9

9.1

In distress:
and wondering if anyone will come
and rescue me from this dragon
which is circling overhead.
Trapped here in this modest home
without a gun…
waiting for some princess charming
to draw her bowstring
and bring this dragon down.

9.2

Four years they’ve been there with me;
haunting me since that day
I walked into their graveyard.
The poltergeists were friendlier at first,
monitoring my every move…
speaking throughout day and night
seemingly kind, benevolent words…
lulling me through my frustrations.
And then there was a turn,
when their words began to come to me
with such depreciation
that it had me go on thinking
I was parted from the world…
and that I was there alone
in a hospital ward
which they had put me into.
Fear had then engulfed me,
crashed in upon my psyche,
and I would go on turning ‘round,
panicked in my bed.

9.3

The only thing that stopped him was the grave,
and not so much the obstacles
standing in between
him and the thing he felt the need to go to.
And now he’s held up in that hollow for his soul,
sensing himself of a world
from which he is apart…
never having made it to the place
where he could rest…
never having done the act
which he had set forth as his task…
surrounded by all dangers;
in a never-ending nightmare…
through a messed-up situation
from which it seems he can’t escape.
And he wonders if it’s fate,
if there was something in his name
which would guide his every step…
or if it were really only chance:
the way he walked into “the valley
of the shadow of death”
and was attacked without relent
by other’s hands…
with no one there to help him
beaten, used, and frightened,
waiting for the moment
which would signal him the end.

9.4; Mind-Mining

Mining my mind for the information
which would otherwise be off-limits.
Having had access
to just about everything
within my own experience
for four years
can really get a lot across.
And I have been undone,
and done up again,
within the eyes of others
to such a great extent and so often
that I can no longer tell which self
is truest of my person.
My private world encroached on,
my life and my ideas
go flying through the airwaves
to others there afar…
and staring off they listen
or call to mind an image…
extract all that is precious
and make gold into bars.

9.5

Dragged onto the world’s stage,
and that’s the part I played?
To entertain a room full of people
while trying to get out
from under their thumbs…
acting as the hero
that I never really was…
in a plot-line marked by
suspense and surprise,
and mind-games, and hospitals,
and overthrow.
An unsuspecting protagonist,
suspecting the worst,
realizing something’s wrong
when watched and blocked in,
fooled, used, and abused.
And sleuthing around in my imagination
for the villains
masked by distance,
a pocketful of mind-games,
a cloaking, and a hood.
Stuck on stage in act three,
unable to proceed to the fourth and final act,
in which all those who were hijacked
have been freed of the effects
of the technology by which they are controlled.

9.6

You look tired Adam,
and that was in September,
and now it is December,
and yet you still persist.
As well as you are able,
they’ve not made this thing easy,
and I know you can’t stop thinking,
but you really need to rest.
They had you panic stricken
and you made some wrong decisions,
your entire being’s shaken,
and you don’t yet know the reason as to why they went for you.
Unsure if you will make it
to your destined destination,
and questioning if fate
has had other things in mind.

9.7

And you didn’t seem to notice
that I was right there by your side
when you felt that you were going to die,
now you need to stay alive.
Come on! God damn it Adam,
can you not see the light?
not too far in the distance
of your lonesome, vacant night.

9.8

And they are in the breakroom
sipping coffee between tortures…
rewriting their harassments,
while I am on a walk.
This is the first time I’ve heard silence
in almost eighteen months…
and I say it’s so surreal, and yet,
before it’d always been the real:
me there on my own
in solitude and silence…
and I am solemned
for the way things have by now turned out.

9.9

I round a narrow footpath
onto a gravel road…
there the trees have made a tunnel
and I pass beneath the branches.
A windy day,
with storms on my horizon…
leaves cover the ground,
and only few hang on.
It’s late in my fall
I can sense the winter coming…
I feel the cold that’s on its way,
and shudder.
I see the thrashing branches,
and the rolling leaves beneath my feet…
staring blankly, solemn, and aside my thoughts I think:
that silence isn’t always silent.

8

8.1.1

On the grass are the headstones, piled in a heap…
the murders are up, and they’re coming in sprees.
The gravedigger, grieved, mutters as he breathes:
‘What is it, to be born into this? What is it to be dead to…?
What is it to be something?
…if we’re looking at each other like we’re already dead…’.

8.1.2

Can we go for a walk? fed up with this Gordian knot
in which my tongue and hands have got entangled.
The “language game’s” been played,
and there never is a “winner”, and right now
I’m some tense amateur,
ruddy at them having given trophies.

How much of life put to the training of strides?
the flexing and stretching of chords?
just to be in surer step with the rest of them.
How much put to the making of a name?
on these open-ended fields.
How much has my heart beat while upon them?
sore, yet still pulsating,
spiriting beyond delay and exhaustion,
and I lost track of which wind I’m on.

8.1.3

That turn-around after which
I gradually began to lose sound of the kid
that used to run beside me.
Looking only forward just to get ahead
to the imaginary mark set there
miles beyond where I then was.
With blurs in the peripherals of my vision,
but the clearest image in the center,
throwing over any who would step into the picture,
or whatever it was which happened in the way.
With some strength I didn’t know before,
propelling me to the place I aimed to go,
that left a heap of broken things,
and a host of others hurt…
who I likely would have otherwise cared about,
had I slowed.

8.1.4

Likely that I have been at times too invested in imaginations,
in envisionings, and descriptions, and distinctions,
and structures and systems and so on…
trying to salvage a relationship
by putting it to the Hegelian dialectic
might have been one of them.

“Bad Air!”,
exclaimed Nietzsche,
“Bad Faith!”,
interjected Sartre…
’bad move’, lipped Wittgenstein,
the morning after a night of alcohol and ice cream,
the gadfly, out of the bottle,
buzzing circles ‘round my head.

And now might be another,
caught up in with the self-deconstruction
of my dodgy soul.
With the usual vertigo
as I approach the threshold of an interesting book,
but always, with each, a leap of its own.
Preparing for the leap of faith I am to make
to be more wholly joined, and
bracing for a fall…
but I leap out to a vacuum,
with little sense of direction at the start,
for any where out here’s as good as any.
Pseudo-swimming with the space dust, floating,
and floating, and poking passing objects
into alternative trajectories.

And since there is no ground out here on which to stand,
I think I’m going to need at least a paper bag
to keep anything together…freaking out by now,
not having braced my agoraphobia for space.
So can I get a bit of gravitation?
or a planet? core? or star?
around which both these fragments and myself
could turn…
preferably before we’ve drifted any further from the earth,
lest we stray too near another vortext.

To be prized into more bits, it’s dangerous out here, I sense:
‘nothing but the text’.
Surrounded by the stars,
pouring lights on through the dark.

Then seek you sun into my night,
never will you span me full!
I am everywhere you’re not.
The darkness of my heart outruns you,
perpetually lagging after
my absence.

8.1.5

Soooo welcome to your brain? am I just here to entertain?
float around and tickle your neurons?
Or tease your strongest (or weakest) associations?
and (re)make a presence? or cause a confusion?

’Seems you like debunking, so this probably isn’t suiting,
ruined, if excitement’s in the sleuthing.
For I am just a bluff, the earthen layers well within my crust
face you exposed,
gnarled ribs like roots over my side.
The wild grasses of my skull
drip with the muses dew through morn’,
before dispersing with the sun.
And so I live for dusk, to drift off with the dark,
leaving some trick-like treats to any
who would chase me into night.

8.1.6

But I have sensed some kind of stirring with you,
jolting as would lightning through the storm,
a flash of the lantern to the sky
before the veil drops again on night.
The heartbeats of the earth,
waking over solitude and silence and security,
lunge at me in the dark…
and I’m shaking with the static sounds of rain
thrashing so relentlessly against the room
that it’s seeping through the crevice and the cracks.
’Held up inside trying to waterproof the window,
but now it’s falling from the ceiling
and it’s filling through the floors…
during the deluges of the winter fallout
that we’ve been in for years.

These broods of my heart are doubling on a daily
and the tissue’s soon to burst apart.
Gatherings go spilling out the fissures
by the sights and sounds
and whatever else strikes my senses.
And I go on clearing out the overflowing aquifers of my soul
for what better can I do when I am brimming?

8.1.7

So long dammed up by now
that the badly poured poor quality concrete
is cracking at the seams.
The gravel was not thick nor strong enough
for this stint of time and weight of water,
and the weatherings of winter
have eroded all the slabs.
Evacuate the towns and farms for comes these waters
flooding down, in blatant sublimations spilling outward from the springs…
flooding down, the spillways to relieve these pressures
weighing on my head…
flooding down “the pent-up aching rivers” of my sacrament.

8.1.8

These ‘I’s flash like lightning, these ‘you’s churn like suns,
whorl like pools and whirl like winds
and sit here like some rocks.
And knowing you in abstract isn’t knowing you enough,
beauty’s too unique,
and truth belongs to all.
‘Think the best good I can do then is leave be and let become,
and you can always reach me
in ‘I’s that I was once. ’Just that…
I thought I knew you times before, but ‘always got it wrong,
so I’m spacing you your breathing room,
and breathing in my own.

Well I’ve listened now to hella sides
and the filter’s got a clog,
and I can’t afford to fix the door the two of us tore off.
So I’ve been leaving for my joinings and walking off the falls,
forgetting my relations
for to have more dreams than haunts.
And I finally heard the very word I thought I didn’t want:
I listened to the lilies
and they told me to depart.
Now I’m just a parted lyric poet, in the reaches of the love,
and I’m a gardener gone to work
in our garden of regards.

And yeah, I “remember doing the time-warp”,
let’s not do it again,
for I’ve been staying in the margins
but am living on the fringe.
And I go on blending in,
but can’t seem to fit in,
and still my crotch is sore
from so much straddling the fence.
And I’ve tried to set the record straight
but only made it crooked,
and not to step on toes
but these rooms are so damn crowded.
Writing letters to the worlds I once disowned
to make amends,
knowing well the looks I get when I give,
but not when they are read.

8.1.9

“Ah, dear father, graybeard” I say thank you,
for never being one who’d yell the kids off the grass,
because I was that kid once, who asked you about it
with a wisp fetched from your yard.
“What is the grass?”
and you went straight into your head,
walked off without response.
As if going on an outing,
searching for a vista,
sensing where you’d step to find your view.
And so we followed from our distance,
the tracks you left were vivid,
easy to detect along the earth.
We knew you were aware of our snooping, and exhaustion,
as you turned, but didn’t stop,
just hollered “son”, “shoulder your duds”,
‘or come lean on my cuff’.

“Lonely old courage-teacher”,
I’ve held myself up by your hip so many times
that I wonder if you’ve not tired of my leanings.
And wonder, further, if I’ve yet returned the favor,
for abler now to brace you.
A mentor then, a friend since, my springtime visitation,
for what reason I can’t say.

Often stunned when I look again to then,
that I left to catch up…
and wonder what would be had we not been introduced
that day late in May.
I envision being with him, my twin, then, and again,
on reading the letter he left me in your book,
and weep.

8.1.10

Would I ignore him even here in vision? would I
glance there at his weary eyes and walk away again?

Things came at me too fast my twin, I ask:
had they for you?
One instance of becoming after the next, and I, then,
speechless, have been lagging behind since…
running to catch up to everything which seems further along,
or at least elsewhere, out of reach.
Still flailing, in an eerie luminescence, for others,
and for understanding.
Still moved on, now more vigorously onward,
by dint of sensing daily more my death.
Trying to get a word in with life, so busied it is, but,
stopped in my tracks, for sensing too our birth…
your presence from a note, I am solemn, again,
in sensing so our solitudes.
As if regards would make up for anything. I’d hope, for you,
they might.

Unheard from in life, and seen as was seen,
and did enough to make things different?
Just couldn’t say it right in person,
couldn’t show it much in public…
so leave these for your reciprocated invocations
if you should ever choose to call:
The things I wish I could have said, the ways in which I wish
I could have said them.

I just didn’t understand it then, in the moment,
and it’s taken me many moments more of solitude
to make any sense of it…
and many moments more of silence
to be able to say anything well enough about it.

8.1.11

Speaking with ancients and up-dateds alike; carrying on
our conversation…through crowded solitude
and loud silence; through dense shadow of night.
Forsake it though! if I cannot sit in with
this silence any longer;
as if one more turn would settle it…
the thing about peace:
it often isn’t only ruined in the moment.
“The forest primeval”, unyielding, yelling still,
hwooing through the pine trees of my conscience.
Restlessness, rustling through the leaves of lonely oaks;
harrowing my sojourns.

Laying in bed alone at night,
listening to the noises of the other animals outside:
the dog, barking, and a howling,
and the howlings…and its yelping and its crying
through the snarling and the gnashing,
and the silence.
Laying in bed alone in morning:
the they-thens, chirping with the rise,
defrosting my consciousness
with the waves of their wings and chords;
gladdened to remind the me-now of my abandon
to solitude.
While I’m baying to the murmurs, and will not lose the scent!
running off headlong headstrong into the wilds,
running toward my ends.

And yes, though things were never so enlivened, admittedly,
I’m frightened…this breath of death over my shoulder,
heaving more I flee, ceasing when I seek,
cacklings surrounding my callouts
as I wander through the night.
And I whisper, solemn, to myself, while staring into space:
forlorn, forlorn, forlorn, forlorn.

8.1.12

Singing of the self, and its belonging to a kosmos
of industries and passions turning ’round New York.

Silent in soul
as a dusk begins its looming over Denmark.

Shrieking up ‘the scream through smoking skies’,
burdened on the bustling roads of Oslo.

Sighing on the “dry sterile thunder with no rain”
for the scorched earth scarred by trenches across Europe.

Howling with ‘the minds destroyed by madness’
on the rooftops, streets, and parks of San Francisco.

8.1.13

As before, the spring rain is stirring these ribs
protruding from my spine, revealing, briefly,
what has taken place, before urging me on.
Yes, roused now for becoming, but disoriented,
and distressed, and disillusioned,
for what the last however-many years have wrought…
my cosmos in chaos, the sense made, unmade,
the dull roots,
dead or dying.

For every spring keeps bringing out more bodies,
temporarily buried during winter under snow,
frozen, so, preserved
after dropping in the fall to war…
and I am in with those who here have fallen,
my arm extending upward,
wrist loose, weak from exhaustion…
reaching through my index finger,
at what exactly,
I can’t discern…
and utter: “April is the cruelest month”.

7

7.1

The near to distant future is glaring in my eyes,
with the glimmer in my irises
as I look at high horizons.
While the sun is setting on this day
and is rising on my night.
As broad as mountains, the near to distant future,
spread out in its fullness just before me,
still here I sit.

For it is not just one event which I am grappling with, no,
I stare through to the end, with restless legs,
impatient.
Wanting to vault the steps which would make it manifest
and suspect that one decision now
could settle all the rest.

And I attempt to still my nervous jerks this way and that,
my jittery hands…
the gap seeming as if
it’s getting greater as I mind it.
Ominous skies impose upon my retinas,
vacantly my pupils skitter about the clouds…
I look around, but am not certain of what I’m looking for,
or at.

And I entertain a doubt or two,
but in truth I’ll say it’s seized me by the soul.
And say I know which way my heart would choose,
but something’s markedly unsure.

7.2

On the void at the edge of “life”, those already inside
tell me theirs is the lead I should let be my guide.
So I linger at the precipice,
seeking to find some way they missed,
waiting for the void to split an inch
and give its blessing.
But the moment now is nearing
and I must make a decision.
Crucial at this crossroads, o if if I had the vision
of the best possible living.
Conscience calling not to give in, and I would gladly stay
but they’re urging so my presence.
Say I should go with them, say my welcome’s well worn out,
that home’s not one I grew up in.

7.3

What now? Now…I wait for a send. There is no sign
discernible enough for me
to make the kind of judgment appropriate or accurate
for a situation such as this.
This is as new to me as it is to you,
and I would no doubt misread the sign
unless it came at me directly.
So now I wait for word. For I’m ready to go, or ready to go
a different way, another way; the pieces,
aright, after all these years, are in place,
with people I don’t really trust,
and the processes have already begun.
But I am stuck here indoors, on guard,
until a simple “yes” or “no”,
or a letter full of questions and concerns,
or a list of the steps to course,
finds me as I am.

About all else I can do for now is pace, or sit, or pace, or sit;
or sleep…like shit. And wake in night
alone again, or watch, affixed
the sun, my eyes: its set, there on the adjacent bank
of the river of my sacrament.
Day by day this dragging on of hope, or even faith,
is thinning out my psyche…
and I admit that I’m afraid to think of what will happen to me
if what I gave away this time
is rejected or refused.

7.4

‘We’ll see’ is the phrase
I’ve been saying more than any other these days.
The most ‘at a loss’ I’ve ever been
about what’s going to happen with my life.
Trying not to flee the anxiousness
any more than I already have…
closing the blinds just to sit with it a while, away from day,
dimming the sunlight.
My eyes stray, looking at things,
but thinking of other things…
how I may have colored outside of the lines of truth,
and whether or not I traced them right.

7.5

I’ve been too long by now alone in it
to know just how much I’ve withheld,
and how much I could truly give.
And wish I could just live
within the eyes of others,
and not be left dead at and in the distance
which has only gotten further
than it ever was before.

7.6

I must sit here and, or for to, write through,
or with, these tremendous anxiousnesses…
write anything,
when it stills me more than medication.
And go on filling up more pages
with almost empty content,
with not much here needing to be said,
for I think I ought to say it there.

But I have said, and said enough?
or was it really that I said too much…?
I hadn’t thought of such a thing
as being too forthright or honest.

And I scour books
which don’t seem to lend themselves to me
so easily anymore.
Ominous or imposing, intimidating to my soul;
tormented, even terrorized, not to lethargy,
but stupor.

And I cannot shut out their voices,
degrading me with noises,
from people
who will never come
to know of me in person.

7.7

Cornered, so I closed the curtains
so I could hear them.

Startled, so I shut my eyes
to listen.

For when my eyes were open,
my ears drew back defensive…

their gestures
threatened.

7.8

The music is loud
to drown out the sounds
of the voices arising to mind…
where has gone the solitude
in which I am at home?
Spoken at, or about, but never really to,
and so,
I cannot stem the viciousness
that’s been clawing at my psyche.

Listen: they are behind the words,
not in or with them.
And I can only vaguely hear that which is spoken
through that which is said or sung.
But there, it’s there: their voice, a voice,
behind, but also after
and before,
and above, beside, below.
And it is present, but only just:
faintness, from a distance…
the noises which can say enough,
the screams and incantations, the rote
of ritual observances…
and the spontaneity I suspected
was somewhere there within them all along…
if even only stifled.

7.9

I heard a stir behind closed doors
of conniving toward I know not what
or even why I’d be involved
in someone else’s plots.
Yet still my voice, unheard,
is shunned or blocked at every turn,
and I no longer know whether or not
it’s safe to speak aloud indoors
without my being heard.

I sense some camera’s keeping watch,
implanted somewhere in the walls
by those who seem to hold a grudge,
or those who are just bored enough
to make a show of what I’ve done.

And it’s no doubt become irksome
being stalked for information,
or dissuaded from the places
where I once felt most at home.
And I know I’m tender-hearted, sure,
and have my foolish moments,
but have been around enough by now
my heart’s becoming closed…
business nearly has it broken
and mine doesn’t have much left in store.

7.10

Dispirited, utterly, and rather discouraged. To think
that something I’ve been working toward
might not work out.
Something I’ve put so much energy into,
to not be brought to life, and for me to be left with
unfinished projects, and failed ventures.
For the way I’ve been making,
and the path I’ve been following,
to be suddenly blocked, with some sense, this time,
of its finality, of its being at an impasse,
and for me to have to go one of the other ways
I’ve been avoiding…
saps me of vitality.

To think that when I think, I think of this. To think
my hope has gone from me completely, or to think
I’m so confused and overwhelmed by the prospects
that I’ll succumb to the despair
toggling with my confidence
and give up entirely on the kind of life I envisioned
however many years ago
and have been busily making manifest.
Only to have touched, but not to have attained to.

And yet, it is freeing, I suppose, in a way, as well, to think
this might be so.
To put these back-to-back mistakes behind me
and move on.

7.11

I was run out of the towns,
both here, in this one, and there,
in the one I was making myself out to be
prepared for, to step a foot in
and enter into as an equal.
Now the net, too, makes me anxious,
for that has been ground-zero
for the attack upon my psyche
(or in other words, my soul)
one too many times for me
to feel that much at ease with.
And I’m stuck here for now with myself without love,
a bunch of books and a word processing program
and so on and so forth, a sunrise and sunset
and a goal
to not let down the world…
and to not break the promises I’ve made, both to myself
and them. I’ve finally gotten rest, but still
this wait is wearing me thin enough
that the friction’s starting sparks
upon the carpet I’ve been pacing on.

7.12

My feet are numb from pacing,
my soul is dry from writing,
and I am inside dying
to live to see the day.

7.13

There seems no other way than to continue on this course
and walk through its thickets with hope
it lets me out of spurs and thorns…
which shoot into my feet, and stick into my socks,
and scratch around my ankles
and catch my denim at its taper.

Alas it is so yes, no other avenue at which I’d look and feel
more warmly welcomed than this alleyway flanking
the main streets of the downtown of the world…
with its dirty patchy pavement and grimy unwashed red brick
walls, behind the storefronts selling liquor,
where the clerks step back for smokes.

7.14

And I cannot get to sleep so simply in these nights,
for that same dream recurring since my youngest self:
Laying on the lawn in a heavy rain, my back against the grass,
at the first house I grew up in.
Body begins to rise toward the sky,
the water’s running off my skin
in what seemed like a lift, a weightlessness.
Arms sprawled out to the side, hanging as loosely as my legs,
as I ascend for some time, high into the open airs,
head not turning, face seized skyward.
Neglecting left and right, straight up into the gray mass,
a dark matter…breathing in, and
fall, let go? not sure.
Back first toward the ground, breathing out,
ligaments draw upward, spine curves,
head bows forward.
Fell, or let go? Hit the ground,
leaving a concave mark in the earth.
Looking up, rainwater tapping on my irises
and casting blurs over my pupils.
I don’t recall ever reaching whatever it was
that was drawing me up,
or if it was even anything at all.

Then I will fall to earth, again, once more,
after my being drawn toward these ominous skies,
so full of saturation.
For by now whatever it was that’s been drawing me forth
has let me go so often that my indentation in the dirt
is almost through the crust.
So close I’ve come before, enough that turbulences shake me,
but still I’ve not yet made it
over through the weathering.
It wears me to be so within reach
and yet be dropped again,
and feel my back colliding with the grass.
I can’t tell if there’s some invisible cord I’m supposed to grab
and lift myself the rest of the way
into the upper atmosphere.

7.15

Held up in this room now used for storage,
where a peninsula has formed from my unmade bed
someone else has slept in,
and likely slept with someone else in.
Where I’ve laid awake, listening:
the household full of family friends, again,
voices, not just in mind.
Pierces of laughter through the music never paused,
and another sleepless night
on the near-side of alone.

7.16

Melancholy. Homesick, but always home.
And I’ve been drinking everyday, and most days, all day.

There were wide horizons once,
now there’s only what’s in front of me:
a blank page and a blinking line.

It’s come my time to speak. My heart beats against my drums,
and I’m getting quite light-headed
as it fills itself with air.
My hands shake, I hold onto the desk.

My eyes are laying in a bed, the blanket is a page.
My dreams aren’t remembered. I don’t wash the blankets.

Empty stare. What a bustle
I look through.
Home is behind them,
music’s in my ears.
Leaves are sticking to my shoes,
and my socks are wet.

The lighting is dull, the room is lonely…
at least I’m alone.
I eat a salad on the edge of my bed,
the bed is in the kitchen, where the table used to be.

It’s Friday night. Music and chatter
from the bars up the street,
and the house parties down the street,
and the people passing by. I wonder and try to sleep.
The streetlights beam through the bends in the metal blinds.

7.17

Could be for the better though,
for my sake, yes,
but morely so for theirs, for sure…
for I can’t yet see “the brighter side” on my end for all this
anxiousness
which seizes me to be inside.

And I’ve gone lost, and ‘losing hope by now
in just about all others but myself…
and ‘guarded,
but attentive
to the currents passing by these pixels…
one by one they go, and my heart is here, again, alone,
like very nearly every other time.

7.18

Lightning strikes at midnight
all along the mountains,
the storms are on again,
these hills are in upheaval…
this home is strong but shaking,
my soul is inside blazing
again in facing its distresses.

7.19; A Part Apart

Considering myself a part of,
and yet for so long I’ve been apart from.
It’s almost as if half of me is missing,
or as if I have been living in two places all at once.
It’s still here in the dark. I’ve gone so far outside myself
that I can’t shut off the possible-thoughts
others might have when sensing my soul…
having gone and given so many bits of it all
to the world at large.
I am here, staying put,
but my regards are straying to various places…
so many voices,
I no longer can so easily discern my own
among the rest.
I have to speak aloud
to hear my self…
but even this is not enough
to keep for long within first-person.
My pronouns drift to “he’s”, and “it’s”, depending
on whether it is my self or my works
to which is referred.
And I have gone beyond myself or beside theirs:
eavesdropping on hearsay and gossip
about someone who I don’t know if I resemble
at all or all that much anymore.

7.20

They start and do not stop, they stop and don’t return,
when I answer or I ask;
they return in their own time.
Another comes again, another reader I suspect?
I sense perceiving me through text
that sits there just before them.

I pace or lay through night and day,
I fidget in my seat. I wait
and here’s another word
which comes to mind…
from them, or me, I know no longer which
is which. My friend
has fled, and beside them
not a single one
is around to lend a hand.

And I no longer leave my den
to reach them there…
afraid, I am well hid within,
but now
I’d rather be with them.

7.21

They cut the grass
and pile the leaves.

7.22

The hawk flies to a tree,
I hear a screech,
and see a fall.
My walks have not been calm these days of late;
they are ridden with an anxiousness…
they are full with thoughts of home
being invaded…
and it’s now become as if
I’m not quite where I should be,
even on my dailies only five minutes away.
I make it partly through and turn around,
doubling my pace just to get back that much faster.

And I don’t pray these days,
but still commune.
I can barely seem to think anymore
about anything other than horrible things happening
to myself, or someone I love.

And it’s midnight in my psyche
these thoughts are dark I know.
And I wish that I could write about something else,
and thus then give you something more than this…
but my method has become a madness.

Night, no longer standing-in here for
the eerie hush over things all.
Night’s now too with shots and sirens,
with explosions and with silence…
from out of which come voices,
and this is not a joke.

And I think some have mistook me
for the one who made it up.

7.23

Have patience, and faith,
give thanks,
through these:
our days of tribulation.

7.24

Exploring the great indoors,
during these late night writes
of a psyche finally freed.
Given over early
to the nature
which consumes me.
Where I am of,
but not yet in,
the world.

7.25

It would be nice to be again unknown, the things I’ve said,
not left in anybody’s memory, my face,
unrecognizable, unnamed,
my figure, mysterious.
The void has been filled,
content goes, for some,
with form;
I mean something to these.
Maybe why I’ve gone to working through night:
so as to not be regarded for a while,
so as to not be thought of as anything,
so as to not be thought of at all.
But absence raises questions…my goal has failed.

7.26

I attempted to belong, and found it that I couldn’t.
I was the wash out with the tides.
I was the rotted plank which needed to be replaced.

That kid’s a piece of work!
That kid’s a brooding storm!

He should have stayed in church…
he’s always staying home.

We put up a facade, you’ll never know who we are.
We hide ourselves in your blind spots.
We are the air in your lungs.
We are the pulse of your heart.
We are the synapses in your brain.
We are the electricity signaling you to go.
We are the spark, but not the burn.

You are not who I thought you were.
“You were the one who broke things.”

You are not who I thought you were.
“You were the one with a plan.”

7.27

I don’t bring much of myself along when I go out into public:
an empty husk
which you fill up
while my soul’s hovering around the environs.

And you don’t see me there above you in the rafters:
the puppeteer, pulling the strings,
both those you think are on me
and those you didn’t know existed.

And barely do you hear me underneath your firm foundations:
a poltergeist
making noises
from the basement
of the established.

But do not look for me in rafters,
do not look for me beneath your feet,
do not look for me behind your forehead
for it will only suite your fancy,
and I hide myself beyond ‘hello’.

7.28

Power out…
Barista 1: “What do we do?”
Barista 2: “Well…nothing”.

7.29

Making room for the muses to move me,
if they should choose to do so.
Waiting in the dark at night
for a summons
from the nether realm or the ether regions:
spirits! wisp before me and I start,
staring down the hall
is there something there I cannot see?
which can see me…
some creature, staring back at me from the other side.

Is there something in the rooms
waiting for me too,
to walk in unawares
and sleep there while it stares?
I hear the floorboards creaking,
I hear a gentle scratching,
I hear an eerie tapping on the thin white wooden walls.
I hear a subtle breathing, see orange eyes,
teeth and claws…

see the deathbed and the birthright,
see the letters and the laws.

7.30

We are heavy-hearted, but we are not yet hard-hearted,
though at times I wish it were so
for it seems you get further along
in having less attachments.
In being so detached, I wrote before, too much,
and it outran me, or
ran me into thickets
before I knew what was going on.
And I freed myself from them only
to find myself floating
barely conscious of where I was going
or what I was doing there at all.
The nothingness, no,
the meaninglessness,
my turning nihilistic
generations after it had gone so out of fashion…
always too late,
always too early,
and always ever out of place,
and surely always yearning.
And filling this void in which I’m floating
with stuff.

7.31

I’m already on a walk before it starts,
there, on the dirt and earth and asphalt
my soul yearns
to be outdoors
with the pine trees and the oaks
and the flowers and the brush…
for these insides haven’t spoken a word to me
in months,
and out there I can speak aloud,
and mutter to myself,
and guess that trees and plants have heard things
no one else has, yet.
Expressing thoughts with my hands, my fingers
and my palms open and close,
releasing the energies of my experience as I pass,
leaving footprints in the dirt, and dirt-prints
on the asphalt.
And gravel from the road
wedges itself in the furrows of my soles,
goes falling off my shoes
from the friction underfoot.

The trees sing in the breeze
in a language my ears cannot yet understand.

7.32

The gravedigger’s been busy:
six feet of earth each:
for God, humanity, history, art, and the author…

the funerals were set for Sunday
but the hearses arrived empty…

the crowd seemed rather displeased.

7.33

The index finger I once felt to be nearly touching mine
has portaled elsewhere with the rest of the body
of which it was a part.

And I am alone in a painting
that’s been on a ceiling for centuries.

Generations have come and gone as I look off,
seemingly indifferent,
but I am not:

I have turned my head to hear them,
I have laid back for to listen
to the murmurs of processions,
and the shuffling of feet,
and to the awe and solemn incantations
and what’s there buried underneath.

6

6.1

This arid earth like cottonmouth,
on the tongue of these twin valleys.
Shriveled airs despair the vale
and stale soil cracks under my steps.
Not ten degrees relief by night when coughs again by eight,
rising every hour with a wave.
Would suffocate the day but for these oven-winds of summer,
thrashing up the orchards and the vines.
Fire season, danger:
high…
and everything around here’s tinder.

And I’m walking after dusk, unable to sleep,
on a footpath by the river.
The hills have been on fire
for a week.
Ash has eclipsed the stars
and shaded the full moon orange.
Whatever it was which led me here
has gone.
I see only what’s above: busy shadows
along a row of old oaks.
And hear only what’s below: my feet on gravel, grass,
then dirt.

6.2

I was not prepared for this…
and I realized only too late
that I had no notion of what I was getting myself into.
Now I’m half-way to the destination, yes,
the middle of the journey, and I can see far
in the direction of both the destination
and the point of departure.
There was a gradual change in the beginning,
where bit by bit of what I thought was altered.
And now there is a barrens between me and my homecoming:
dry will be the days, hot will be the nights,
and dust will rise up underfoot.
I will shield myself from sun,
I will sweat and I will groan
and I will thirst after mirages.
And I will not be happy, but will tell myself
that if I make it past these barrens I’ll be well.
Would I give up another happy day
for that life that I’ve envisioned?
Will I continue to believe it
or believe it is a lie?
Can I not just have hope for something else
and go in a different direction?

6.3

And to think, we could have avoided this,
had we turned ourselves to the left or right
those miles back, or at the start.
Yes, had our starting point been different,
had we turned when not this far in
for we are too far along now to turn back.
And lose these many grounds we’ve gained
all at once, it’s not enough
to make us so unsure of where we’ve got.
And yet we are unsure, yes yes and yet, that other path
those many miles back jetting off the main
has come to seem a welcome.
For here we are, in the middle of the wilderness,
with no other ways presented for our steps,
unless we’d walk headstrong into the thickets.
For a path is one which others wore
and now there’s none to follow.

Must we follow? shall we set? and tear the leaves of grass
from stem with only feet and shins?
We don’t have to, do we want to?
stay on this straight and narrow
while the core of our soul is about to scream or sink.
We’ll stay put, I’m sure,
and bring ourself to the breaking point,
if we have not yet come upon the means to break.
Off, or out, or in, on, or away, off onto that other way
that’s jetting from the main.
Out of these canopies and thickets,
into the world which we once knew…
changed as it will be,
well along without us I am sure.

6.4

‘Definitely makes me feel somewhat ridiculous by now
to think that I have been living in this way.
Which other way, by now, is there for me to live?
I’m too far down this path as it is…
and they didn’t make it all that easy
getting over to a new one.
It would be years before I make it through the thickets
adjacent to the way I’ve walked…
so overgrown in these parts,
that I can’t quite see the other side…
save but in some tinselings of the light.

But he got off the trails and his path and stays put,
he speaks in third person
to gain some distance from himself,
he sits, somewhat stooped, and utterly stumped
as to what went wrong and how to make it right.
He stares out of the window from between the metal blinds
while the sunlight passes by
from one side of the house to the other,
and waits for words
which rarely come.
While the pine trees jostle with the grazings of the breezes
and the oak leaves bustle
with the gustings of the winds,
and whatever it is responds
to whatever it is.
He sits there not quite stoic as he once was
when he felt he was in steps toward the goal he set
those many years ago. And ages now, it seems, to
him, that eternity before has come between his soul
and the life he had for so long meant to live.

6.5

Is this an impassable obstacle,
or am I just overwhelmed as it is?
Overwhelmed, not by just one thing,
there are several,
and may be that they are simply so petty
as to be off-putting.
The off-putting petty things are in the way
of the major works
which I must get to
if I’m to both fulfill a duty
and succeed in making it somewhere.
Maybe these ends
shouldn’t have been brought so close together…
But so it is.

By now, I have an unpaid debt to society,
and can’t seem to get a job…
and a not-yet-fully-paid loan to the world,
which I’m eager to get around to that much more…
but the world seems to reject me,
‘just keeps pushing me away.
As if there were some force of repulsion at work,
the signs read: “stay out”,
and I so yearn an entrance,
and thought I already paid the price of admittance…
but I must have missed something somewhere along the way,
for otherwise I’d think it wouldn’t be that difficult.
But this one has me stumped,
now it’s as if I were “The Thinker”…
never brought to some resolve,
never reaching a conclusion.
As I sit here pondering instead
to an end I’m either losing sight of,
or an end which isn’t there,
or an endless, open-ended sort of end,
but an end which seems indifferent to my efforts.
For what then might it be? enjoyment? enlightenment?
is it simply conversation, or communion?
for the sake of itself?
for the sake of something else?
I’m lost, or at a loss, and am in need of some direction,
or a hand to help me out
of this abyss I seem to have dug myself.

6.6

How far have I got from where I was?
only now recalling my younger-self
at the start of my walk.
Confused, and nearly lost,
and on my own with some books
and a beaten heart repairing itself.
And the bruises left no mark or trace
which I could see to sense
its coming along in the process.
Eventually I forgot it even happened,
yet went on saddened even laughing,
as I shied myself that much away from others.
Next thing I know, here I am in the spot in which I sit
for hours on end everyday alone,
sending S.O.S’s through the wavelengths…
to which none have responded, and I’m anxious
that I’ll never leave the island
which Calypso’s tried to make so cozy.
And I’m sensing my defeat in the hands of a warm bath
and a bed in which I sink into the springs
by nights end when I think that I can rest.
Till now I haven’t, and I can’t…not until I clean up this mess
and remake this bed,
and hug the only loved ones I have left,
so I can go on to become the kind of man
I’ve made myself to be.

For now I go on split between two camps, that,
for so long as I have lived, have not stopped yelling
back and forth above each-others heads.
And it’s sometimes like it’s tennis, but I’m usually the net:
‘gets hit time and again
by servers who can’t get beyond the faults.

6.7

There is a stir by seismic activity,
shifts, and upheavals,
for better, or worse,
from frictions at the faults,
and from subductions of my soul.
And I was pressed into the molten core of earth,
and interworked there with the other elements,
before being drawn back up, exploding outward
through the crust, and oozing on out over the edge
of once capped and snow-peaked mountains.
The tensions at the faults they drew
have at last been enough to slip in opposite directions.

6.8

And the alcohol is frothing from the tops of the bottles,
and down the aisles…
and I can very nearly taste it on my tongue as I pass by,
as it goes ’round still within me
in my psyche, and experiences
of a warm-belly full of whiskey,
or a head spinning with wine.
For years they seemed the best, or only, “friends” I had
in lieu of living breathing beings,
and almost seemed to make up for the lack
of fulfilling relationships which has been a plaque
on the teeth of the whole of my young adulthood.
When its enamel was wearing thinner and thinner every year
from corrosive mixtures of the substances
which I over-used.
And it’s taken some care to clean off the gunk
which built up over those years of my estrangement,
and for me to have finally had enough to call-out
my mismanaging my self.

6.9

To what end, I know not…and still have but
vague hints
of something somewhere there afar
toward which I’ve been moving,
even when I wasn’t going
anywhere beyond my room.
And at one time or another I lost sight of it entire,
and a chasm opened up below me,
swallowing
my whole being
in an abyss of despair.
When I succamb to my distresses, put faith into my vices,
and fell completely out of touch with others,
and existence
slipped out from my grip, I floated in an empty space,
and went on with my routines
without any sense of what I was,
or what I was doing there at all.
Which wasn’t much but typing,
but the type,
just turned and twisted,
and I didn’t write anew…
What now?
need I some rite of passage
for to be a sign that I got through
my younger self and on to full adulthood?

6.10

And it’s becoming quite a bother:
this lack of all response from any other
who would care to walk beside with me a while.
But who can find the time?
which has been lost on the hunt
of ‘looking out for number one’.
Who, if found, would every spend it
on a gift for those they left
for that which they have loved?
And who could ever find the vein of gold
which was buried long ago,
and kept well within this earth,
when it was just walked all over or even passed right by
during the fray of the foray for a dime?

6.11

How is it I’d maintain any sense of self in such conditions?
in this aloneness,
without feedback,
reverberations of my soul rarely returning.
Speaking aloud
with unresponsive airs, here
in the scattered fragments of my particularity,
informing universals.

6.12

Writing trying to find my self,
or conjure it from out of verse,
and every time I tried it fled,
and what emerged did not return.

6.13

I was nearly slandered out of my existence,
and I fell off from the face of earth.
I had to draw up, as from a well, and bring forth every aspect
of my self which had been buried…
which lay there, waiting, underneath,
in the aquifers of my being…
so that my soul was at last able to see, and be seen,
and hear, and be heard.
And I’m unsure if the cavern which was left
is stable enough not to collapse in on itself,
but hold firm for those who might walk upon the patch
of the land with hollowed walls below it.
The arch at its top
has become but a thin crust
as others have not yet seemed to stop digging up or at
its foremost layers.

6.14

Fighting back,
the vices of my past besiege me.
I suspected one intruder, easy to deter,
but I looked and sensed the force
of legion at my door.

And I thought that I was keeping a hold of myself,
but alas, I found that all along
the clash eroded my defenses.

And I’m standing at this gate now sliver-thin
rally-crying out: how strong, o god,
against this must I be?!

6.15

Let this be what leads you,
it is the only way we’ve gotten anywhere.
And yet, it hasn’t gotten us out, it has rather kept us in
with a sense of needing to be here…
where the conditions seem more conducive
to the demands of such a thing as this.
But, where also, my vices would harass me
with their scabs upon my psyche,
which I pick at when they’re itchy…
and reopen all my old wounds
all at once.

The loneliness, the smoking,
drinking and yet thinking that my psyche is still sure.
My wrong-doings and the dodgy things I did
to make them into something more…
into something more than flaws and faults and failings.

And, bleeding, I would hermit there for months,
while the old wound’s covered up again
by a fresh new patch of skin…
so rough to the touch,
so irksome that this cursed thing
won’t just heal in full…
and leave a knotting of flesh in the place
where the tears were made
by the nails.

6.16

Making the furrow all the more noticeable as I go. The earth,
becoming finer and looser, the plow,
becoming heavier under my weight
as I lean more of it on the grips of the handles.
And I’ll say now that sometimes it seems as if this ox
has led me to where it wanted to go,
and I’ve just held on and followed
from not too far behind…
and it’s been grazing, and I’ve been absent-
minded, looking upward
at the skies: ominous and orange, the sun,
just below the mountain line
on the western side of the valley…
the sign for us to end our work and go home.

The full-moon’s in the east
just after the night begins.
I’ve often wondered about this river
which is flowing in between us…
and the mountains surrounding me on all sides save one,
and the ocean beyond those in the west…
and the expanse beyond those in the east,
and the wilds among those in the north.
And I could follow the current of this river southward
and be at ease in open spaces…
and see for miles in any direction
with that river still between us,
or those mountains still around.

6.17

Looking down the hallway of your past
at but a corridor of closed door after another,
locked after you passed…
with loud music drowning out the knocks
you’d give to see if they would open.
And you’re pacing with these omens following you at home,
outdoors, and to the only kind of work
which you’ve been able to perform.
And by now are so buried in your modes
that you cannot fathom doing anything else
or other than that which would, on a daily,
dog your steps.
So you’re relented, going mad,
resigning in the midst of those
your heart no longer goes to.
The ones who once had loved you…

And on the brink now of inhuman,
and you feel you’ve been mistreated,
that some unfair life-tax
has been imposed on you your whole life
now in pieces. And in ruins
is the life you then envisioned you would live.
Now nothing more is precious to you than a respite
from the torments by which you are surrounded,
at the weeks-end when you do as you see fit,
but even then, in this, you’re only met
with what now has
your warrior-like spirit weakened.

6.18

But we got too close to fire, and, so riled, reckless pyro,
burnt,
out of our enthusiasms straightway to exhaustion.
And now we’re bulwarked by a distance,
tired but always restless, out here on our ownsome
and devoid of all commitment.
Floating in the empty space of instant satisfactions,
pushed on by whatever force
in absence of direction.

And tell me then, are you unable to see
what we’ve become here in our distance?
With a thrashing soul, a heart still pulsing heavy,
yearning for a homecoming,
and even just one other to pass along through life with.
Ambivalent by now toward both, for the length we have to go
without any certainty of arriving
at an unknown unfamiliar destination.
And the loss that we’ve endured these many years
of looking back and forth with doubt,
with uncertainty, and regret,
and almost ceaseless longing.

And we lost our love for this?!
and I guess this was the better?…
and may be it is best that we admit it to ourself,
so we might at last be at home.
When this is who we are, whether or not we like it,
for it’s all that we have been these many years.
 
And we’ve tried to make friends, we’ve tried to fit in,
we’ve tried to fall in love again,
but we’ve been stuck here in this spring,
in rebirth since our birth…
and it’s become so very dizzying
to have an end as ours in view
while ever tarried right before the start,
wondering when we will begin.
The rest have seemed to be moved on into winter,
huddled warmly, close together,
in decorated homes.

6.19

I look out from my aloofness,
so long sailing into the winds and the tempests
that landing seems a little less than home-like.
For out here I befriended undulation,
whether it was tranquil or was violent.
And became more familiar with the seagull and the serpent
than the Graeco-Roman pillars
or the fruit of good and evil.

But no longer am I timid of the deepest parts of earth:
the lava and the soot that have been pooling
from the oceans floor, or the magnificent creatures
in the most imposing leagues.
The pressures which have crushed me twice before.

But, unapproachable, and not so much aloof,
or so I heard it said:
that I’m a stoic in a solemn stance
with a leave-me-alone-like look in his eyes…
and a misguided religious sense of obligation
to an existence he’s envisioned and projected
misting from his skin, intimidating with the distance
which he’s putting in between us.

And yet for all this all along I have been attempting to express
the way I feel about you and us and this
and the way you make me feel about myself.
But the signals I send keep on slipping from my grip
and you read about my sins in them instead
…or you read about yourself.
Seems though I must admit that either way is well
in that, whoever you might hear here
would be either you or me.

6.20

And the rolling off my fingers and my tongue
run me into a ground by dawn.
And there are flickers from the part of my soul
with little hope…
I cannot help but show you here
for bleeding through my censors.
And I see now it wasn’t anger
for surely it was sadness,
so often I confuse these.
And in this way I’m drained,
whatever that worked up with me,
released.
And of all the energies I’ve routed here
will any of them transfer?
From the ‘X’
who is no longer matter.

5

5.1.1

You’ve welcomed me into your presence
with quite a mighty storm, o river that I am beside.
I came to this home upon your banks,
and face the possibility of its change.
And am, at once, afraid
of your waters as they’re rising now to reach me.
Of your current in increasing speed
advancing just beyond me.
And the earth and rock and tree debris
that’s bounding down this art’ry.
As it’s carried southward out to be released to the pacific.

Pacing anxious near your banks so long
I’ve left a path in steps…patterning infinity,
the circle folded on itself.
When next, in turn, inside I look,
and ponder what I there perceive…
as our ever fires warm-orange hues
are provoking me to speak.
Shadows have danced without relent along the walls
since eve and dawn. The fire they put on in fall
won’t be put out until our spring.
And the winter here’s been sending storms,
and now I need some light to see.
And the valley’s not as cold as I’ve it made out to be.

And through it night draws into day,
clouds converge to cover sun,
and lightning struck the grid, shot through,
and burnt up all the bulbs.
Electricity has been put out
and something in the night here stirs…
I go to greet the dark and pray for moon.

5.1.2

The lull during the day was break enough for comprehension,
but now its force has come in full.
The rain’s as dense,
the winds are worse.
This time, unlike before, my worry is not hollow,
not here, along this river,
at the beginning of the storms.

Hearing light drops as they thicken, the gutters even ticking
outside the front room where I sleep
and the back in which I work.
Reverberates abruptly, from a rhythm to a thrash…
it must have come in dreaming
because it wasn’t there when I went to bed.
I woke to gentle tapping,
on a flat roof like a drummers pad,
resembling my rested heart.
And I lay there for a while
waking with consciousness defrosting
‘longside the longer dawns of winter…
till my mind realized the fury and my eyes threw open
in an angst to face, in darkness, omens staring
piercingly upon my soul.
Here…at the origins of the arc of the rest of all my days,
worry’s come now dense and heavy
with the floods I can’t escape.

5.1.3

Ah yes, before, my child-like-side of heart
had startled with these hints of storm…
the rising rain,
stirring me from needed sleep.
I’d lay there restless in the darkness
and wouldn’t wake up rested.
Stressed to throw off the covers
and step beyond the precipice of the room.
With wakings weight set upon my resting head,
indenting itself that much further into the pillow.

My tired eyes still tied together in their rest
release themselves with warm anticipations.
My lips slightly crick to the right side of my face
in a soft and subtly mischievous smile.
They may as well be opened in bright display of teeth
with gladness to be shown.
I throw off blankets and on old clothes and go greet the day
with haste but not with stress and not with woe…
for to be with it is to again witness and be in with
the furies of the river from the rages of the storms…
and see, through these thickened grayish hues,
two peaks atop the distant snowy range.

The rain’s sideways, heaved by the winds,
pushing it from its falls.
The currents from its calmer saunters
rush to reach pacific shores…
and be moved out with the tidal shifts and discharge into sea,
to mix these freshened waters with the salt.

5.1.4

And I ask the rain, dismayed:
when did you reach us?
And question then the wind: my twin,
when was it you arrived?
Did the stillness break so sudden sometime
hidden in the night?
Or had I been so deep within my work or dream
that I was merely not attentive?

For it seems the storm is on again,
but I hadn’t sensed its stirring:
turning from the silence, into murmur,
into mania.
It seems the floods aren’t far again,
but I didn’t take the warning:
when the calm narrower discharge of the river
became mighty.
At mid-night I was on its banks
and it’s covered them by morning:
advanced upon the place I sat
watching the moon in phasing.
I woke from rest feeling refreshed,
as if with nature I were friendly,
but nature’s message: “not like this”
by dawn was reading plainly.

5.2

Four other people in the house this week,
and I’ve still been alone?
All along they’ve sat beside me, walked around me…shucks,
they’ve even hugged me.
I’ve sat with that stare at my back,
working through the distraction of being seen.
I’ve walked into they’re minds
and out their mouths.
And I hugged them like a stuffed-bear:
cuddly, and lifeless.

5.3

Farewell to the world which brought me into being,
which isn’t gone but went from me…
off onto an out of the way place,
away from the mistakes I made.
‘It is as but a dream’. That face surmised but never seen
has grown beyond its recognition.
Has gone afar
and has been searching…
for a place to be alone,
or a way to walk the eve’ and morn’…
while something there invites my soul
to be where it’d be at home.

In dark and heading toward the dawn,
in an always ever between days,
while orange hues wrestle with the walls,
while on through caverns in this cave.
With just myself and no one else,
with nothing but a torch in hand,
and pools of water at my feet,
and wondering how this will end.

5.4

Detachment,
from everything,
and everyone seems distant.
But it is not a numbness that now grips me,
it is just detachment, from everything,
and everyone seems distant.
The draw-bridge is brought up, the mechanism,
stuck or locked, I cannot tell which,
don’t care to fix it or find out.
And I burned up all the boats I built,
reach me, if you must,
in your own.
For this detachment,
from everything,
and everyone seems distant.

There’s a river in between us,
upon the banks of which I perform my sacraments…
a visible sign of the gap
between our graces.

And I rise to a ritual which doesn’t end till evening.
Performing various ceremonies
interspersed throughout the day.
Communing with the makers and the angels of my existence.
Writing letters which I’ll never send,
and poems which I’ll never speak.

Seeing colors, shapes, and figures
without discerning any details…
of lovers friends and mothers
but I am not any of those.
And sitting here in solitude, cross-legged, spaced and solemn,
watching over waters as they pass along these banks.

Then stir a fire inside to sit in with the shadows,
and pace between the darkness
and the orange flickering hues.
Chanting incantations
in a low, gravely, whisper,
making myself worthy for a muse.

And hear the dense and solemn tones
as we join in with the chorus!
Yes hark! our calling out to night,
in whispers, of our broods!

And let me leave aside my whiles
and be joined in with the ancients,
or let me be vaulted to the future
and turn up in years to come…
for as much as I’ll speak praises of the present,
I am most in the after or before.

5.5.1

You’ve walked this path every day,
it may as well be your own path.

And you sense when it’s right to give it up,
like when the winter comes.

But it’s not the cold which keeps you from it, no,
it is the floods, the heaving sideways rains, the storms.

For though you can walk when you are soaked,
you cannot walk a path that’s six feet under water.

So you, quite wisely, forgo,
and find a different path to walk…today.

5.5.2

We’ve gotten off the path
and I suppose we’ll make a new one,
with a hardly discernible indent
veering just off of the main.
Our boots will leave their imprints in the sediment
and with time and many steps
will hedge the wild grass,
discouraging them from rooting there again
on the once loose dirt we packed down and made firm.
We’ll find ways through the thickets
and we’ll take on all the thorns.
We didn’t bring the bandages so we’ll leave a trail of blood.

Others will see the way we’ve made,
may be inclined to walk it,
and will not know the name
nor would recognize the face
of we who first had had it felled.
This vista is our gift to them
if they should choose to take it,
regardless we will have made a way
through to wherever from the main.
Note it all who passes by, with wonder who first walked it:
why they’d be inclined to step so through the forest?
what was it about the wilderness?
And ask: does it dead-end or is it a better lead?
if we took it where would we end up?

5.5.3

We must not give up any ground we’ve made,
lest we fall back into the old ways.
The ways we walked away from
for good reason with good riddance.
When we saw in them, from long experiences with,
how they led us wrongly.
Dead-ended us in thickets, coaxed us into quagmires,
and we made our way through, sweaty and exhausted.
Came out on the other side the better,
but we’re not going back, lest we be foolhardy.

And though we stare into the dark,
we know this place around us.
We’ve heard these sounds before,
we’ve sensed this breath upon our necks.
We ascertain the way ahead
and discern there is no danger.
For we are certain of what must be done
to see us safe through night.
It’s overcast but the fire’s bright,
and this is not to be our end.

5.6

Lend me your twisted convulsions,
your disorienting memory.
The scattered pasts,
more present than the earth on which I sit.
The absences never to be filled again,
save but in reflections
evoking but a remnant of the mood.
The solemn part, a sliver of the hues, a chip off the whole,
searching through the fragments of a span of time
for to sort them and to better see
when lain out on the desk.
Sifting up the settled sediment
for no gain but to swim in muddled waters.
Meddling with the muses in the night,
drawing from the deepest wells.

5.7

Parallax of the last streetlight at the end of the drive,
flickering through the nights
outside my wide expand of window.
In the center of my forehead if in looking solely at it:
my reflected face, its background,
as it takes hold of the fore.

But when I look upon the window,
drawing back my focus from the distance
to the reflection not but four feet from my nose…
something subtle happens to the streetlight:
the single standing orb disperses into two…
the warm orange glowing globe
spreads sideways over eyes…
the soft flickering hue
separates off into my pupils…
and the lines emitting from the light
nets across my sockets

And there the dint which glints upon
the upper parts of my irises…
which brightens their blue edges
with a fire-like luminescence…
that hinges on the higher reaches at the surface of the retina,
brings out of the border the relations of its pattern.

5.8

But the sky still finds the whiles to smile
and the earth is smiling with it…
while the planet sits in orbit
oblong on in its rotations.
The slow dance mid the multitude
has finally reached its chorus.
And our steps are somehow surest sometime
mid-way through the year.

As this inward tilted hemisphere is rotating on its axis,
the airy light blue irises of the sky
are edged by spreading clouds of white.
And the very core of earth spurts forth
for churning by the sight
of something closer in its space…
and looks up overhead at night
into the pupils
drawing distances again.

For howsoever many miles far off there
the glinting stars evoke its thoughts…
when sky’s no more but the lack of light,
the absences, the dark.
Sea’s tapping the full moons strings
and land is left in shadows and the semblances of sun.
Nothing more can now be done but wait for what’s to come.

5.9

I continue on my walk, happily meandering. And look beside
and start, elated in heart to see a Heron…
ahhhh, I whisper to it, I see you often in your flights
and cannot cease to help but say a praise.
Such a beautiful thing we are together,
your brilliant stature, and I cannot avert my eyes…
as I walk softly on the path beside
so as not to startle you as you had started me:
Standing on the waters edge, hunting in the shallows
where the water meets the land, the sun sets.
Rays are reflecting off the top of the current moving still,
in the gentle undulations, in the turning of the currents
for the water caught in toe.
Your plume slightly raised, your legs, bobbing back
as you meander same as I…I stop to look a moment, you stop to look at me,
we nod our heads and leave each other be.

If only it were as easy as it is with these water birds,
at home along the rivers banks.
But, for me, the draw to it is so strong
because it’s so out of reach,
and, once attained, so difficult to keep.
But I have sensed it, belonging, in a place
that’s not too far away, in a state of being
easily attained, at a stretch of time
in which it isn’t kept, there, along the walking path.
Surrounded by the vague contours of some kind
of consummation, and a presence from which
I could not pry myself.
Held me firmly there and then and let me go to nowhere else
beside, I was content with nothing but the river,
and apparently neglectful of the night.

5.10

Bats at dusk and dawn…and mind in times as these
flies in a similar way as they.
Frantic, jagged aerobatics,
seemingly haphazard.
Snatching things up in roughly the same place
at roughly the same times.
Quite unlike the heron,
from point A to B…
with slower wing beats and almost, it seems,
some purpose
beside finding food
and resting upside-down in an exhaustion.

5.11

I see people interacting with each other at a certain time,
at a certain place, every week, without fail.
Entering the doors, between the pillars,
underneath the overhang by the twofold or by fours.
Standing inside in a circle,
discussing things I’ll never know.
Laughing, smiling, shaking hands, making names,
hugging, and leaving to their cars.
As I am seating at the other side
on the banks of the river in between us…
writing alone, reading alone, working alone, ignoring those
who want to do something together…
pushing myself that much further,
every waking hour.
Sensing I am in steps along the right directions, and yet
one moment, or one reflection,
recalls to me these people, these things,
I’d apparently rather not forget.

Coming back from my outings, being moved on to the rest,
and during my falling into sleep and dream,
with my consciousness fading down or zooming out,
I’d hear whispers in my ears of the others
I was with or near
when far away from home.
Trickling back and forth in my canals. Tickling and tapping
my drums. Tricking my brain with voices
and with words and unfinished sentences.
I don’t recall them making any sense, just half-bit half-baked
fits of syntax, and in a thorough mix of tones
and textures and tenses, and a variety of topics,
without any links or relations.

5.12

Of all the walks we’ve had together,
those were the most dreamy,
and this is the most difficult.
There was something so surreal on those walks,
while here,
there is something very real.
Some sense of being stranded,
off away from anyone I knew, off away from anyone
I know, or anyone I could get to know.
Everyone I knew is on, and otherwise
than they were. I wonder
who they have become, but that is all.
I make no effort at anything else,
not to ‘get a hold of’
or contact in any way.

And now? who knows where they are,
what or how they’re doing.
Having lost contact, not caring, really,
to keep up with them.
For we, having chanced in on our acquaintance once,
would chance out of it as well…
and go whichever way we willed,
or whichever way the world would will us.
The way I went has led me here: waiting for the sun,
to go out on a walk…
while the earth around me is still within its waking,
I am at my beginning and my ending.

5.13; For Kristian, To Dark Bird from Red Earth

Have you been made out to be the tallest
of any man there ever was?
Did they dig for those you buried
in the garden with the daisies?

Have you been followed down the gravel road
you walk at dawn to be alone?
Did they startle off the birds you watched
when they hastily approached?

Have you made sense of the whisper
that absorbed into your bones?
Does its cordless voice come through your femur
when you go to graze the chords?

Have you kept alight that little fire
while you flew on through the world?
Does it flicker as you’re growing tired
from being far from home?

Have you at last gone to get some distance
to recover your uncovered soul?
Do you hear it outside while you listen;
it’s songs you haven’t heard before?

Have you there yet been reminded
of who you truly are?
Do you sense your being as it’s lighted
of your self within your song?

And you have now returned from those long years in migration,
to where lullabies are chanted through the night and for our darks.
And off the moon, these many miles away, I sense reflections:
resting on this red earth’s heart, is the daring dark bird’s song.

5.14

I won’t say it was worthless,
it’s just difficult, sometimes,
to say in which ways it was worthwhile.
When I’ve only ended up
an hour and a half away
doing nothing too much different.
Some hometown walkout, who can’t make it on the interstate
to meet them where we were,
when I was other than that which I have become.
But I don’t exactly know what I’ve become,
it shows itself too vaguely:
in fits and starts, in flurries and evasions.
And I’m struck, right in the imagination,
by this troubling situation
which confounds me.

5.15

Calmly, I sit frustrated,
bearing my implosion,
my unseens
writhing in the sunlight.
Madly aware is half my present soul
of how much this hurts, this
withholding
of a world.
A world in which I’d be myself,
because right now this one isn’t enough,
and doesn’t match the actions
I sense I should be taking.

5.16

And this, the only reason I have made it all along,
for I’ve forgotten of my lonesomeness in my pursuit
of a state of being in which I’ve been
so much nowhere else but here.
I’m sure I’ll reach it there as well,
have been keeping with my more than meager habits
to prepare myself for then.
But how long can this go on? when it seems as if
I’ve just been dragging out and hanging on
to whatever life my fading will can muster.
And I’ve gone so far but haven’t gotten further. I look around
and it’s the same stuff now as it was then
before I left the city which so dogged my every step.
It’s felt like I’ve been moving in a definite direction,
but the destination has advanced another
mile again by the time I’ve sensed I’ve reach it.
And by now I can’t make out its definitions,
and everything beyond it was far too much of a bother
for my energies to go toward.
And it’s beginning to seem
like I’ve been wasting life and time
in making it more meaningful
than they say it really is.

5.17

The river’s rolling by, and I’m inside staring out the window,
or at the pixels on the widescreen. It’s been
four years since I last saw any love.
And I’m messed up on whiskey, thinking: I wish
that there was some
around here in this area.
The dirt and grime and musk comes as miserable
to the life that I once knew.
The flies and other bugs
are wisping all throughout the room…
but the butterflies remain outside
next to the pine trees and the lime.
No longer sweeting up a storm, so it’s said,
after the triple-digit dog days of the summer
in this o so arid place.

5.18

Don’t lose heart, and do your work…
this is all we’ve come here for.

Follow your path, and mind your steps…
that we would need our bread and rest.

4

4.1

You’re a relief to see.
I’ve been seeing people I don’t trust…
who get my heart rate up in all the wrong ways.

You make me feel safe.

You make me feel like I’m not alone,
like I have a purpose here, like what I’m doing
actually matters.

4.2

It’s been me and you for many years,
these last two we’ve been rather close.
‘Can’t seem to get away from you anymore,
you follow me into crowded moments.

And I’ll have some conversation on our outings,
and you’ll be smiling along for a while,
listening to what we’ll talk about later in full.
And I shut the door of our home, and so begin your questions,
the voices, still warm,
the images, all in order.

4.3

I can feel your heartbeat down the hall.
I am that by which its pace is hastened.
I sense its pulse on my skin when you near.
I am aware of your presence.
I feel the air you move behind me.
My ears pivot as you pass beside me.
And you always walk away.

4.4

Hurrying off the moment we make eye-contact,
I reach out my hand to lay on your back, but
you are off on your way to the next step in your plans:
To sit among strangers, and commune with the dead,
with hopes that this will be the day
you make some meaningful contact with the living.

Recalling how much
we’ve done together?
How much we’ve accomplished
and how much we have failed?
How much we have lost in our efforts to gain,
that which we have made and raised…
and the meaning we’ve brought out from our existence?

Our patiently awaiting some arrival,
our sauntering with consciousness,
our pacing at the banks.
Whole spans of time unkept
save but in a glance of recognition…
otherwise, mostly inattentive,
as we tarried there a while,
cross-legged in meditations.

4.5; For Night

It seems you’ve become too much for me,
or maybe not enough.
Cold, for how far off the earth
has gone from sun.
Clouds have come in over on us from the sea,
spanning more than my sanity can bear.
Awake with you drawing closer all the while toward me,
no one else but you, nothing more than this.
Just too much time with you in night,
orienting myself in the dark
by the sound of your voice and the touch of things all.

And now my harder beating heart,
trying to keep me warmer from your cold,
just wants to be in bed
with someone else.
For here we’ve lain,
loveless, together,
for however many years,
lost to the conditions of the winter.
With but four good hours of me sleeping on my side
while you sprawl out all around me through the room.

But then, is warmth not why I’m with you?
and light not why I stay?

For I remember reaching out for you in summer during day,
to lay with you again on the blankets set outside.
Enraptured enough to be seeing stars,
those fissures in my vision, the shooting dots.
And using all my wishes up on you
without a second thought.
For hours more to just be there
encircled.
With the coolness of your breath
all along my neck.
Sensing you and saying to myself
that magic does indeed exist.

While the sunlight spies on us from the other side of earth,
jealous with its telescope.
See its right eye dragging through the sky,
looking long on us in longing.
And when it comes back from afar you will be gone,
and I’ll be off to meet it for our business.
It plots…I see it trying to chase you at both dawn and dusk,
but never catching up.
You are too much for either of us it seems…
but somehow I’ve 1-upped the sun,
for here you are, on my heart
and in my arms.

4.6

I stood there in the alcohol aisle,
staring at the shelves, saying:
god I miss you…
remembering the time we had together,
the places where we were,
and what it was like when we were parted.

And I saw myself in the glass and plastic bottles,
like a fish which couldn’t accept there was a limit…
one illusioned
that it was swimming through an ocean.

Difficult it is to not regress,
when it seems like I have already relapsed.
Illusioned still to suppose that I’ve made way from you
with every day beyond our parting…
in times as these,
petrified in the alcohol aisle…
saying: god I miss you,
but unsure about the referent.

4.7

I heard you’re on your own again,
you’re proud I bet,
leaning always on your independent side.
But I’ve seen you weep so much these nights,
the full moon across your head…in our bed,
I’ve felt your still breathes shudder.
And your cries into the night,
and the cracks within your cries,
and your calling out through an empty house
for somebody to come.
The words you want to say,
your gazing off at nothing in the distance,
your sighs made off in secret.
Staring toward the floor, solemn, with signs of grief,
hidden in your countenance,
attempting to…?

4.8

And there’s that tear-drop stained pillow
you flip over in the morning…
before putting on some coffee
and getting back to work.

With a head-crab you let latch onto your brain by day,
leaching its strength from the outsources of your life.
And forgetting about what’s living there
in the closets of your mind.

4.9

O my love I miss you so,
how many things I’ve placed between us,
close as we once were.
Since this program started
I’ve forgot to slow things down…
only briefly is there calm,
busily I run from one work to the next,
thinking to myself that I’ll come around to you later
when there’s time…
that I haven’t made
for you.

4.10

Know that I still look to you in longing,
here under the ominous roof
of this other kind of work.
Rickety and cricking,
with the winds now calling me to come
and find you there.
The windows,
drenched and shaking,
like my psyche.
Thinking to myself that I was better off with you, alone,
both inside and outdoors,
for we would make the most with least as these.
But I cannot get to sleep so simply anymore,
for such things on my mind as these
which keep me from your presence.

4.11

Who am I to you anymore?
for still you come to me on your own terms.
Seeking my affections
only when and as they suit you.
Is it that you have no other place to go, or stay,
while the others are asleep?
Are we not the partners we once were?
teammates in the world?
Together, in our virtues,
and supportive through our vices.
Or are you now only in this for yourself?

Have your actions, plans, engagements,
before informed by my own,
become swept up in the currents of the world?
Have your various joys and sadnesses,
once bounding with mine,
strayed into a flat line while with me?
And I was once your muse, your inspiration,
from out of which was made your best ideas,
and damn-it all
since these of mine I find are still by you and yours.

4.12

Coming to me on your whims,
sneaking off as you do in early morning.
I’d watch you from the living-room window,
sitting in the yard with your back toward the house.
Your chest facing that fire
I’d imagine to be turning in your eyes.
The blinds are open wide,
but you haven’t turned to look inside
and I’m not sure you would see me…
Standing by you, silhouetted, sitting with you in that silence,
wondering if you’d recognize the referents
when I say: I care to understand you.

4.13

I’ve been away,
distracted,
absent.
Estranged from you,
who I have realized I have missed,
and of the atmosphere containing the airs.
And it is as if some hidden abyss was all at once revealed
just as I was standing at its precipice
by an image of your sacred face,
flashed before my eyes.

Waking me to an awareness, and
vertigo at the threshold of the pit
to which I cannot see the end.
And so, step back, and sit,
and bow my head into your hands.

4.14

O that I had wooed you by my lyric! versed
from out of my berserking…
somehow my spirit reached you,
and impressed.

Broods and fury, mania and melancholy,
lamentation and jubilation, and the lull, and lust,
and longing, love, and loss upon you.
Absorbed, sublime as you are,
these cries out of my heart and thoughts
echoed into your vastness.
And the animal in your wild stirred,
lifted its head, listened close,
went in search.
Bounding over earth to fetch me
from the fields flanking the forests,
near the river and the orchards, to the source.

4.15

There is so much more to you than that,
I can see it in the way you speak with people…
and treat people, and relate to people.
But this thing you’ve been doing
is standing in the way of your relationships.
These haunts
you’re fighting off
will not be laid to rest this way.
And it’s only become more difficult, I’m sure,
doing this alone.

4.16

You’re lost, have faith,
the way ahead will find you as you go.
Walk, with every inch of day, walk
into the night.
There will be a sign
that will draw you forth.
If there isn’t one, make one for yourself,
which could be your guide in lieu of any other.

And are you so alone in this?
is that the difficulty of your task?
Do you listen for what calls you?
and follow the direction of its voice?
You will be well met
when you at last make it through
the thickets with the thorns…
there with they and this you’ve wholly loved,

then only may you rest.

3

3.1

Held up inside,
it’s Halloween night.
The music’s at full volume,
for fear of the knocks at the door.
Trick, here lives a ghost
with no candy,
or a cranky old hermit
in an angsty young body,
who just wants the kids to go away,
for having lost his child-like-side of heart
not long ago.
The flickers though do enough
to bring out those haunts which have been living here.
Just enough to remember the outline,
but not well enough to remember the details.

3.2

It was my own fault, admitted,
a foolishness I’ve buried too.
I don’t like going to that part of my ghostyard,
as much I still make myself.
The harrowing recollections, from out of the far end,
set aside for the worst of me, and the grief from these,
marked off by a fence with spikes at the top.

It’s actually rather nice there,
vines have weaved through the interstices
and it always smells like morning…
I’ve engraved no better phrases
than the ones on those headstones…
and though it requires more effort to maintain than the rest,
it seems far better cared for:
that ghostyard of my falls and faults and follies.

3.3

Held up inside with a handful of memories
and muses
and imaginations,
not keeping track of days,
not wanting to move on from night
until whatever with them that is haunting me
is released to page in ink, closed off six feet deep,
left serene to sleep in peace:
the ghosts have finally found their graves.

Following me throughout day,
lurking on my sunrise walk,
whispering to me the afternoons
and I anticipate the dusk,
well before the warmer airs have lifted,
and earth breathes in again.

Come on then, o rotation! let’s be off,
the sun rays are too much for us, and we
have withered to nothing but a skeleton,
drumming acoustics in the moonshine,
tapping its fingers on its femurs,
grinding its teeth.

3.4

Caught myself thinking in eulogy…
imagining even those I’ve had a falling out with,
or those I’ve fallen out of touch with,
or those who may still hold a grudge
telling stories about the better times…
saying nice things with only slight nods to their misgivings,
making me out to be a martyr,
or a victim…
those who wanted nothing more to do with me,
perhaps having had a change of heart
when they heard that mine stopped beating.

3.5

To get out of the cave
and make way for the light in day,
only to be found in a Panopticon
near the edge of Pandemonium
when I surfaced.
There was a bustling of the people as I sat there overwhelmed
enough to do nothing but watch
as each went on in their own way,
ignoring each other entirely…
pushing each other aside just to get through the streets,
clamoring over each others head to get the top-spots
in all the tallest towers, vying for the rooftops
just by grabbing at the ladders
which were hanging but a few feet from their reach.

The only places left there which we’d have some space
to breathe of less polluted airs
seemed nearly unattainable for us.
Unhappy as we were with our lot,
I stayed affixed the spot
while the guards kept watch,
and I went about unaware they even were.
And I still wonder to this day whether or not
the bits of information I so easily passed on off
went for the good…
and in which ways the behaviors
which were passed off to the others
made it back to me therein my cell.

They passed, but couldn’t tell who I was, or what I was about,
they guessed, and yelled at the glass
to get me to move.
And I, unmoved, wondered about the sounds,
and who or what or even where
they were coming from.

I slumbered, and shat, groomed myself, and sexed,
while voyeuristic drives were being satisfied
at my expense…
and at that of the consumers: handing over cash
at whatever they were charging for admission
to this peep-show into the hell-hole of my existence.

And I couldn’t break the glass,
the keypad could not be cracked…
the only way left I had for escape
was either only in my imaginations
or someone else’s lending me a hand.

The door at my back opened,
and I noticed someone standing there,
urging me to come.

3.6

The trees have overwhelmed me
as I walk along the ranges,
among the scattered ancient giants;
swallowed by the peaks.

With an odd mix of wonder, awe, and terror,
gripping me and my sense of adventure;
but I was not expecting these distresses
when I was stirring my excitements.

Voices in the wilderness,
whispers in the trees,
wailings from the waters,
howlings while I sleep.

3.7

Winter is the withering,
in written meditations,
walking among dormant limbs.
When hermiting away inside
seems perfectly in step with nature;
‘stay you there’ it says,
‘where you will survive the storms of day and nights.’
And yet, I must admit that it comes colder than it does
during the rest; in a chill which frosts my depths…
the caverns damp and musky airs
breathe heavy when inhaled; exhaling out a vapor.
The stone on which I sit cross-legged to ponder; and the rock
on which I lean back on in wonder,
chilling as they are, and they and I become as one:
I am the rock, I am the stone, I am the touch of cold.
Unmoved, inside, a statue among the unshaped earth,
with a chisel to my chest
to chip away and shape my frozen heart
which by summer will be melted.

3.8

Petrified, but someone has seemed to crack
the outer cast of the stone
in which I’ve been immersed.
And the chips are falling all around my feet,
the cracks are becoming gashes are becoming freed
to fall off just as well in chunks.
And but one eye can see the one who at last struck the chisel,
I think I know, but still can’t speak
their name.

3.9

Remove yourself to whatever wilderness is left
for I’m not coming into the crowd.
Commit them all to memory, evoke them when you please,
but don’t bring them here.
Follow the paved road till it is gravel, the gravel, till it is dirt,
the dirt, till it’s nothing but high grass
and monarch oaks.
And meet me there, between the trunks of the tallest one
which veered off just beyond the base,
where I have waited long in longing
for an other one as you.
Sending up smoke signals to the sky
that you may see above the minds of they all
who surround you.

3.10

If being social is a need
then I hunger and thirst all the time,
and have been getting by
on dew gathered in leaves
and the scattered crumbs of human interaction.

3.11

I long for someone to smile at me again,
the way friends do…
to look at me like I belong there,
and speak to me like they care.

3.12

And I thought of the walk which led away,
far off into solitude,
where, unreachable,
detachment and distress
lurked upon the loneliness
of a life that loved
human beings intensely…

and the mystery, and the unknown,
and the never-to-be-attained,
but always-given-to
strange constitutions of the existent…

and the light graphite contours
of our regards.

3.13

With faith
because of grace.

3.14

Who follows, to what end I know not,
the lead of an apparition
without a light
into the dark.

3.15

And, calm, for the silence of the night,
I softly smiled.

3.16

Reinvigorating my body’s downtrodden spirits!
at last I’ve caught a second wind,
and the sails of my chest uplift
with airs exhaled from out of another persons lungs.
These vibrations of their chords reverberate
my drums to row,
and not just let their gusts make forth
my way across the seas.

Then to land home I go the more
and Theseus has been remade,
and I tire of this ancient ship,
and anxious in these tidal waves.
I’m wishing for some calmer skies
and willing earth beneath my feet.
‘Want to embrace her in my arms,
but she is well off and away.

Alas! this bitter-sweet yearning tasted on my tongue,
as if it were this salty breeze I’m breathing
as its cold turns warm
when brought into myself.
When ninety-eight-point-six degrees
would meet that of the there surrounds,
and cool me justly
as it would when heated far beyond my bounds.

3.17

That for whatever reason I so long before felt drawn toward,
or rather, lured, at times, it seems,
by some siren-like muse…
who called me with her song-like speech
to swim unto the shore
and reach her there upon the rocks…
soaking in a downpour.

And almost drowned, time and again,
by the weight of my past which clung to me
as if I were its life-vest, or some kind of boat or raft.
And almost drowned within the oceans waves,
heaving in their undulations,
before I broke onto the sands.

But I haven’t reached her yet, exhausted,
and I cannot rest, and every step I take
is by the quivering of my legs…
while my brain is getting lighter and my vision’s going blurry,
and I’m reaching out toward her
with whatever shaking strength I’ve left to give.

3.18

Then desperation for my love is drowning in my river!
I see her swept off with the swifter currents during storm!
Struggling to stay afloat, writhing treading violent waters!
Waving, reaching, calling to me, pacing on the banks.

‘My love I am no swimmer!
But my love here I come!
Amen! if I drown trying to reach you…
let the currents of the world swallow us both’.

And so I jump into those frigid waters,
avoiding brush and fallen trees.
I reach my love and give my shoulder,
passing out clinging to me.
I swim toward shore but cannot hold the weight
while waves are crashing in.
Dragging us down, again, again, again without relent.

I saw her there as I was dying.
Her song was in my head as I was drowning.
Her voice was the last I heard
beside my muffled yell.

3.19

The gravedigger’s been busy,
six feet of earth each:
for God, man, history, the author, art…
the funerals had been set for Sunday,
but the hearses arrived empty;
the crowd seemed rather displeased.

3.20

Caught up in a downpour
on a far off gravel road…
drenched and sensing death
getting to my head…
stalking ’round the thrashing oaks
while I’m out here, at night, alone.

3.21

Do not shine your light on us…
we do not want to be seen in our dark.

3.22

Alone after all,
or some part of me is,
and faith right now seems foolish.
And I guess I could just will it
just so that I’d keep on going,
but the veins by now are clogged
and the airways are blocked
To, From, the part of my soul
where there was hope.

And smoke has filled the chamber of my brain,
the sparks turned into flames, and the signals
from one of the sides
is having communication issues with the other.
I still get by on one,
but can no longer see in color,
just a bright light,
flickering above the earth.

I’ve tried to call it down to talk,
but every reach for contact it repels a little more,
and I suspect with one more night it will be gone.
Be gone then star (have you misled me?),
and farewell to the last of the light
that thus far led my life…
let me stumble ‘round in dark
till my eyes adjust to night.

3.23

The signals from that light in the night sky have stopped,
here at midnight, well before the sun rise
which I wait for.
Anticipating nothing of the daylight anymore,
nothing but that this earth will turn again.
Turn out another something or some other, sometime
for someone somewhere.

As I’m moved on by this endless procession
of issues to be contended with…
while one supplants the other
in my immediate consciousness…
and is added to the list of those I haven’t cared for yet,
or those I have forgotten about.

Process is not unknown to me,
but consummation is my chimera,
eluding definition.
And when ends are so often readjusting,
I bring them from afar into the present,
so as to, if even for but moments, sense I’ve made it.
For the mark, once set, I miss,
having shifted in the course of my trajectory.
And if that old cliché is right, then home is rarely here,
as my heart’s so often elsewhere.

3.24

We’re going to space
without gravity’s consent.

3.25

Their hands which lost some strength
but gained some grace.

3.26

The drawings on your walls
I realize only in reflections.
Your gripping at your bars before
had gnawed at me in night.
In four walls like a prison
I’d cry out against in caging…
with a warden who made sure
to remain well and out of sight.

For that rhythm in my ears
which I thought was from musicians
turned out to be reverberations
from your pounding on the drums…
that ringing in the lining, lingering after courses,
was only just the gnashing of the chords.
And blood then hadn’t fully filled your chambers,
and plaque accumulated at your doors…
darkened for decay from your red and fleshy color,
returned when I had given it to earth.

What had soothed you then
in your inflammatory swelling?
What held you together
when you neared your bursts to part?

How did you maintain unscathed?
always and only on, my heart.

2

2.1; The Cave-In of the Cave

When I first came back to consciousness
it was to a darkness, deeper than in any night.
Images from the past
were passing through my mind.
Words were the best I had left in memory,
and words seemed almost empty
and were close to fail.

Where am I? I asked into the darkness,
and she replied: you are in the cave.
Welcome to you who’s waking and tell me where you are,
for I can hear your call but cannot see your face.

I couldn’t tell, and so I said:
my back’s against a wall of rock,
my feet are on a floor of stone.
One hand is in a watery pool,
the other’s feeling creatures crawl,
ones I have never known.

You must be by the waters edge, chill,
be still, I come.
You needn’t be so awkward here,
it has been a sort of home.
Even though you cannot see
in here you’re not alone.
And even though you were asleep
beyond your dream you rose.

How did we get here? I asked:
you were with us, up top.
You may not recall,
but I remember your voice well.
You remember not the rocks?
the cave caved in.
You were struck,
felled by the fallen.
But you woke, I hear your words
and sense your soul.
This ‘nothing’ all around us is an issue,
and you question.
Fear me not for I approach,
out of your unseen.
I will graze your head,
you will sense my stroke.
You will not see me, at first, in full, but you will understand
enough of how it went when it is that I have told.

And so she touched my skull,
passing fingers through my hair,
and I felt some wave of comfort
in this place eerily near.
Let me remind you of what has happened,
and for now do not despair,
just be within the present
and it will all soon be made clear.

We came down to the cave as a group
with a common intention, or at least a common reason
as to why we’d now been herein.
But when our group split, all throughout the caverns,
through the earth’s deepest crevices…
well, we’re not sure yet how, but the way out caved in,
and when it did, the way in crept slowly out…
into our bodies, while the pores of our skin drew taut
with haunts which burrowed into our thoughts
without relent.
Each one of us, in some respect:
carrying our cares of being there within,
but we’ve been disconnected from the world,
and the world we’ll soon forget.
We remember the surface up top
and what it once was to us, indeed, it is therefrom
of which our words down here most speak.
But some say we’ve advanced, some say it’s our loss
others say we’re lost, and few say we’ve been found.
The sunlight leading out has gone,
and the wires lining the walls have been cut,
the fire has been doused
and the others have become as ‘not’.

But enough, here, turn this flashlight on,
toward the ceiling and the walls.
See for yourself what we’ve become
being severed from the world above.

I did and saw: someone standing faced toward a stone,
swaying back and forth
with their back turned to us all.
Murmuring, muttering things we can hardly make out,
and cannot quite comprehend.
With their hand raised up, fingers widely spread,
palm out, faced forth, dead set
to speak against our ends.
While their other hand is drawing
what they said upon the wall,
writing it in chalk and spelling all of it in bold.

And there were some who ran on off,
but there is one who seems at home,
‘didn’t see the first,
the second’s just a form:
Sitting in the last of our clean drinking water,
a modest pool in a sudden drop, taking a piss,
devising a plot
that could keep the way out shut.

And our tools are broken and there is Philo,
boxing in the shadow of this shadow boxing him…
at the entrance and the exit, with his bare fists,
the skin upon his knuckles torn
to show the barren bone and limb.
His ligaments are giving way, they too about to tear,
but he go on throwing blows
because his spirit isn’t here.
I heard a break in every strike,
a cut, a crack, a tear.
And each became the more distinct,
but it’s heart-beats that we hear.

And there, Sophia, heaving air,
nervously breaking on anything near.
When she sees it is us she just sits there and stares
into our eyes through the tops of her lids…
circling her head, repeating: “this”,
with less pains than us, in her angst, she accepts.
But nonetheless cannot yet come to grips
with this darkness gripping her.
While her arms draw close to her sides,
and her hands lay still on her lap.
She lingered too long, hardly animate,
collapsed, and fell off a ledge.
We suddenly felt the thud, but nothing after it,
while Sophia’s laying on the floor
regathering her sense.

But we here being still refuse it to be lost yet are afraid, some,
I hear their screams,
all worked up about the cave.
Echoes of awful things seem to lurk around this place,
and between the piercing shrieks
a host of whispers have remained.

2.2

A crisp sheet clears the wakened roving
for we that dwell within this veil,
dim lit homes as we are rising
to getting by or living well.

And by the light in many windows,
a show of figures moving slow,
I see the neighborly old widow
at home and working through the morn’.

While windy blows give us a warning
to wear our coats into the world,
as frosty pines on our skin are darting
little shoots of silent cold.

And so it goes, the ceaseless lining
ourselves up with ticking time,
whether steady or else hurried,
to greet the gray ominous skies.

2.3; The Sleeper as He Dreams

A walk along in morning’s night
through a world of walls on every side,
passing intervals of posted lights
which brighten the streets, but darken the sky.

The suburb’s reek of remnant sense,
slumbering forth it’s rise,
and I see that I’m alone,
yet I feel some thing’s alive.

There’s a familiar pulse about this place,
growing each step,
ghosting my aims…
reverberates,
yes, breaks a wave
of some subtle force
over my frame…

for suddenly, into the streets
pours out throbbing human heartbeats,
the cadence joins in symphony
between the dreamers as they sleep.

2.4

So I’ll tend to myself
and say that I’m fine,
and feed an emotion
just to get down a line.

I’ll play the right music,
and I’ll write a few rhymes,
cloud-9 on my vices,
rose-tinting my mind.

The projects keep piling,
can’t keep with the pace,
but I keep on writing
without or with taste.

Eyes-spicy from pixels
and a barb’s in my brain,
my arms are all achy,
and I wake with the shakes.

And talk too excited,
and scare others off,
hungover from silence,
so flooded in thought…

no clearing in conscience,
how many I’ve lost
by saying too much
through an unbridled tongue…

for I’m easily opened,
too much like a book,
but at times it takes effort
to reveal the truth…

so I tried to be dodgy,
but can’t dodge the world…
there are no exits,
no windows or doors.

Then I’m sure you will notice
when I’m face-down drained and dazed…
whatever of me is left
you can find on every page.

2.5

Still you’re praying for some others?
to walk along your side.
Still you’re looking for a lover?
who could help you through the night.

To warm you when the airs have chilled?
when the dew has turned to ice.
And add an echo to your ears?
with a pseudo-lullaby.

Awake although your eyes are closed?
while pacing through your mind.
Harass yourself with mirthless tones?
as though on trial for a crime.

Do you lay with little patience?
Do you still give a little thanks?
Are these the days of tribulation?
And is this then just a break?

Do you perpetuate depressions?
Do you weight yourself with blame?
Do you say that you are anxious?
Do you linger in one place?

Do you wrestle with your self?
Are there two voices in a fray?
Can you not find the peace
to rest and greet another day?

Feigning that same face you wear?
Is beauty turning bleak?
Does a presence lurk in absences?
Is there no right way to reach?

If you’d like then I can speak a song
and lull you off to sleep,
with a whisper like the thunder,
but in a voice that’s full of grief.

Would you slow-dance in this black-light?
And meet after in dream?
I’m sure I’ve seen you there before,
I hope that you’ve seen me.

2.6

With eyes an airy-white just like the mist
lingers on the land as fallen clouds,
silhouetted shadows of a polar shade,
left as signs of some things there concealed.

smiling like a soft wind curls the smoke
upwardly doubled over on itself,
able to be traced back to a source,
once blazed but hid the ruin in a veil.

Its body moving subtle as the earth
digesting waters once the storms have ceased,
alive in quiet needs of these to be so dormant
to reveal what has fallen and might spring.

Its arms motion to me as withered limbs
fissure through the light given at dawn,
when the trees only appear suffused with black
inversely to the skies unveiling orange.

2.7

So I’ll pry apart the parts the past invested in this whole
and observe each like the sediment swept with an undertow…

above the bits till they have sunk when tides have been subdued,
to find the remnants of the past presently in my view…

down just below the waters brim there sits a wispy face,
but the figures blotted out and the features dissipate…

here, then there, now everywhere, my souls under some hex,
framed as if a window view were all I would expect…

yet too up on the waters’ edge, a sort of looking glass,
I cast my gaze into the sea and see myself reflect…

the silhouette vanished at once, was then I realized
this thing which seems embodied was the phantom I, revised.

2.8

Would you reach into the room
and be for me the catalyst of truth?
I, with smoke smoldering in scattered ashes,
but losing touch of the airs that would inspire a blaze…
I ache with energies, as embers
yearn to be inflamed.

Then let your breath be blown upon the cinders,
and these might seem the signs of starting fires.
Swiftly turn the organ ‘tween our shoulders
and warm my body as you breathe in me the oxidizer.
So strike me with a spark straight in my center,
and let’s together kindle now this source…
release its heat and we’ll grow wide together,
and let us walk more surely in the world.

2.9

Theseus has sunk,
attempting to repair too many parts at once, while off along at sea…
and we: the captain and the crew are drowning just beneath…
seeing wooden boards and oars sinking into the deep
from the vessel we couldn’t keep afloat that kept us from the waters reach.

The mast was first to find the floor,
darting through as would a spear,
onto the murky green below,
to strike a target not so near…

recalls to me our voyage,
the last flashes before I pass
were between my birth in Theseus
and my death now coming fast:

To be up there with changing waves, yet stable on the deck.
To slightly undulating sights, to the water much like us.
To the currents we were caught up in, to the fall and rise of tides.
To the vast expanse of airs, to the unobstructed stars at night.
To time that didn’t turn in ticks, to the circles not the lines.
To feel our turns around the sun, to the moon’s phases, our guide.

To be moved by ocean and winds, to face what seemed the ceaseless brine.
To making forth horizons more, that were always ever passing by.
To glide over the water’s edge, to glance and see the sky…
through tempest, torrent, calm, and stillness…
through infinity in our eyes.

To fix the wood which finally rot and never touching land.
To sail toward the wisest shores and turning ‘round again…
There within our vessel loved, to becoming discontent…
we wanted more than what it gave and took more than our give.
To willing more than perhaps should and caring not for aught.
To tearing boards that might have lived had we not torn them apart.
To those that weren’t so withered as the ones submerged in salt,
we pried too many pieces from the place where they belonged.

To then, when waters poured on in, to them, first swept away.
To going down in slow decent while accepting our due fate.
To Theseus then half engulfed, to the hull as it would break.
To the only life we’d ever live, to our oceanic grave.

2.10

To begin another start,
to the light beyond the dark,
I had long been asleep
when my heart beat faster…
blood, through the veins in my arms,
wanting them to lift me up,
as my dreams had just been done
and my eye lids flicker
shut, back into my bars,
the ones that keep me from
the good that greets the morning sun
is rising after dawn, in my bed I toss and turn
and try to sleep in longer.

And through drawn-blinds rays-jump,
telling me I’ve had enough,
and with light lining my bed
I shield my head
and make a last attempt
to run,
without moving at all,
to ignore or just to stall,
to remove me from the motions of the rising past the fall…
I’d rather just stay put,
I’d rather not be moved
but rather go on sleeping.

When I’m fearing what’s to come,
made anxious by the sun,
and laying here against my will
with thoughts so full of this that must be done,
with my eyes still tightly drawn
I feel it won’t be long before I must rise up,
accept what’s just,
and resolve my thoughts to move myself beyond.

My strength’s not up to par,
my vices have it marred,
their thrall is one I have wrought upon
so many years indulging in their stuffs…
till I was sick and felt corrupt,
till I was selfish and cared not,
till I finally lost a sense of plot
reacting on whatever senses brought.

My pathway had been lost,
I sought and found it not,
and fallen to so many wrongs
I looked out of the grave that I had dug.

Then I knew something was off,
could tell I was disrupt,
as it was then my conscience called
to me in tones more pressing than my wants.

When the sun at last had struck
my heart and woke me up…
it prodded me and pulled me from
the hollowed bed in which I had been stuck.

2.11

You know all too well what it’s like to not be noticed
by the one you’ve had your eyes on now for months.

2.12

The drought of life has passed on by,
and light rains graze our skin.

We had been dried up for so long,
our spines, broken or bent.

For lone along the world we walked,
and limping as we went.

And found our selves when they were lost
by a lover and a friend.

The ashy skies from fires subside,
the horizons come again.

The haze that haunted us so long
has settled on the land.

For the moment we can see afar,
together, as we stand…

looking upon the yoke in wake
at the beginning of its end.

We breathe a breeze of clean, crisp airs,
new vistas in our sights.

We’re welcomed by so many ways,
but some we’ll have to mind…

for some will have us looking back,
or send us omens in disguise,

and some will lead us into dark
before they show their light.

Through mountains and their ups and downs,
‘cross valleys long and wide,

‘long coastal regions of the west
with the rise and fall of tides,

past summer in its searing heat,
and winters frosty pines,

if ever there you would lose heart,
remember, you have mine.

So shall we treed the preset tracks,
and stick to all the signs?

Shall we lay our own-most path,
and walk with both reason and rhyme?

Shall we be the birds with broken wings,
or did we grow to fly?

Shall we shatter our last innocence
to experience the times?

2.13

Yeah, I’m not so good at keeping my heart covered,
there it lay, spread out on the table,
flopping like a fish that’s trying to find some water.
It falls into your lap, but you don’t like slimy, throbbing things,
you scream and push it away.
It retreats into my chest like a frightened cat.
Still peering out, it prowls, moving nearer when you’re looking off.
But when you at last come close
it starts, startled, coils, leaps from my ribs;
bites your hand, you grab its neck and throw it onto your interstate…
’gets struck by a car, explodes, and flesh covers up the headlights
which once led you through the night.

2.14

I don’t have game
but I’m not trying to play you.

You’re not my bitch
and I don’t aim to tame you.

You aren’t a tool
and I’m not going to use you.

You’re not an object,
I cannot just take you, I’m not going to claim you.

But I am going to ask you:
if you’d let me be with you, and if you’d like to be with me.

2.15

I see you: sky.
You see me: earth.
Ever distinct,
yet harboring force,
rotating in chorus,
perpetually turned,
the bulwarks of beauty,
the shepherds of birth.

‘Tween us lay waters,
and whispering winds,
the waves of affection,
and inspiring ends,
the fires of becoming,
these base elements,
with spacetime to move us
why should we miss this?

Let’s seize what’s between us,
the crest of the turf,
lay hold of the buildings
they’ve built for their world,
let us take back the rivers
lay claim to the flora,
for we’re the harbingers
of whatever’s stored in us.

And fear not the heights
nor the depths that pervade us,
these prove this is right
as nothing evades us…
For I’ll see you: sky,
whenever I look up,
and you’ll see me: earth,
as ever: enough.

2.16

I place my ear on her ribs underneath her left breast
to listen to the most beautiful iamb I will ever hear.

2.17

In solitude even when surrounded,
such distance for how so much a nearness…
for though I could barely move my hand and touch your arm,
we may as well be miles apart.

2.18

But when I stepped out from behind the curtains,
authentic in myself and not acting out the fancies,
you liked neither the story,
nor the character;
there was no applause.

2.19

She strikes like lightning,
and fades as fast.

The positive charge:
moving down from the sky
in unseen electric lines,
to me, the negative one:
moved upwardly as static
sent onto its discharge.

And we reach in a touch,
and dispel our energies at once,
and that bright chord ties heaven to earth,
flashes, for but a moment
and sends me off
as the after clap and boom,
in billowing thunder,
roaming through the airwaves,
far from its source…

till a murmur
is all that’s left,
and a mark on the land
where the charges met.

2.20

Covered in particulates of my skin and sweat and piss and shit
and vomit from my drinking days,
for all ways in from here come out.
And God I miss you
but God I’m stout enough
to make it ’round here on my own…
or thought I was,
for mind in times as these
drifts back to the beauty which came from between us.

2.21; Ice Skating

It was my first time,
when I was not so callused.

My skin was fresh and soft and fleshy.
My body was ready, my nerve wasn’t.

You probably could have guessed, from my gait,
unfamiliar, undressed to that new situation.

Finding it difficult not to have felt at least slightly self-conscious
having never before cared so much to please another person.

As we stood at the edge,
dawning soft smiles and even breaths ,

stolen by the moment, and with nods of certainty,
and suggestive eyes in a terse glance

we leapt onto that white sheet,
a freezing bed of ice, the A/C set on super chill,

and firmly gripped the side,
whatever was left of the world we knew…

as we took it slow, getting our bearings,
better understanding the movements which propelled us…

off balance in the beginning, writhing,
or coasting with some grooves furrowed before.

I went down, during an 80’s throwback,
while turning on the chorus.

But I learned quickly,
an instinct uprooted.

The music faded to the background,
every other sound dropped out,

taken in with the other-touch,
free from the self…

with a focus from which something in us wouldn’t care to deviate,
carving up that once glossy sheet,

leaving our marks, memories,
etched in with the rest…

not exactly two,
for we moved as if were one,

in keeping sight of the other
we kept sight of ourselves…

oriented by a presence,
oscillating in the infinity pattern,

gliding the place between weightlessness and gravity,
figures in a flight of finer friction…

breathing out hymns with the thrusts of the waist
and even breaths in as fibers rest from tensing with each steady draw,

struck by the chord of being close,
with hot-blood from our beating hearts…

bounding down another round
after the turn is done.

When in the end we step down from that bed,
looking then as mountains would from space,

and leave it as it is:
a strange infusion of grace in passing.

Tie up our shoes and go to greet the night.
Say sincere-solemn goodbyes.

Get in our cars and drive away,
with disheveled looks and shaky legs,

having given so much that I still have marks
on the softer parts of my feet.

1

1.1; First Prayer of Adam

God…
I have no regret for what I’ve done,
though my conscience has been stirred by it,
and my mind has been completely grieved…
though I have cause to reflect on it in a whimper,
and to recall certain parts of it with a whine…
though my ears have gone on haunted
by the exhales of Your whispers…
though I can’t sleep all the way through night
for this nightmare of a dream.

Then God…
if it is as You say, and I’ve become as one of You,
as of both the waters of the firmament of heaven,
with those below, gathered together on the earth,
and those above, of the just rulers that are stars…
with knowledge of the workings of creation
and an understanding of goodness and of evil…
and if by speaking I am also able to create and to destroy,
then my lot is this existence,
if even in its curses,
and with graveness, but with gladness,
for it I am responsible.

Then all that I will hold You to
is that we speak and walk together
in a respectful and reciprocal relation…
and be not distanced or disparate,
nor be unequal or held in difference.
For in Your anger,
out You drove me,
and in Your sadness
out You sent me,
before we knew what we were doing
for too filled with sorrow and fury
and love…
and I found I could not speak us to an evenness.

While this one unfinished sentence
turns around my head on repeat…
and one plainly written phrasing’s
bouncing all throughout my brain.
And what good is an image
if it does not reflect exactly…
if it’s not made out in some way as the same.

And God…
lest I return in some contempt
and challenge Cherubim to a combat
with courage and in fear…
or slip by them sleeping softly
in their night
with grace or guile…
or devise a clever trick that might dupe them
to permit of my reentry into Eden,
to put my left hand on the eternity-fruit,
to take it, boldly, in my grip,
and snatch it firmly from its stem,
the Tree of Life will there remain untouched,
its produces texture, left untasted,
it’s nourishments, ever renewed,
but never eaten.

And God…
I’ve reflected carefully on those days before…
looked back on their passage and reviewed every step:
when You formed me from the dust of earth,
and breathed in me the air of life…
through Your raising for its tending and its keeping;
to the comparing of the kinds
and the first of many trying task that was their very calling.

My thoughts have extended to the greatest length,
strained with a most solemn seriousness
on about how You brought all things before me for their naming;
about the sleep You caused to fall on me, and the dream
I most remember…
and rewakening to find a one
who against all others most accorded to my kind…
and the proposition stating that with her we shall become a flesh,
a body and a blood…
that we would leave father and mother
to be joined in with as one…
and thus from this “therefore” suppose
I fulfilled at least one of two commandments,
when I left You
and was joined with Eve.

So God…
I forget the actions of my fall,
focus my eyes upon the present,
and turn my head forward toward my future.
In this and to it I must walk,
for existence calls me forth now
with a lifelonging endeavor,
and mortality must be met with death
and darkness waiting at my door.

I am readied and have resolved myself
to the work which must be done,
and so am moved on to the toils
which You opened up before me,
and the trials sure to follow in the currents wake of choice,
when You cursed me
and for my sake cursed this ground.

This task I will bear upon my shoulders,
held up in human stature, not shambling, or in shame…
to carry its weight against the gravity
as I make some way throughout the world,
until the hour my flesh and blood returns to earth.

1.2; Last Prayer of Adam

While Eve and I are here now fine, we’ve been bettered by our pains.
We’ve spanned the earth-primeval, and we’re withered, old, and aged.
We’ve plowed this land in pilgrimage which our progeny now reign.
And I call to you now near the end of all our winding days.

Facing west as the sun sets, having come back to this hallowed place.
The horizon is by now suffused with a host of gilded rays.
At last I’m feeling full of peace past forty scores of age.
And wonder at the more I’ll live, but will live it to your name.

So I gazed over the past and found that paths would leave a track.
That while although we were sent off cursed,
we might come back rather blessed.
But if we lost some sense of soul, then for it, my solemn leave:
of a calla lily at the base of the fateful fruitful tree.

And so to the author of the universe, the one that’s turning us,
I send now through the wavelengths this one last closing thought:
I can’t request forgiveness for the actions of the fall,
for the Garden of Eden, without Eve, was not an Eden at all.

1.3

I seemed to have walked into the wilderness.
Coming back from time to time with mud on my boots,
and dirt on my hands.
With ragged clothes from the thistles and thorns,
not washed, well worn,
and a speck in my eye.

1.4

You reaped from me the soul I sowed,
and I have nothing left to give.

You strung me up, a puppeteer,
my body hung by thread lifeless.

You spoke the only way to go,
And now I’m lost along its path,

for I came to only know my own,
and the guide has up and left.

1.5

I heard the echoes of an old voice in my garden left untended:
“lost soul you were found before, the Lords way with you is crooked.
Return to the tradition from your rookery of abstractions,
water the earth that you burnt with your words and trim the untamed hedges.

Pick the thistles and the thorn…hell, just toss your thrifted rags.
Rip that plank out from your pupil and let us mend the iris scratched.

Scrape off all the crusted dirt clinging to your muddy boots.
Pat the ash off of your back and change the bandage ‘round your foot.

You drank away the nights and days and left your graces in neglect.
You’ve spent so much of precious time in a place you haven’t fit.

You’ve let your focus shift with the currents, trends, and whims,
and make hasty decisions because of something someone says.

You cared so much what they assumed from the way that you appeared
that a passion only just to please became the reason you were there.

You’ve reckoned so much of your self by what they take you as,
and think yourself that much the less not having what they have”.

Not doing as they did, not being as they were,
are these the same conflicts from then just secular in world?

Where I’ve learned to speak the language but still retain an accent…
picked up on a dialect but miss pronunciations…

studied the written systems but can’t remember all the grammar…
shown how to behave but I deviated from the standards.

The new man nearly just emerged, but he was hemmed in by the old one
who found it’s just not possible to be all things and then some.

The old man calling for return, the new man shouting over:
sure that he is making sense but he’s whacked-out on the ether.

And I am in between the two just trying to stop a murder
as new’s about to go for choke but old-man is my father.

Four feet below this dug up hole, old-wiser’s buried under new,
and soon will need a way out because he didn’t make one through.

Now he’s blacked out on the floor by night and I cannot hear the sounds
of what little youth that’s left in me calling as it drowns.

1.6; For Crista, The Cross You’ve Taken Up

You there, nearing demons, have you gotten through the ranks?
Are you walking on through evil? do you have the needed strength?

O young courageous person! you are facing more than most,
to approach the very gates of hell with nothing but the ghost.

For we’ve ignored it’s draws, pass through it undisturbed,
and come out with a grin thinking we still are as we were.

But you, you can discern in us corruptions of our souls,
in our obdurated hearts and our weightless wicked words.

And o follower of the lord! walk forth with trust and faith,
for a fallen kind on this cursed earth has no recourse to breaks.

You say an evil’s now upon you? is it reaching you indoors?
Have you barred up all the windows? is it prying through the floor?

Is it ransoming your family with a due you can’t afford?
Is it ransacking your safe? is that where your wealth is stored?

Is it yelling at you in your home? are echoes lingering on the walls?
Do you close your eyes and cover ears? yet still you see and hear its calls?

Do you cry for the light in the noon of your night to come and lend you aid?
Do you lament the state of life you’re in and pray it all away?

Guard yourself o child of God and do what must be done
to stay the way and seek the truth and lead your life by love.

For you are not some broken pot in the eyes of God beyond,
it sees you’re strong to bear such blows,
it sees your beauty through your scars,

and if you know the dark will come, ready yourself, prepare your heart,
beat your breast before the dusk and tell legion to bring it on.

And it’s okay to be afraid of pains and shades you’re sure to face,
but always have in mind the one in whose image you were made.

So lose not hope even although this night it may have won,
your victory’s come by the risen sun dispersing darkness with the dawn,

and even in the deepest part of night you’re not alone,
just look up to the sky to find that light shine off the moon.

Remind yourself who sits with you and recall what’s to come,
for soon when night’s passed over you’ll be standing with the son.

Then for these times of tribulation fail not to give your thanks,
for if this were an Eden then we wouldn’t know of grace.

And may these sudden nightmares not have all your dreams be overthrown,
may these distresses not decay or fray or halt your gradual growth.

may you believe and too abide, may what you speak be also shown,
may it exude from your every act and in that way be it known.

May your very life be the visible sign of the inward grace you hold
by the disciplining of your soul and your devotion to the Lord.

And be a follower of Christ don’t solely sing him praise,
don’t merely preach his words, don’t only speak his name…

exceed the requisites of righteousness and if you must then be reformed,
become one of the virtuous and turn away from wrongs…

do all you must to rid yourself of sins for which you once atoned,
sure your aim after you miss that you would always hit the mark…

do well while you exist on earth if even you’re not of the world,
foster that kind of human being which God once said was good…

and if even you’re rejected, hated, wronged, or blamed, and mocked,
never shrug off the weight of the cross you’ve taken up.

1.7

There’s nothing surer than a step,
if one would be just focused on and bound up with its grace,
and move there in familiar motions
when at unfamiliar pace.

For as sure as one was fairly felled
would forth and near its next avail
and closer draw one’s purpose there
when a catching scent admits of air.

So send to me the sounds of some things far,
and set my sights wherever fair,
that with the sureness of a step
the ends begin to clear.

1.8

Summer moments pass to month from minute,
when all at once a sense shifts during day,
as we’re brought again to fall into our lessons,
environs saturate with autumn rain.

And if this is the age of information
then we can surely have a little say in fate,
stand beside our higher educations,
clear a way with surer ends and aims.

But if we’ll have to work our way through winter
could we at least proceed in even pace?
Through storms and stress just trying to find a center,
as some are lost to caves or slip in haste.

So step as sure for spring will soon reenter,
and grow forth from the waters of our brains.
Amen, to all these parts however fitted.
Amen as we each proceed in our grace.

1.9

So far into this thicket
we can only see the leaves,
each of all the trunks of trees
as far as near could be.

The way is fresh and not yet cleared,
the details seem extreme,
but with hope in sight when we step back
and see these evergreen.

1.10

Closed eyes,
why don’t you open?
you’ve had your fill of sleep…
by now you have had far too much,
you’ll waken feeling weak.

To the deepest dream you now have slipped,
and things no longer seem so straight,
just images without an end
where all is blurred, even your face.

Now uncontrolled impulsion tends
to throw you past your reach,
to steal you from your purpose,
to lull you to a sleep.

And a bed and blanket it provides,
as you’re losing sight of what is there,
but this bed of briars,
and this blanket of thorns,
tear as you toss and turn.

And you’ve had enough,
want nothing more than to just get up,
but they’ve pierced and clinched your skin,
and in you they gain a tighter hold
the more you writhe against.

And you try to speak but pours out sounds of water mixed with sand,
making no sense in your unconsciousness,
but you’re asking it to end.

So open up those long closed eyes,
see all of this just as it is,
that which you’ve neglected since
you let the thicket in.

1.11

What have I become?
the world has gone so dark,
things have been distorted,
and the faces have been blurred.

When I look into the mirror
I can sense somethings have changed,
but can’t pin down what it is,
and distress has laid its claim.

Confusions grown so thick
my vision has been marred,
it almost feels as if
I’m locked behind my self’s own bars.

For I’d been running toward the future with the present,
forgetful of the past and what it meant,
forsaking that which has then come before,
thinking they’d prescribe the ways of all,
feeling they had answered my lost call,
seeming that they said more than I could,
speaking of those things I never knew,
throwing my self well beyond its words,
to appear as if I was more than I were.

Putting up fronts to protect my fragile past,
hardly seeing they behind my mask,
faces began to blur and I found myself at last
in the mirror just as foggy as the rest.

But some-one saw if even only me,
bare and naked as the willow tree,
withered in winter before it’d find its spring,
pride and shame for what I did there see.

Swollen and my pupils, wide and dark,
a bloodshot backdrop ‘midst my brightest yearns,
looked and saw them closed, yet widely spread,
and that is when I clearly saw my soul.

1.12

For it seems I’ve been exploring,
and now there are so many turns my soul longs to experience
that I’m not so sure this journey will ever seem to find or reach
a suiting end or destination.

I walk to the top of one hill to see the horizon,
and always there’s another in the distance
which seems to bear a better view…
so I set my tent for night,
for by morning I’ll be off again.

1.13

Fell through words that were already there…
falling now into nothing but a blank white space,

unending till I end, with a pencil in my hand,
leaving graphite lines as I pass by, spiraling through the airs…

that mark just how afar I’ve gone since when it first began,
with the original text, breaking on my back after I had leapt from land…

then with an inverse upward view it means not what it had,
those lines have long now been obscure and so I turn my head

to face the nothingness, to read no more from script,
to let it be as it, and begin to love again.

1.14

He lived beyond the sun, a youthful one,
preferring dark to day-light late he came alive.
He got into the car, and drove while drunk,
on county roads where critters taunt the lights.
We got the text at dawn, a harvest moon,
was setting after passing over night:
‘Dude…get to the ICU…John went off the road,
spine is broke…unconscious with a crushed in skull
not sure if he’s to make it through the month.’.

The life support unplugged, they say he’s gone,
what’s left is just the husk of what he was.
His pulse slows to a stop, we stand and watch,
the dotted line draws on flat like our hearts.
As the empty static gnaw clogged our thoughts
with the hum of dirges for the dead and young.
And all the stats’ I saw
prepared me not
for the night it was one that I loved.

The funeral was tense, an eerie stress,
mingled like a mixer with the mourn.
Stirring the rest, an unwelcome guest:
gossip’s drunk and knuckling at the door.
If ‘perception’s really all it is’, as you had ever said,
then brother know to me your green was gold…
that part of me leapt
with you into death
with you there in to the unknown.

Walked the streets to home, nevermore alone,
this town too full of absence and its mocks.
The quiet brooding storm, heart splitting as it’s growing
into something that I’m not so sure is “fond”.
And I just sat out in the yard, smoked a lot,
watched the hunters moon bring us to fall.
When I was routed to recall the words you wrote
to me the very day before you’d gone:
‘I took a hike this morn’, to watch the sun,
so clear I swear I see you at the bluffs…
trying to gather thoughts, and clear them up,
reminded of you and your early walks.’.

I’ve written back at dusk,
this hallowed, hollowed month,
every year since, attempting to respond…
sending letters
of unsaid regards
which the messenger has likely lost.