Last salvo

Sometimes
Two hours past midnight
I wonder
Wandering
Clutching shreds of text
Tinkering with tattered machines
Compounded and combined
Strewn 'cross the plain of time
Something from Dali's mind
The desperate efforts of whispering madmen
Fleeting forms
The artist and poet
With song and poem
Rusting skeletons with silver plate
Chisel-chipping hieroglyphs in river stone
Thinking twigs forever losing leaves.
A melting of chaos made by angels falling
The hurler and the hurled
The world below,
A pool that is boiling.

We are a raging fever of little cells
Kept in quarantine
It has stretched to hold our minds.

Delusion of the latest hour
Where lettered pages little avail
All books fade and finally fail.
They are but the fuel and foundation
A funeral pyre to warm the incoming generation.
Tomorrow comes quickly.
New cities grow
Bridges are built
And tigers still shred antelope on the plain.

My thoughts are dust
Words are simply shapes.

Friend

Friend


It was…

'Friend!' to you

Across the long water,

The silence, the golden silence that rolled from the horizon in motion.




My word-

A solitary echo that resounded,

Sang like a single bird in lion’s-mane cage

Rang in a silence made golden by

A tired sun resting on the world's curve.

My word soared like an arrow shot over an empty plain.

The silence came in molten waves

Waves rolling in a rhythm of breathing light

A restless seething against the night.



This word sent an echo into a place forgotten

An old word with a lost meaning

Remembered only by

Old men

And the very young.



It was…

“Friend!” to you

Across the long water,

The silence, the golden silence that rolled from the horizon in motion.

Here I go again

drifting right now...
I watched Apocalypse Now last night after drinking 3 cups of coffee. So there I sat, wired with caffeine, watching Colonel Kurtz philosophize and get hacked to pieces. When the screen went to black, I pulled out Philip K Dick and finished his relatively unknown novel, The Maze of Death.

Still couldn't sleep, and everyone was knocked out.

So I sat at my little desk, put on the film score from Inception, cranked the volume and just let my subconscious flow through my fingertips onto the keyboard. The song, "Time" is the best I think:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0kGAz6HYM8

The composer, Hans Zimmer has a solid grasp of conveying strong emotion through subtle tones. I love his work from The Thin Red Line and other pieces.

This song was a powerful, wistful, somber but with a passion that came in slow waves. You could film a warrior's last moments as he carried a friend to safety before bleeding out; or a couple making love in a room with snow outside, the rhythmic weave of bodies with closeups of facial expressions in shadow... It starts out slow, but with an ebbing and flowing that builds to a heavy climax with a slow tapering into single piano keys. Tenderness and strength, vulnerability and power all blended together.

Sweeping sadness. A prizefighter weeping. I don't know, but damn! A beautiful piece.

Often I will pick an amazing piece and write to it. Just let my mind drift like Nostradamus staring at his midnight basin of water, one hand scribbling out the future. So this stuff is personal subconscious stuff. Not exquisite by any means, a little repetitive like "chemical machine". Ever since I left the mortuary, my concept of the human body has changed. That the skin holds a complex set of ongoing chemical reactions dominates my perception of the human form. A woman is still beautiful, two eyes still glisten with humanity, but I cannot shake the image of the decaying form from my mind.

Disgust has long since faded. It is replaced by a sense of reality, a terrible final sadness that death is totally real for these beautiful biological forms. A human being in his or her body is beautiful, arch-angelic. We are made more beautiful by our temporal nature, by our transience in this world. That is the tragedy, and that is what is the most beautiful. My poem from my book A Piece of Cobalt Sky says it best:

Between Sleeping and Waking

All I have
Is this tender castle of my body,
A mist of atoms
Frail in their solemnity
Balanced in a fragile truce between
Potential and actuality
Duality of love and sadness
Linked by a vapor of electric charge.
From the choked orifice of my heart
The universe sings
And I dream of deep waters and tall trees.

For me, poems do not usually spring out of my head in full armor, but this one did in Iraq. I was almost asleep, listening to the beat of distant blackhawk rotors, and suddenly the words came in full sentences. The only change was "this tender castle of my BODY" from "this tender castle of my FLESH". I hardly ever go with the results of a popular poll, but too many women said it conjured up a phallic tower, and that was not my intent in the poem, so I changed it to body. Although I have to say I still place my vote for flesh as opposed to body. Anyway.

So I went with Inception, and switching to Adagio for Strings Tiesto Remix, I had these visions of the crazed Colonel Kurtz dancing in the jungle to trance, muttering lines from the wasteland.... I think I failed on the ending. I don't like it. Here they are.

And if you want to see where they came from, or rather hear:

Inception: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0kGAz6HYM8

Tiesto Adagio for Strings: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGfq57asAzA&feature=related

Poem I

There is a spiraling that goes unnoticed

Lateness comes early.

Judgement

Sentence

Execution.

No defence against mortal prejudice.

Brass trumpets blow

They blow with an iron sound

Steps are heavy and slow

A march inevitable.

His heart has stopped.

Carry him softly.

Carry him softly.

Poem II

After midnight

I sit alone.

There are no words

No thoughts.

Time seems to change

Meld

Morph.

All constants are off.

A sadness comes

A faint but penetrating smell.

My animal senses stir

But my soul is awake.

Sound is less

Touch is in a dream.

I see visuals like a program

A photonic dance on an internal screen.

This sadness says:

Wayfarer, where do you wander?

What dark forests in the night

Breaking holes in frozen waters

Searching for a lost sword to slay the dream-

O wanderer!

O chemical machine!

I exhale

I feel my shirt against my skin

My toes touch the winter floor.

I am here.

I cannot leave.

Tomorrow the alarm will ring

My eyes will open.

I will swallow and clear my throat

Grind beans for coffee

Spill a little water on the floor.

I cannot escape this.

This is real.

But this is not real.

What is real and not real are reversed.

I can get a smell of the real.

It is not intrinsically sad

But I feel a great sadness because the real is close

I can sense it

But I cannot see it and I cannot find it.

So my heart becomes sad.

My son was sleeping in my bed.

When I woke him to move him,

I felt his shoulder and it was hot;

I realized he was a furnace with living blood

He was a combination of chemicals chain reacting

His skin was a sensor that felt my hand and woke him.

His eyelids opened with muscles and he saw me.

But when he saw me

He smiled

And I saw he was a soul and not a chemical machine

But his eyes were still asleep.

So we are slumbering souls
We ride smiling chemical machines.

Our hearts are filled with sadness.

Measure each minute

Organize actions

Make systems

Click Clack

Gears

Circuits

Technology

Grids

Logic

Reason.

Keep it going

Snap

Crack

Green-Yellow-Red-Green-Yellow-Red- Green-Yellow-Red- Green-Yellow-Red- Green-

Copy-Paste

Don’t create, just repeat.

Cycle

Cycle

Cycle

In a desperate rhythm

And the ghosts bid me:

Silence!

But I keep typing

The one man awake.
And the ghosts whispered:
Stop!
But I keep on typing
The one man awake.

I looked at my son

Found a chemical machine.

I looked at this chemical machine

I saw his soul

Within his soul

Sadness.

Desperate man

Alone at midnight

Trying to gauge this ocean.

It is black

The depths have hungry hands.

Leaning on the desk

I look over my shoulder

Every hair stands on end.

Every mental weapon I hurl

Mind an anvil

My thoughts hammers

Beating on the door of time!

A fish on the hook

Turning and tossing

Fighting with the dream.

Poem III

Solace is a lost world.

Love that is unspoken

Dreams unknown.

Finality

Sparrows falling in a storm

In the wind

In the madness

I missed you

But I could not forget you.

Read this note.

I left it pinned

Fluttering

On a random tree

In some field

Outside a small town without suburbs.

People will drive by it tomorrow

They will look straight ahead at the road.

On their way to church

In their Sunday best,

They will not notice it.

It will flutter just for you

Each word an isolated note

An echoing stroke

A gentle finger

Each piano key

Struck singlely.

My note with its small words

In the early morning

A paho waving in the wind.

Remember me.

Poem IV

Mistuh Kurtz

He Dead.

Stood between life and death.

Drank full the cup of horror

Danced into a purple haze

Drank death till he crucified his mind.

Yes, the arms were hacked

Yes, they made a pile

And he wanted strength

A noble army strong with horror

But he thought this was an addition

When it was really a subtraction

The multiplication of a fraction.

You cannot meet fear without trembling

You cannot meet death without dying.

Dancing in the jungle

He was a hollow man.

He met death and he drank death down.

If you drink death and become death

You can meet death without dying.

Fear becomes you, and you are not afraid.

Yet they were hollow men-
Hollow men!

Fear carved them empty

Weak bodies

Chemical machines 

When they held death

Death ate them like acid.

Mistuh Kurtz

He dead because he wanted dem general stars.

He wanted dem stars the way he had wanted airborne wings.

The path from gleam to gleam

Flash to flash

(a secret emptiness)

(a cold wind)

(did we not say they were hollow men?)
They told him, "Do this! We will give them to you."
So he saluted, and he left, because he wanted them.

Kurtz entered the jungle unaware
He thought,
"Just one more mission,
Then I will ascend the gleaming stairs."

But the jungle is different

It has no system.

It was an ambush to his plans

It delivered a primal answer
To the human question.
It answered as the jungle,

In a way grocers do not.

Kurtz left the polished floor and journeyed into muck.

He lost himself

He could not go back.

But he could not go forward.

He short circuited

Crucifying men in rages

Reading poetry under twilight
In a Buddhist temple
Staring into darkness and the canopy

Searching for signs but finding only filth.

Surrounded by sweat and blood and mud
He did not want the stars

The flash, the gleam

He saw reality
The silver haired CEO's
They had sold their souls long ago.

It was all a tinsel dream.

He did not want to be a grocer in uniform

He forsook the line of dusty pictures in a Pentagon hallway.

But lying on cold stones

Empty

Darkness and death found him

In the hollow of his heart

They made their abode.

The jungle was unforgiving

Nature doesn’t lie.

These gods are wild and ruthless.

Mistuh Kurtz

Your horror is not yourself

Your horror is not the final silence

The last rolling in your blood.

It is a wicker man

It is an intelligent and hungry cancer.

It is not chaos,

It is the deliberate choice of chaos.

It is an injection of entropy into the human spirit.

You were hollow back in grocery town.

Your epiphany killed you,

Not your horror-

Even it was only an echo.

You crucified yourself

Each nail was a realization of your true condition.

You died in darkness, self-condemned.

You are a hungry ghost

Your demons?

They are the demons from your mind.

               Photo taken by myself, an awesome shot of a brilliant graffiti on a boxcar down the street.

Turning the Crank

Last night I had the writing bug, so I put on my headphones and listened to John Murphy's Adagio in D, Sunshine. It is an amazing theme from the unforgettable sci-fi movie "Sunshine".

Here are the poems that came out. Not bad poems, but decent. I always try to write my best, so it is frustrating to produce something that is good but not excellent. Too much mind, too much deliberate crafting. I think the best poetry is from "No mind", "No consciousness". But you have to stir the well, pour out the pitcher so that it keeps getting filled.

So... here they are anyway:

Poem I

There was a place we knew once

But,
We lost it.

The sky is empty.

Perhaps the stars are hidden

Maybe the universe didn’t pay the bill.

All we know,

The sky is black.

Long ago
A call went out

Our heart became attuned

Although we don't know the meter

And we don't know the rhyme.

The notes roll

One upon another

With foothills into mountains

Mountains into snow till the granite touches time:

Crescendo.

A child is curled under covers

In early morning

The heat kicks on

Outside the windows
Tree limbs crash in a wild song.

Where is that voice that called to us?

We used to believe

But
I think we lost it.

I am looking for that voice

And the place from where it calls

Please tell me if you find it.

At the very least,

Write to me

Send me a letter with a map. 

Poem II 

In the moment of sunrise

I felt your hand in mine.

The rushing and the whisper

Ebb and flow
Breath of your heart.

A sudden peace

An inward turning.

The wings are silent

They move in air

Each particle of light

Swept by the horizon.

The light and the dark.

Morning,

Night.

(The heart beats softly)

There is a plain under a red sky

In iron armor
Two heroes always fight.

The wings beat

Air shakes.

The anvil,

Your heart

Each breath a hammer,

Every moment

The ringing strike.

 Poem III

I saw the end

That last moment

The closing of the book

Last page turned.

It was beautiful

And terrible

A gushing flame and a roaring wind

The curtain of the world

Torn asunder.

From the uncertain sea over misted continents

God walked like a giant

Each step one thous’n mile

Legs vast and shadowed

Like elephants by Dali

The torso a mountain

Lost in the darkness of the sky.

His beard swayed

The sound of a forest raging

Hands like great tree limbs falling.

His eyes in lower heaven

Two coals of fire burning.

HONORARIUM

Perry

After Touring the Richmond City Morgue

There is a silence
A silence that comes before mourning
(like a sentence without a period)
The words do not come
Finality fills the room
An inevitable cold.

(we did not know him)

Science states
All ways lead to entropy.
Others say the long night waits for everyone.
While many say there is simply nothing.
But
Somewhere in the vacuum of postulating intellects
This intrinsic truth was lost in definitive nouns and adjectives.

(we did not know him)

Within singular silence
Between interior and exterior
The breathing of the wind and
A stagnant stillness

When daylight's residue paints a pale stripe in the air
An empty room with blank floors and bare walls:

A room that waits without knowing
A house without electricity
A husk in a corner.

(we did not know him)

Outside
The sounds of evening
Neighbors behind lighted windows
The smell of woodsmoke and Autumn
Trees that stand quietly in the yard.

The leaves move in the wind but there is no sound.

Inside the room, silence.
There is no observer.

(we did not know him)

There is no emotion.
The gears of the universe clicked,
There was a past
There was a present
And then a sudden motion-
Tonight the sun will set
But there is no emotion.

(we did not know him)

The room is still.

(but for the tag, we did not know him)

The Sun shines on me and I like it.

There is no excuse. We must take on the world.

Build! Build! Carve out great swaths boldly!
The warmth on my face is free. Who can imagine the immensity or beauty of the sky. At any time, those of us who are free may walk beneath it.

There is no excuse. All prevarication must be denied.

If no one else had ever dared to break free of the cave to cartwheel in the open air, then we could rationalize an argument. But too many have escaped. We can see the smoke of their morning fires on the horizon, and we can smell their cooking meat.

We must engage. We must seek out our targets.

No limits.

[the other day, I was trying to describe Thomas Wolfe's work. i am reading "O' Lost!", the unabridged version of "Look Homeward Angel". I was trying to say that you could not "read" Thomas Wolfe because his writing is too rich- you have to "eat" it so to speak, but not like food, more like eating a landscape. Of course, that just sounded crazy- I was trying to say that Wolfe's thoughts are too big to objectify- they have an organic life of their own, and coupled with an immensity of scope, grouping them with the usual clever novel just doesn't work. So here is a metaphorical/poetical attempt to explain my understanding ( : ]



I do not read Thomas Wolfe.
I cannot.
His words are too large.
Textual landscapes
Verdant sentences thick with woven roots.
The chapters loom like organic monoliths
Each inch carved with a biography that records a minute history
Intricate weave
Documenting the progression of synchronistic artifacts
Each breeze
Every thunderstorm
An accounting of each knot and gnarl,
The random scars and deliberate marks
Inscribed, noted and em-poemed in stone.


The splendor of his vision
Gossamer connected arches
Shining nouns and singular verbs with buttresses of adjectives
Conceptual cathedrals ink-hewn
Midnight mortar 
A loom of pencil and pen.


I cannot read Thomas Wolfe.
His work is larger than I am- 
The tyranny of reader and work
Subject and object is overturned:
For Wolfe there is no seventh day.
You cannot close the book 
You cannot stop creation
To play God would be obscene.
The potter becomes the vessel
The vessel becomes a tower and swallows the moon.


Wolfe creates worlds with life
They live and breathe, have form and breadth and exist in space.
Like immense vistas
Continents 
Solar systems with gravity.
He paints pictures that tremble with a pulse:
The sweeping shores and wide waters
The misted islands of Puget Sound
Rich with trees
The smell of moist earth mixed with old leaves
The rough solidity of granite in the sun
Residue of snow on the mountain
Soft sand with a hint of heat.
His man walks
Has meat in his voice
A button is missing on a sleeve
There are wrinkles in the corners of his eyes.


No, you must eat his words
Digest them.
Dig holes in the hills and valleys of his books
Excavate into the loam of his thoughts
And like a heavy cake, eat slow bites.
Dip into the waters
The warm shallows
The translucent mean where silver trout gleam
Into the deep cold where darkness is a current
Sip them
Drink them down
Savor like a connoisseur.


Wolfe carved his Michelangelo's and bound them into books
A universe un-contained by any beach of sand.
Explorers and wanderers walk his shores
Waves wash their feet
The sun is reverent while the land sings. 

The State of Things

My life
It is written in an unknown script.
In rare moments, monthly and at midnight
I comprehend fragments of a line
Then it swirls away to chaos
Coffee and cream- too swift of an integration.
I yearn for delineation
The yin and yang,
Black and white demarcation
But once again
The old man wields his brush-
Stormy grey.

Rain drops have fallen
But they dry quickly
Ghostly ink blot artifacts of water
Transient fireworks etched in dust.
The earth is dry
A journalist's portrait of sun-crackled ground in Africa.

In this corridor of my restless world
A fitful wind blows
Gusts from a blinded Seraphim
Raging like a panicked bird
Against a window pane of heaven.
My history is a row of wine glasses.
Fate? A metal baseball bat swung by a pro
(each glass at impact freeze-framed in primitive animation
an explosion at the moment of ignition).

Segments of this beautiful life
(Buongiorno Principessa!)
Like separate eggshell china cups
Shatter in time to a karmic metronome
Go to pieces on the cobbles of my ground.
In this constant autumn
My careful piles of leaves disperse hourly
Under the burning trees of a purgatory
Mundane in its urbanity
I rake and rake eternally!

A poet prays for visions
For hieroglyphic portraits that define the soul,
Seeks a subtle music to raise the veil-
Blasts the brooding raven into drifting feathers
And reveals the balm of Gilead.

But on the steps of his house
Overlooking the street
He hears the churning of the factory
And smells its smoke.
He sips his cooling coffee
Watches a homeless man on his bicycle pedaling slow.

All is not lost-

Only my Rosetta stone.

My Library

Remember those afternoons?
Inside the library on the Base
Bombers rattling the metal shelves
I leaned against the industrial aluminum window sill
The memory of hot glass baked by the sun
And I shaded my eyes while I read the Hardy Boys
My chin tucked on my chest
Elbow anchored against the metal making a sweaty spot
Leaning back slightly in my chair
Kicking my foot against the wall
Pausing occasionally
Looking up
Watching for Mom to return from shopping
Only to meet the Texas glare
Shining windshields in the parking lot
Returning happily to turn the pages faster.

After dinner tonight, I laid down for a moment on the bed. Oof! It was hard to get back up.

I muttered to myself, "I am getting old!" But, I stopped and amended it, "No, I am getting oldER".  I became a little internally confused at this point, because five hours of yard work and running around wore me out more than I thought it would. But, I also felt young enough to mentally smack myself in the back of the head once I realized was complaining like an old man. Yet I was still tired.

In situations like this, I find it helps to grab a beer, sit on the deck and throw my feet up on a chair. Twenty minutes later, perhaps one more beer as well, and my subconscious and I come to some sort of understanding. Or at least a  compromise. On a really good day, I'll remember to grab my laptop and see what my fingers can dowse out of the keys.

So, library? Hmmm. Don't ask me, ask the strange guy several layers beneath my cerebral cortex. Excuse me while I take a deep swig out of my beer. The nice thing about sitting on the deck when it starts getting cold is that your beverages stay cold a long time. Nice... Maybe you lose some feeling in your nose, but then, that could be the beer, right?

Anyway, I have good memories from libraries. I hated food shopping as a kid. The commissary was a monstrosity of torture and madness. The library was right next door, so I would enjoy two hours of reading on the huge squishy shiny blue cot-chair-blob things they had in the kids section. Every once and while, like all kids, I would meander over to the water fountain and take long lingering drinks. Funny how all kids seem to do that with water fountains. Drink noisily, all bent over with big pursed lips, getting the water all over their shirt; looking around, wiping their mouth and then taking another godawful long drink. Depending on the season, easter jelly beans or christmas cookies or candy canes would be sitting on the little greeting table close to the door. Although, if you began to graze, the head librarian's desk was right there too, and she didn't hesitate to glare and bustle over to start "straightening" the table and shoo you away.

Looking back at it, while I had plenty of private time in my own room at home, the library was my first experience of independence. For two hours, I was on my own. I could go any where, read any book, even run away if I wanted too. Usually I just found a book I hadn't read and got lost in it for a couple of hours. Sometimes though, I would wander the stacks and just note how the books were organized. Every once and awhile, a title would jump out at me, and I would haul the book off the shelf and placing it on one of the big shiny tables, pore through the pages. I never was a master of the card catalogue, and I hating asking the librarian for help. My explorations eventually gave me an intimate knowledge of each discipline, and so I never need Dewey's decimal system. Sometimes, I would just flip through all the phonograph records, looking at the album covers. My favorite was H.G. Well's time machine. It was the indistinct figure of a man sitting on a box holding a steering yoke with a strange mushroom like umbrella behind him; surrounding him were what looked like lines of magnetic force, like the the whorls of fingerprints... then, just empty and terrifying blackness. I remember staring at it a long time, imagining how it must have felt to be alone in absolutely nothing, no matter, no air, not even time. I figured sound itself would not even possible. I distinctly recall thinking that he must not have been able to even breathe, and worrying that he didn't even have an oxygen tank, and that as soon as he threw that switch he was pretty much done for- lost in a flat, non-echoing limbo forsaken by even lost souls, not alive nor dead, just a strange hiccup of unreality sandwhiched between time and no-time, mouth open in an eternal scream. (lol) Like I said, it made a strong impression on me.

In the end, small as it was, this libary became a book chapel of sorts to my small soul. It was the last homely house in the wood between the worlds. A place that I could properly say was my secret kingdom, and I knew every nook like a native American recognized his territory. It was my refuge on payday, and a castle only a twenty minute bike ride away. Eventually , with my drivers license, I progressed to university libraries, the city public library, but I never lost the love for the small library with the old fashioned aluminum window sills and the rickety metal shelves.

Years later, I returned to Dyess Air Force Base specifically to check out my old spot. I parked, walked up the sidewalk under the metal awning, and then stopped. The library had been demolished, and I had been so distracted, I hadn't even noticed until I was halfway up the sidewalk. There was nothing but an empty patch of dirt and a couple pieces of concrete rubble poking up through the ground.  Walking over to where the kid's section used to be, I stood there a minute, watching the people leave the commissary, just as I had glanced up from my book years ago. I was genuinely very sad.

Whether we are old or just getting oldER, and even if we are young, sometimes we just need our own space for an hour or two. So I will finish sitting here in the cold late October air, toasting the planet that hangs right above my tree while I finish my beer. Good night everyone!

I'll close with a pleasant fantasy:

He sits in a chair outside

Framed by a patch of ground.

It is afternoon

The sun shines brightly;

Its heat touches his face.

His eyes close,

He remembers the lost books

The books that he read.

He understands but is sad-

Like when the Norse gods walked quietly the day after Ragnarok

Picking their golden chessman from the dirt.

Autumn is Coming in the Door

Fall comes to Virginia suddenly. Within a week, it is noticeably cooler in the mornings, and there seem to be less birds singing. I wonder if some have already started their long flight south?

Perhaps it is my imagination, but in September the light seems to change to "fall-light", and  there is a hopefullness in the air. I don't really know how to define this feeling better than that, especially when it seems that there should be some sort of mourning or sorrow for the free days of summer, more of melancholia perhaps. Yet, there is a fullness, an autumnal ripeness that descends like heavy apples from trees with coloring leaves. Fall marks a harvest time, the point of the year when maturity still has its virile strength. Later, in the darkness and cold of winter, it will transition with feeble steps to a maturity identified by finality.

But the pleasure of the fall! A gentle breeze, the rattle of leaves down the street in the evening, the golden light in the Sunday afternoon. I am researching my Gilgamesh/Steampunk novel while sitting on my deck. Books on Zeppelin Airships, Illustrated Encylopedias on Sailing Ships and Steamboat are stacked in tumbled disarray on the glass table top. I pause and sit back as a breeze sweeps through, and suddenly leaves are drifting over head. The oak tree drops acorns regularly, and I can see hawks wheeling overhead while a crow scolds them with a gutteral cawing. When winter comes, that "caw-caw" will be a lonely sound that echoes through bare trees and fields of snow; for now, it is simply a vulgar herald of shorter days and the increasing smell of woodsmoke in the air.

My neighbor's garden is beautiful across the lazy street. The flowers will soon fade, but for now, they match the growing orange and redness of the leaves.

It will be a good week, and I look forward pulling the box down from the closet filled with my sweaters.

The Slow Decay of Eternity

What is the real life?

What is smoke and what is solid?

Where is the golden jewel that shines with nuclear majesty?

Cradled amid silver twigs with blood of molten suns

That small and sacred spark shudders with a heartbeat

A surge of breath into a muscle devoid of wonder

So that meat is galvanized by electricity.

This smoke drifts and curls

I follow it in dreams

Sitting in my chair behind my desk

(My brain awake)

I watch it dance and I see clearly.

In the night, though clouds are heavy

I see with rare sight.

I have walked in this world’s streets

Tasted a dreamless sleep

The vacant eyes of people walking

Not awake

Not dreaming

Drifting like flotsam in the sea.

Their faces are worn smooth and their eyes are blind.

They cannot see.

An old man left his village to climb a mountain.

He said he went to see the face of God.

He climbed over jagged rocks

Trudged through bitter snows

Shivered in cold winds.

But he continued through the night

Passing through clouds and up the last steep slope;

In darkness he ascended the spire.

Morning came, and he clung to the pinnacle

Ablaze with brilliant light.

Early evening, he returned to the village

He could not see, his eyes were blind, but his face shone with light.

No one ever knew…

And no one asked…

Was it the fierce sunrise, unfiltered by dust and haze

Or did he see God’s face for a single shining second

Before the frail organs of perception shorted in spiritual sparks?

Yet the old man was not unhappy.

Children, even men and women

They gathered around him, sat and listened.

 He told and retold the story of glimpsing the light of heaven.

He would lean forward, raise a finger, whispering, “The Light! The Light! I have seen it!”

In his blindness he would whisper, “I see it still! All I can see is light.”