My blessed teacher
My ego’s sworn enemy
My joy deflated
Half
This is the true face of sin
Eternity on a roundabout
Cut off from your roots
A single, static dimension
Reflections upon dirty glass
An ending most abrupt
W-E-L-C-O-M-E
Let us not act our age one night in New York City. When the smoky underground Club’s strobe light distress-signals us, let us just say yes. As, for God’s sake, it is the one place that accepts us as we are and we refuse to notice that they spell it wrong.
The rainbow-haired, don’t care dance is ours and theirs and we were born this way, to steal away -the lot of us, the we. There’s no one who’ll make us go back to the where we once called home. The white-noise sizzle of this place will see to that.
The Recounting
Maybe your next step will be your last, but you don’t “get” to know beforehand. And instinct is absent.
The floor under your feet will tell you after the fact whether it was ever, at all, true.
And truth, it has been queried, “What is truth,” but I ask you, what is trust? What is trust?
Trust, kept buoyed by hope, took forever to fall away, and these believing eyes with it.
Expectation is only of the coming eve’ and the promise of exasperated sleep, and I praised it more than once.
One morning revealed the night had stolen the vestiges of trust, breaking free all that hope bound.
The only evidence of either, some sense of un-nameable shock. Something’d been there, but what?
Then life’s replaying of horror: The all that was and the all that’s gone. Each breath, each day, each night.
Of Your Time
Which is better of a tree? Which is better use of me?
To speak of its presence? Saying, “How strong its solemness, standing tall, withstanding all?” Asking you to close your eyes and opine on how it could be that such a tree only sometimes sways and creaks, whilst all creatures around it move about, busily in elsewhere mode?
Or shall I show this photograph…evidencing all my skill? See here my theft of light, my manipulation of mirrors? All the while holding my breath, knowing all I’d offer you was a lie to your eye, an insult to its blessed, innate sense of depth, of dimension?
Walk we instead, up to this friend and touch, even taste its barked bend? It won’t mind! Trace your finger to its roots-there’s solemnity! Follow, follow upward eyes, leaves dancing in the wind. Shading, singing as a friend?
California, Again
It’s Winter when he does this, so I buy myself time and find flowers somewhere. Color-filled, with thorns that draw my blood which proves I’m alive and not here to stay quiet and blind. These flowers, I cannot help but clutch them in desperate remembrance that it’s Summer somewhere. I was born in the Summer.
Dream Dreamer
Cascading stars
Not falling stars
Nor momentary shooting stars
Night fireflies
Not fly-by-nights
Nor echoes in the dead of night
Not half-attempts at anything
Nor abstract things
Just real things
Artist Credit: Tiger R.; at various ages
If Not Epic, Nothing
A mistake
Of epic, inhuman error
That looks more like betting the house on a whim
Than burning the breakfast toast
As if the gods had prodded
While I, fresh out of faith, felt forced to obey
Lest my heart be finally ripped from me
And my body thrown down the temple stairs
The Daylights
All About Beauty
Maybe when I’m old, then gone, they’ll talk boldly of me
Paint word pictures of the thought I gave, the care I took
Depict the lines on my face without failing the beauty in them
Knowing I’d want them to tell my whole story of success
All of it, and how, but for them, I’d have failed abjectly
