Late
later than we knew,
but that is eternally,
you.
Profoundly present, attentive,
ignorance only in the future,
the moment reigns supreme,
you.
All other time,
is trivialized by experience,
the sand amidst the dune,
you.
When the day ends,
when the next begins,
it is always comforted by,
you.
Now, here,
living fuller lives,
loving more,
we.
Life is the sieve that filters our passions,
straining them thin;
permitting only a few freedoms – here
or there,
until the flow of it runs clear.
With a lattice like maze of obligations and tollgates,
keeping all the big dreams on the other side,
our mind desperately scours for starbursts;
reflections of light caught by precious minerals,
hidden amongst all that dirt –
salvation.
Poetry,
is life with cheesecloth.
Not every day affords the luxury to write,
yet it persists, ever eager.
Hours consumed by obligations,
endless tasks and responsibilities;
yet it is we who determine value,
who make the exchange.
To frame a scene you need time,
the theft of which is a crime
for hours are not ours to give;
we live in this paradigm.
We capture all that we can,
like amateur shaky cam,
hoping to fix it in post-
at least for most that’s the plan.
We are not photographers,
nor are we biographers,
we don’t have that kind of view;
closer to cryptographers.
Drowning in information,
searching for causation,
to create more chaos,
or a cross of damnation.
It isn’t until we’re done,
that we can learn the lesson;
leisure is the right response,
but everyone wants to run.
Beautiful you,
I love you, for
all your finality, for
your outrageous irony to the banal, for
your desperate questions, for
your sober answers, for
not caring that we don’t hear them.
Beautiful you,
the compass of those abandoned
the comfort for all great burdens
the compromise to every cost
the combative reply to injustice
the end of all roads and the igniter of passions.
Beautiful you,
oft I yearn for you to ease yourself upon me
take me in your arms and squeeze,
like laughs upon a deep breath
as eager for the contents as their release;
but I will not plead, not again.
Beautiful you,
be always out of reach
the distant sun that has set
the word bound in paradox
heard but maligned and unspoken, until
at last,
I have earned you.
An endless rhythm pounding against the ground,
echoed steps lost, never to be found,
Stop.
Let it all flood in,
thrashing against the coves of sanity –
white foam, screaming.
The gulls cry out for stunned fish
lying on the rocks
unaware of their consumption,
an endless rhythm pounding against the ground,
echoed steps lost, never to be found,
Stop, finally,
amidst the garland.
Are the flowers for respect,
or just the satisfaction
of causing something else to die?
Nostalgia is a weary hat in a lost town.
It speaks soberly of altered states,
and doesn’t belong there,
but it did-
it did.
The brim is warped leather,
the crown, sulking against the skull beneath,
with deep canals born of frowns and smiles
indiscernible from those that rest
on the shoulders
of endless hours that bridge the days,
swallow the years
and sever the link to innocence.
It is a native-born traveler,
returning as family,
but with the wear of life upon it,
like a refugee denied asylum,
home again
a stranger in a strange land.
I am content in the sunlight
a thousand blank pages waiting
but without any cause to fight,
for my attention. Not needing;
necessity is self-defeating;
but there- available all the same.
The time left us is only wanting,
this life having finally been tamed.
The day drifts away but it is still bright,
a lifetime of mournful shadows fading
behind a long legacy of delight;
decades of fruitful creating,
the love of those that are liberating,
curiosity like an open flame
from fire to fire, always leaping.
Never quiet is my soul’s refrain.
With the coffee that they like,
shaved off the bean like chocolate moose;
a foggy night of swirls rolling off the spoon.
That kind of early.
I need to be there.
People will remember if I’m not,
hold it against me, resent me.
How do I barricade my home office?
It’s a bedroom, no need to barricade.
Supposedly.
Just need food and drink for two,
so when they come for me,
[They will come – are coming]
we’ll live!
Better than we did when we had to work
all the time,
coming in early.
Is a locked door enough to hold them off;
the door between the day and night,
between dreams and reality,
between consciousnesses?
I hope so.
I hope so.
I don’t want to die like this,
early.
Be done for the day,
unanswered.
The sleepless nights of the nation
bringing to heel those movements transposed,
when the walls can no longer protect you from the elements.
I felt love,
feeding us and making us strong,
to become violence on the leeches
only a few feet away,
who will not bend by force.
There can be no companions here.
Our identities,
something that burrowed into the background,
but we’ve known that;
reduced we are to subtle heat obscured.
Hanging from the wires,
no one to prune the eccentricities
between this place and another.
So eager to find themselves fit amongst the stars,
all the insides set to fire;
It can’t go on like this.
I can taste the years;
every moment respected and cherished,
severed from the world around us,
on the other end of the beginning;
silent and still,
dripping.
Once we had it all together,
tumbling like a clod of dirt down a hill,
that will collapse under pressure;
restrained only by old roots.
Let that comfort you in your time of need.
The smell of ancient minerals,
oil, grease,
that languish lecherously
against all the dreams of fate.
The end is nigh,
though no one is there to hear
the autumn leaves laughing beneath tranquil steps;
like water toiling away,
tossing up all the horrors we had forgotten.
Those truths that hide in the present, revealed,
but brighter,
leave nothing that was.
Echoes,
captured by some concern that is not me,
a stroke of color
pressed hard against a blank paper,
the sound tumbling up a long hollow
until pleasantness is nullified,
from years of giving more than expected,
dying in avarice.
I’m not sure now why it didn’t break
while we fought against it,
the long wait and effort vindicated
before that final curtain drops.
The systole and diastole
cannot survive to the end.
Where the wires, pipes and tubes retire,
quiet hidden movements
with shrouded secrets even the skin conspires on,
stabbing at the ceiling in six different places,
until, at last, broken.
Like orphaned laughter so briefly sustained,
to become part of a greater whole,
the salt laden water water rising to the throat;
a sense of belonging,
lapping at what warmth drips down,
in the brighter corners of that vacant place.
I can’t remember why I enjoyed it so much.
Eager to grow into something beautiful,
and quietly resign to darkness;
I would fashion some reverence from the stale stone slate.
It’s not trash, but it should be,
to open eyes questing;
awkward, ungainly,
bruises, cuts, and wounds.
Overwhelming,
wondering,
yet no less worthy of what alms we offer.
And that is enough.
We are bleached sidewalks in the sun.
I don’t know.
Some part of that old life,
forcing itself through too small a gap,
crumpled like crash test dummies;
Belies what was beneath our feet.
I want it all – and quickly,
while the state of my mind,
cannot reconcile what is real.
I must feed it,
before it gets away from us.
Para llamar a casa,
in violent protest.
Hours are indiscernible from minutes.
I regret thinking time was like the sea,
that primal tugging beyond the veil;
but truth does not move through time as we do.
Collecting like lightning in a bottle,
settled like stew in a dim lit room.
This is the world,
all our troubles overflowing,
like so much sand over the desert dunes.
Exhaust what you can, the endings don’t stop.
Naked,
I fear that life,
though it is dependent on the past.
A heavy hand may have cast it out,
as a thresher to an arm amongst the wheat;
a cloud of chaos still warm from the womb,
confident there is plenty more
(if you’ve got the coin to spend).
It’s not like it thirsts for blood,
it will find empathy
excavating what innocence is left,
in the darkness.The leaves are gone.
Lives are short,
taint us with histories,
known, expected, overpowering,
everything.
Grow Gray With Me 