Tag Archives: darkness

Shadow Boxing

Come out and play,
          come out and play!

I hear you in the shadows,
            dancing through the darkness
                    like a sea cucumber in the current.
                            The absurd fun,
                                the jubilation.

Come out and play,
            come out and play!

I see the soft glow of your teeth,
        still obscured from the light,
                like the scales of a fish,
                    waving back through muddied water.
                            The subtle jest,
                                  the tease.

Come out and play,
          come out and play!

I feel your intensity,
        the primal tugging beyond the veil,
                like the vortex of a whales tail,
                      disorienting its prey.
                              The elegant guile,
                                    the hubris.

I am ready.
Come out and play,
          come out and play.

Nuance

Most of this is empty space;
the parts we recognize are our own.
Drawing lines to define the void,
make it digestible,
before it gets away from us.

All of it is exploding.
Omnidirectional fire
in a panicked escape
from itself or any purpose in its future;
circumventing speed for scale
while we just try and catch up.

What can we possibly expect?
Swimming around in noble gasses,
breathing fire and using the ash
to write equations or trace shadows.

When the mouth of the cave has closed,
all that we know will be darkness;
but most of this is empty space,
so perhaps there is still some truth in that.

Coffee

Like boulders tumbled end over
                                          end
until hard sharp edges are rounded
                  soft
pebbles
        that flow over the hand
                as the water that birthed them.

Then ground into rich soil
                    vibrant, dark
            eager to grow into something beautiful
                        to taste a set of lips
                  and rest there
                            taste again
      and settle warmly inside.

Each morning
            I embrace that glow
        as it embraces me
  and feel the day blossom.

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.

Bill Brody

“It was the drugs,”
              they said,
“the trauma”
“the loneliness,”
loading him up with excuses
              he had no business
              nor inclination to carry.

He was busy,
                    always.

Ideas, drawings, paintings
            inventions, stories
                              political campaigns
                                          music, movies,

             shooting out of him
                              all hours of the day or night.

Leafy green things, alive and vibrant.

      though in the winter he would turn statue outside
                                  naked
                                        cold

                          for hours alone
                                no one to prune the eccentricities
                                      or take him inside

      and he would call me sometimes
            to talk through the night;
screaming at me of
                        decay, darkness, the hollow in himself
                    but never saying any of it out loud

Like a dead tallow tree bursting with life.

Wishes

The well waits open to the sky
a placid barrier below
silent bait for the passersby.

What water patiently poised
would want of the world above
only dreams will ever know.

The meager coins that violate the surface
swallowed by depths of darkness,
are but emissaries of whispered words
that beg of fate a future to bestow.

They gather amongst the sediment
an ancient glittering congress
perpetually pleading the case
for ambitions that died long ago,

lost to the unknown abyss
where light is known only by shadow
and purpose found only in fools.

An Ode to Blinking

The sliver between our open eyes
a slice between frames of light
that go on and on and on
like the water-colored frivolity
that supports those old cartoons;
bright characters in stark contrast
oblivious to the stylistic dysmorphia.

A flash of darkness
quickly set aside by the bookends of life
a pause so faint as to be forgotten
lost in the Kaleidoscope of colors;
the years as shapes, tumbling
on and on and on again
always different, always the same.

The universe moves unchallenged,
pufts of turmoil in the vast darkness,
and in that turmoil
flecks of life – flint sparks
quick flashes of light in the darkness
an irony like blinking
that goes on and on and on.

Khaos

Khaos reigned that one great day in June
when the world fell beneath a pall of gloom
while he brought low all that was known
and left only the flowers of violence in bloom

That terrible sound as he traced the ground
with his one companion and friend
a blood-rusted axe that shined where it cut
longing only for flesh to rend

And rend it did until it was sated
by as many souls as there are stars
those struck, expired and those missed, did live
though their hearts were enveloped in scars

For none could stand against those bloodied hands
the day that Khaos reigned,
they died or they fell beneath his knell
and the world remains forever stained.

Echoes

I don’t want to be stuck down here
the metal creaking
my form popping into something smaller
               and smaller
                              and smaller.

Without light sound is the last reflection
               I see myself
               I see myself
breaking,
                              like breaths fighting for relevance.

               I see myself
               less than I was when that sound was made
                              and diminishing quickly.

               I see myself
               and no one else
futile, trapped beneath the world.