The darkness hums around me
The concrete, warm against my back
reminds me the sun was only just here
My thoughts suspend themselves
The expanse, gazes back into me
tells me my secrets are safe here.
That is my favorite place To Be.
I sometimes wonder
if you do not truly grasp
the sincerity of my love.
You broken, wondrous thing,
how can I make you understand?
When you and I met,
when you befriended me
and deciphered the map
written on my heart
that I’d lost the key to,
All the black and white
that barred my freedom
faded into gray;
And when you kissed me,
I fell away from the place
where I’d been chained;
I wonder every day now,
as I fly freely on the wings
you showed me I’d always had,
how I can express to you
the depths of my devotion,
and my unconditional love.
You, who loves and loves me
and expects so little in return,
how can I make you see
this invisible pledge
burning inside my heart?
I lie awake in my cold bed and feel you all fly away from me,
to thought-worlds and color-places that exist in the mist of dreamers’ minds.
Even the sky leaves me here, and falls away to black expanse.
(I wonder, as I shiver with the thought, if it scares anyone else
to realize that daylight is the shroud and darkness the reveal?)
I wish I could follow you all, down to your misty, secret worlds.
I would kiss you, take you into my arms, tell you lovely things,
if you would find me here, and lay your warm body next to mine
for a soft, sweet interruption from my introspective reverie.
I climbed in bed next to my sleeping love. His arms and hands reached out from the mist of his dreams, found and pulled me close, and he kissed my forehead. Like always. I trust in this unconscious action, in the feeling of his sleeping hands knowledgeably traveling the curves of my body. I trust in this simple thing like I trust in the sureness of a breaking of a wave on some distant ocean shore.
The unavoidable fact that you will one day leave this world
steals you from me even now, even as you hold me.
By the time you breathe your last, I’ll have lost you
a thousand times.
How do I stop this death ritual? My morbid tenuousness
is shriveling the blossoms you managed to grow.
Please tell me how to appreciate this life of mine
before it is gone.
“Take care not to let your hearts be troubled.”
Perhaps the author should have spent some spent time in Tibet, with the Buddhist sages. Perhaps he may have found another way to put things: “Take care to not let your hearts be troubled, or entangled, or attached. Also, perhaps you ought to take care not to take care at all. Perhaps you ought to prohibit your emotions and let nothing put you on edge, nor in the middle. Perhaps you ought to just not do anything or be anywhere at all.”
Perhaps there is a way to plug up the heart, so that it cannot feel, cannot heal, cannot take its part in the endless cycles of emotion and demotion.
Take care not to let your plans become a beautiful mirage in the desert of uncertainty.
The lazy trees’ songs
Reach me across the meadow,
And I sigh with them,
Letting out the air in me
Like a deflating mattress.
*
“No, that isn’t right
That isn’t quite flattering”
He tries it again—
Letting out the air in me,
In a soft and drawn-out sigh.
*
He ponders the world
As the clouds above stroll by.
If more time were spent this way,
The world might be enlightened
*
He dares not tell us
The last cloud reminded him
Of something phallic,
That he laughed for five minutes
Before somberly lying
*
And telling to us
That it was a nice flower
For a nice bouquet
In an elaborate ploy
To forsake his youth too soon.
Eyes look up from their frail perch among piles of old books and crumpled trash, belonging to an old creature that has lost its way in the circle of things, lost its way in these books and trashes that mean nothing. The figure stirs from the wreckage of intellectual neglect and stands in the moonlight streaming in through the window.
“What a feeling.” The eyes haughtily, stupidly, bore into the night. ”What a feeling, that permeates everything, when every thing has at last stopped its incessant chirping and whirring and slurring.
“It is like the day the ocean forgot to break on the shore, or an evening the sun forgot to set. It is like the day for dying in the name of some Ineffable Name, so that one might live in the luminous light of Ignorance’s dark shadow. It is like the day that darkness rose from the dawn, and covered those who needed comfort, as it still does, for we are cursed to live in the Light of frailties and feeble deceits.
What becomes of the soul, when it turns on itself
to make everything whole? Does it rust on the shelf,
does it die in a hole, does it murder the self
that once gave it a home? Or might it be the self
That back-stabs the soul when it turns on itself
to make everything whole?
The day is highlighted there
in the calendar
Marked with my favorite color.
Your name, written anywhere,
deserves nothing less
and everything more than this.
I watch the days pass me by
as I float downstream,
the sun turning my skin brown.
Sometimes the river-wise birds
Let me paint their wings
The color I gave your name.
