Tag Archives: past
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.
A Confrontation
I cross the threshold between two rooms,
to see you there, tall and bright;
happy again to let your words spill out,
carelessly like a flagon carried mid dance,
confident there is plenty more
and rags at hand to clean the floor.
I haven’t seen you like that in a generation,
who we were- long since old and dying,
making way for who we are now;
reduced to somber stones with names-
only visited on occasion.
I feel those old ghosts resurrected,
bursting through coffins, through earth and the fog of years;
desperate for relevance again.
Crying out please, see me friend!
through laughter breathe life into these lungs!”
But how could you now see the ghost of me,
or anything between who you are
and who, in all this time, I have come to be?
Joy has propositioned you from this world,
while I, before, was naught but misery.
Let me retreat, satisfied as a memory.
Settle those spirits within and lay them to rest,
I beg the fates on our behalf,
please, don’t see me, lest
in all these years,
neither of us be free.
To My Younger Self:
Enjoy the silences;
the waiting,
slow words.
Not having anything to do;
the leashed phone,
the unknown.
Bruises, cuts and wounds;
the bitter cold,
the searching soul.
The night without street lights;
uncivilized sights,
sunlit rooms.
Enjoy the world
as it was meant to be;
sober, subtle and unexplored,
because in the end
it will turn on you;
bind you in rope,
flood your eyes, your ears,
and leave you with no place
to call home.
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.
Grow Gray With Me 