It’s the chaos season,
and the weather lately has all the safety
of life itself;
boiling one day, hailstones the next.
It’s the action-era,
trigger-pull politics,
the virtues of grinding heels
and vices of feeling.
It’s the time of concealing,
beetle shell, reptilian hue,
t.v. glowing blue in the curtained window.
It’s the Stonecutter’s hour,
rock, paper, scissors,
returning to what we already know.
This heart is a nebula;
bottomless spirals
reflected in clouds
of dark-brewed tea.
My spit is the water of snowflakes
born of the sea;
my sweat,
the torrents
of the Nile River.
Resonant pulse beneath the flood,
I long to pierce the Veil,
take in the music of
time and space,
water and sky –
quiet murmurs of the paradox.
Three a.m. thoughts
crash and precipitate,
a rush of water cascading down jagged rock.
The deluge drowns me out,
and I want to stand my ground,
but every point is equal,
like the surface of a sphere:
ultimate democracy.
Nothing is quite as real in the dark.
I feel myself sharply outlined,
conspicuous mar on the still blanket of night.
My weary eyes seek out
the moon,
the comforting speckle of starlight,
but tonight, tonight
the sky is a cloudy sea, and
even the stars are lost.
~
the sunlight,
glazed immortal –
pianos in his head;
same notes played progression.
saw a passing reflection
in the window of a car.
no expression,
steady,
like the pulse in his hand.
a rambling apparition that
walks the blocks of house-shaped mailboxes,
cracked pavement and loose rocks
scattering out from worn-out sneakers.
the moment lives only through movement,
heart beats once for every step.
and the world is turning a little faster today,
the sky all hung with dust and time.
can’t stop now:
make the memory.
Dying Fire 