Tag Archives: aging

Hourglass

What is lost with life – our possessions,
our love, our heart, our intentions

May be found again in somber hands,
outstretched to catch our sifting sands,

The grains of our time tumbling in light,
ignite like fire eager, and over bright.

While the slag that falls past those fingers,
is gone forever, the memory still lingers.

By the end, so little of what was remains;
it is not what is, but what is not that pains,

So, we shield those fragments from the outside,
with the withered parts of us that still reside,

But in this sacrifice, all the light is lost,
we can shine no more, that is the cost.

Video

To My Younger Self (Video)

This is part of a collection of poems accompanied by an AI generated illustration as a response to those poems. In the collection, “A Super Collider of Zigs and Zags” by Brendon Behlke, each poem was submitted as a prompt to an AI art generator and produced the artwork on display. To view them the way ancient peoples would have viewed them, you can order a copy of the entire collection, over 100 poems and art pieces, releasing on November 18th 2023 here: https://www.fontainehousepublishing.com/product-page/a-super-collider-of-zigs-and-zags-by-brendon-behlke

A History of Mirrors

It takes a moment to recognize the face I see,
rough cartography that looks like deceit,
lies between us, a confusing ambiance;
big; small – they are all wounding.

Look away and speak to me only in silence,
you are the last I want to hear.

I’ll extinguish the lights,
scream until my lungs rise like flames,
reducing my thoughts to ashen remains,
that glow beneath the cacophony.
Embers radiating a dim red light –
of fear,
            but you and I,
                                  we’ll call it anger.

Rocinante’s Secrets

The worn grips where I held you tightly,
through foul winds or gentle breezes;
the subtle change in color there, pleases –
where hills become valleys resting in those old wraps.

Every scratch, no matter the size,
when I carried you impatiently from place to place,
or tangled with you imperfectly at my own disgrace,
are hints at the strength beneath your skin.

The dirt that hides in strange corners,
the oil, the grease, the wires, the gears,
sometimes too much, or too little are my fears,
that the care I can give you is not enough.

The way the two of us consort,
inspiring the earth to move, the wind to blow,
and in that ambiance becoming only the now I know;
free, finally, from times attempt to capture me –

Soft words whispered to eyes keen enough to listen.

Tomorrow

waits for no one – it but exists
          and that is enough.

           I accept the challenge
though it grows everyday.





I raise the sails each morning
      towards that great whale
                  not to hunt it down in vengeance
but to explore its yawning wake
                until at last it turns on me
            and speaks solemnly, “no more”
      having grown too great a future
                      for my sails to endure.

Anthem

“Every heart, every heart
to love will come
but like a refugee.
Ring the bells that still can ring.”

  • Leonard Cohen, Anthem

Old machinery languishing about,
ceaselessly producing;
billowing useless dark clouds,
sacrificed by the workings inside.
Picture gears and sprockets,
conveyer belts and boxes,
a labyrinth of pipes;
each with gauges no one reads.
Just a wealth of confidence inside
every heart, every heart.

Though – no one goes there.
Not a soul in, nor a soul out.
All the roads bound around that place
lead only anywhere else
and even so, there are no grounds
on which to drive up, stop and contemplate.
Just a large barbed fence
to keep the curious out.
But always, the aesthetic eye
to love will come.

For it is at once the landscape
and that which defines the horizon,
reaching out for the cosmos
as Tantalus for the peach;
confined in a prison of industry
crying out black sooted protests.
Giving back nothing aside what the eye can see
observed from the periphery.
It will find empathy,
but like a refugee.

None know its architect,
nor will any pursue such details.
Those secrets will die in the warm steel nails
that first hammered in all those walls;
in the mortar that bound the brick to silence.
It is known only that it exists,
the eternal workings always singing
yet growing quieter each year;
While I return its gaze and insist,
ring the bells that still can ring.

Grow Gray With Me

The fog that hides the day as night retires,
shades of sunlight grasping for purchase
struggling in undulating swirls,
hoping to find in ambiguity, some purpose.

The rising darkness from the depths of fire
billowing into the night to throttle the stars,
like open mouths cradling soundless screams
or the profound words of a dead man’s memoirs.

The way a tree feels when bound to expire,
stripped of all its lush extravagance
the machinations of a world that brought it life,
now turned to break it beneath those same elements.

The slow pyrotechnics of stagnant air’s attire
sustained in sanguine starlight while time drifts away,
held like the pot won in a game of marbles,
careful hands celebrating their display.

The decisions we unearth in quagmire
seeking more an end than a right or wrong,
transfixed by distant familiarity
the difference lost in the chorus of the song.

The way our histories resurface as satire
courage marred by fear, the bold now timid and pale
those truths that hide in the present revealed
once pitted against the rest and placed on a scale.

The thoughts that in twilight give cause to perspire
when the permanence of absence is paramount,
trickling through the cracks in our confidence
though it is only ourselves we need to surmount.

Sentry

His mind was
    patch worked duct tape
on the seams of a yellowing couch
  something that burrowed into the background
    a body discolored like an old formica table
that would topple
                    beneath even the slightest weight
                                              too often.

Discolored and unsettled
          nearly balanced on a piece of cardboard
                that must always be adjusted.
    Each bruise is a decade of smoke hazed biker bars
  lucid stupors of apologies or irritability
stuck to the bottom of this ancient surface.
                            Bright pinks and deep blues
                                now dirty and faded;
                      resigned
                  collecting what remains of life
  as dust in falling will grasp at the light
              spark like fire
                      shine like diamonds
        burn like youth.