Crayola crayons can’t seem to make a picture.

Job change/no confirmation, kids on the cusp of a wave that will take them away from me, what I thought was for keeps is drifting off, my youth giving way to desires to just go home and nap, my wishing I could just talk my way into a stupor but knowing that I don’t want to hurt anyone (even for the most harmless reason).  I just want to go home - and to be honest, I have none…

So I get on a jet and I go to Oz and toast with old mates, I’ll hang out in Pattaya and long to call back the mysteries I see; I’ll dream through a jungle in Costa Rica and picture you complaining with a backpack on, I’ll go to Brazil and see my children and a mother I love running through the surf.  I just bought an international phone today - I’m sure the messages from Asia will rain down on my hopes and lost friends in the West.  One day, I wonder if I should just not return and find a girl, settle down, marry, have children - but home is forever a horizon for me.  I just need someone to slap the living shit out of me - beat me into sub-consciousness, hand me a Corona, kiss me on the forehead and tell me everything is all right now.

Money, ego, longing…Christ.  What is this all about!  Why is the bitter/sweet more sweet than bitter?

Tonight - laundry, finish the three half empty bottles of wine in my fridge - pray to stay awake long enough for a walk in my neighborhood with my faithful dog Memory, tugging at the leash, just the now and the clacking sound of its drunken footsteps; as the clothes tumble in the dryer.

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.

Why would anyone set sail on a boat called Rock Bottom.  Yet here I am…

The sky winked a few times and the day spilled slowly and steadily out over the horizon.  Millions of people cursed it, loved it, or wished it had never come.  But, with no heed to us, the day crossed the finish line tired and worn, collapsing into the arms of dusk.

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

Biography

I grew up with this drive…and sometimes it was a band (skynrd, molly hatchet, journey, REO, 38 special, Dead, Rush, YES)…it was an event, fast ride, beer cans, woods, a camaro…a house party, bon fire, south jersey shore and wooded county highways from the farms to the coast…springsteen and southside johnny…slipping down the crevice between baby boomers and xgeneration.  Unconcerned, I kicked a discarded beer can whose consumer I’d disdain for ever throwing it out to begin with…an environmentalist, with a dead aim between a Genesee beer bottle launched at a yield sign somewhere along a straight road through jersey corn fields.  I hated then the money that I wish I had now…that without, compels me to reminisce.  I loathed killing then, as I took up arms to defend my country against other parents; I swore I’d shoot another man and thank God that I never had to pull that trigger to defend my country’s right be what others strive to be.
 
I wasn’t worried as I searched everywhere…I had no idea of the mistakes I’d make.  I was 12 when I wrote about always searching but never trying to find.  I saw beautiful girls and I tried to choreograph my life and its characters so that somehow, fate would land one in my arms…I fantasized of great athletic achievements…I never figured that I’d bring two beautiful children into this world through an act that I never trained for, have no skill in, and that sometimes shames me.  God sees my spiraling life and for love of his chorus of angels, He shed a tear and transcended the most magical of imagination when my children burst into the light of our closest star.  And they too will fail beautifully and be in the eyes of God when He gives life again into the world…I am in awe of my children, because in all my life, it will be the greatest creation of God that I’ll ever witness, until maybe I stand before His angels.
 
If I’d only known for sure where you were…I remember being that adolescent drinking just one more beer thinking it was necessary…either to swing that spotlight on the delayed frame movie strip of my life, or get me just a little bit higher.  I never knew there was a worm at the bottom of the bottle…I didn’t realize what I would remember about those stolen beers was the thin tinny taste of the aluminum can.  Meanwhile, you leaked into my heart;  keeping me from a tragic dosage of wanting too much.
 
I didn’t know the writing would get better, and mean less.  You were dancing, draped in flowing terry cloth on the other side of a lonely door hidden in the shadows of the corners of my cavernous mind.  I’m not sure how I became half of who you are to me; who I am to you, considering the garden stone walls between us.  Hewn rock, hoisted by Herculean men, stacked, thud into the rich soil…seared with moss, a cancer of roots.  What gave us, you and me…these time encrusted borders so thick that we never heard each other scratching at the surface of the great divide.  A divide that now paves the ground we tread…our dance floor.
 
I tripped and feared being alone; I fell into the dull pattern of searching for a face with the dream.  And I forgot about the dream, but it didn’t forget me.  I listened to the words I thought were meaning in the songs I never thought would come…and the music keeps playing and there is no end to the melody, no loose string in the harmony, yet the end is found in every new beginning.
 
I just know that I failed in everything I set out to do alone and had I not, I’d have never understood.  I stand hear before you, wounded, faulted, jeered, less than perfect from all its angles…and I realize the miracle that cements all this together is that I indeed stand here before you. And all you want me to do is love the life I’m never expecting…I hope the unexpected, finds you.

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.

Jim Harrison

…still smelling like Athit, I found myself awakening in first class next to the recluse, Jim Harrison.

Jim Harrison was planetary from the moment I saw him. He is a thick and somewhat round man, dense enough to have his own gravitational pull and orbiting moons. From the corner of my eye, I can make out that unruly salt and pepper hair, blown back in disarray like Tea tree branches on Rottnest Island off Perth. Add to that a thicket of mustache, with different shaped teeth jutting down, like tombstones out of bear grass. He needs some grooming and some detangling. His eyes remind me of stout cement nails, beset in a tan round face. It’s leather and creases are like that of an old fashion catchers mit. In his eyes are little hematite beads, lens caps on film projectors rolling polyester film from the early 60’s. His left eye roams blindly, while his right tries to console a childhood injury that left him sightless in that one. His clothing this day is reminiscent of that which you’d find hanging wearily in a dark storage closet. His light brown T-shirt is a bit too small stretched over a hemisphere of abdomen. Over that he sports a rust colored and distressed suede jacket, with gnawed fringes on the sleeves as I recall; or so I seem to imagine. I’ll bet that in his pockets are a couple of old well pressed diner receipts, a turnpike ticket, and crinkled cellophane candy wrapper from, like, 1970.

Sitting beside him, I can hear the pitter pat of a mouse running on a squeaky toy Ferris wheel turning in his mind. From drink or lost years, he slurs slightly through stories about Jack Nicholson and that genre of people (Hunter Thompson, Dennis Hopper, Jimmy Buffett, and a few others.) He speaks with a bit of disgust about the Hollywood scene; having just returned geographically and mentally from a movie director’s office in LA, says that there is no money in being an author, but screenwriting, well there’s a living… Aspiring screenwriters are coming out of the knotty woodwork, with lolling tongues and pointy pencils (that’s not exactly what he said, but so I like to imagine it). I don’t get the feeling he’ll be putting out another book – but I hope to see some poetry.

What would I say to Jack Nicholson, who I ran into walking along the bay in San Diego years later? About this chance meeting with his friend Jim Harrison? “Hey Jack, I went out for barbeque with your friend Jim Harrison when he came through Tucson…he told me what a fucking nut you are.” When I ran by Jack that sunny day, I just said “hi Jack,” which seemed to startle him…he lifted his head in bewilderment and tried to spot me from under his shades.

Jim Harrison and I drank booze and made up a story for the flight attendant…you see, he was an underwear model and I was his agent…this went on for the entire flight. He disappeared while disembarking – ending up somewhere in Patagonia for a retreat. That day, I went home and Googled Jim Harrison. And scanned excerpts from his book, “Legends of the Fall”…and it made me think about Thaksin and Athit and Nicholson…

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.