Staring into the crimson trance
with faces of friends distant and far,
revealing presence within our moments peaceful.

Rugged body to watch the earth's teeth
crumble glowing in gold to ashen clay valleys.
Crackling sparks of rhythms carry the soul to gardens high above.

To a force that gives and takes,
smile most gratefully glowing,
a kaleidoscope world warming the face
of the one who pokes the universe.

Instead of paper, here you are.
Rather than dust, here you are,
removing the world of its
human fingerprints.

Like a flicker of the sun,
a shaving of light, you soar
across the trembling flowers,
calming them with your weightless touch.

Dancing on air,
you suspend in the space,
spreading an earthly joy
into the wind, into the silent sound.
The breeze, your raja, the sun your mantra,
and I, your beholder.

Beneath these wondering eyes
there is a storm that rages,
and in the eye of
the storm there is a small island;
there, a small cabin sits with its light on.
The candle flickers like a whip as it
illuminates an old bookshelf filled with
tattered dusty textbooks and novels,
loose papers with words scribbled
knick knacks wooded and rusted,
all damp and strewn about.
It's here I am stricken, trying to make
sense of wrinkled papers
filled with ideas of an almost human nature.
As the eye blinks once more,
and the winds begin to howl
I step out into the sand,
books held against my chest,
screaming scribbled thoughts into
the swirling sky.

We attempt rescue, unable to bear
the stardust-coated dragonfly
beat, beat, beating
frantic on the glass.

We entice him to perch
on our extended lifeline-broom
nurse him in a box, where he flutters
quivers, lies quietly blue.

My son cries bitterly
as we place a minute cross
upon the dragonfly grave
while intoning our final goodbyes:

We honor those who have fallen victim
to this fatal architectural trap, lured
by skylights of enticing white-light death
and the paned illusion of freedom.

In admiration of winged determination
and perseverance in the face of futility
we carefully tend the fragile, curved bodies
lay them here to rest under the mock orange.

years of gauze-weighted detritus
swept beneath these ponderous shrubs
a reminder - what seems like freedom
                                                         ­           often isn’t.

A fist used to pound and smack
to smash and wack, to grind the
white flavorless dough from
fields of broken gravel,
crumbled by the passing of time,
flooded by hopeless tears as it
shoves it's seed into stone.

Clenching tightly white-knuckled,
as if to hold desperately to kindness
long left, or never given.
A ****** callused and raw fist,
scared sick and confused, proceeds
to knock the wind from the earth.

Never will the fist be opened
to caress the face of it's mother,
to halt it's careless helpless tantrum
of being, to quit the flogging and be selfless.
A fist so ****** will only end
in a flailing fury of bewilderment,
into the golden flash of it all.

Long ago,
before the first chin hair,
before the first pimple,
before all the stress.
Sitting in artificial sand,
I thought about the future,
reaching a glimpse
of brightness into a fantastic future.
For Christ sake I wanted to be a trash truck driver.
I sat and dreamt about the life beyond my years.
Now that sand pit is a stone curb
were I pan the gutter for specks of
humanity.

I shouldn't have to think in my
years of youth and wonder:
Wether I should leave this world to die,
Or perish with it all.

Inside these quick April showers
lurks a silent melancholy,
a short buzzing of dysphoria.
The human is much like the earth,
for it is these short spells of sadness
that prime the soul for the sunshine
of happiness.