One thin linen layer
separates my spicy palms
from the vast unscoopable harvest
of the crystal-scattered light.

Sunbeams brace the icy sky.
Early bursts of starlight score the dappled shade
whilst snowcrush of silence
interrips our invitation-emptied poem page.

So strange how soft it is.
The insulation stationed
on the streetcorner of the universe
intersection: stars sky & stone below.

I'm stepping in and leaving shocks of shade
just above the blades of grass
with tangled roots that sink into the icy loam
and stone-stacked-stone,

the earthy bone that plumbs deeply
to the heart & hearth of Earth -
a hidden molten core, the nethers
of a depthless tunnel filled from core to feet,

my feet, and then my torso-mind-and-eyes
that see. How strange it is, how softly sets my gaze
upon this world, a fleshy inglenook in space
that sees itself and steps into the snow.

Love is fear's mother,
and she calls you to see
everything you are afraid of.

Let it be before you. Accept it.
Accept the broken glass
and childhood spilled
like lemonade, and the wrinkled
brow, and the nightmares
and the scary movie,
built to taffy-stretch the curl of your spine, accept it.
And let it go.

And the heaps of crumpled paper in your torso
will start to smooth in tandem with your opened fists.
While sweet, sweet words are written fresh
in clean tears of grief.

Say!
does Wednesday have a favorite snack,
doled out on paper napkins in a bright-lit kiddie school?
maybe trade some salty fish crackers
with its neighbors?

does it jump for joy when it's time to leave,
and giggle when it gets to go to school?

Little Wednesday,
the middle child.
every week, a little older,
but easily overlooked...

perhaps it dreams,
in the way of stories,
that it will do beautiful things.

We found neurons in the soil
while mining yesterday.
Dendrites broad as city streets,
and axons like superhighways.

There were ribosomes like raccoons
equipped with claws to clip, construct
cities in a stunning cytoskeleton:
the Bones of the Earth.

What, we wondered, does our planet think?
Does that mean we aren't the best anymore?
Is our planet a component of a greater ecosystem?
Is our planet a person of a species?

Thinkers think to survive.
Why does our marbled orb muse?
Are there galactic predators?
We scramble civilizations to prepare in fear.

Or is there rather interstellar prey?
We ready our harpoons either way.

When you fall asleep,
Your brain catches fire
Burning up the less significant
Memories of the day.

As the flames rise
So do the swathes of smoke
Curling past your eyes
And around your ears

What we see and hear:
~That is what dreams are~

The geese are a honking loose thread across the sky. I can hear them in my wicker chair like they're sitting right next to me and I think their voices carry at least as far above as down below. So loud. The sound of changing seasons on the wing. You'd think a goose-whisper would be enough to keep their conversation going, but no. I need to hear them in my wicker chair too, apparently. I kinda like that. Maybe they are talking to me. Maybe their sounds are like street-songs for strangers, or God-praise, or apple pie cooling on a neighbor's window. Maybe they made something really pretty in their hearts, and it's so big they can't keep it down their noodle-necks anymore. And so they're singing it out, for the whole world to see, like a big grin, and it's just perfect that I hear it in my wicker chair, it makes it even better, and that's why they're so loud. It could be.

I love stone. Don't you?
We forget ourselves for
a moment when we stand
beneath
a mountain. A true experience
of a mountain makes us
feel small, which is right.
Because we are. But
we only forget for a moment,
really less than a minute, and
soon we cast about for a little
sharp-edged rock to carve our
names into the cliffside.

Once, a person lost
their faculty for emotion.
That turned out alright, though.
He wasn't ever sad.

But it was sad. It was tragic.
Because we listen to our
little voices, and grind our names
haphazardly into the rock,
and it's really very silly
to try to be immortal. Even mountains
know that. And we live
with these very silly
voices drumming all the time in our heads,
and we think that's us.

We think that those voices are us.

And that person? The tragedy
is, I don't know if he ever gets
to be corrected. Do mountains
interrupt him? To forget ourselves
for a moment beneath a mountain.
Does he ever get the chance to ask:
Why do we forget ourselves,
anyways? Who is it that made us pause?
The mountain? It didn't move.
Our little voices? Ha!

It's something else. Something powerful.
It shuts up your internal monologue,
and in those moments, you are at your
most agile, most eloquent, most true.
On stage. In a sport. When you read
a set of words that hold power to change
your life. Does it have a name? It has many.
"Soul" is only one of them.

And that person? Yes, it's sad.
But ask yourself this: you've seen
your mountains. They made you
step back. I know they did. There
was an instant that your little voices
were completely, utterly hushed.

That moment happens, and it's
entirely out of your control. The
next moment is truly up to you.

So what do you do? Take a picture?
Carve your name into a rock?

It is a midsummer storm, and the air is textured like heavy cream
warm and thick and sweet. It hasn't yet began to rain, and bare toes
grasp clods of dust, the kind with root fibers tangled inside,
and everything  is keenly sensed: the smell, the taste, the touch,
the sound of the wind and the warmth in this charged moment.

It is impossible to not be humbled before these grey clouds,
massive structures that remind you of the roiling turbidity of silt
at the bottom of a river, freshly disturbed by a fish's tail
- except these grey giants, these clouds feel infinitely large.
Humbled, yes.

And powerful: the little human on the parched earth
feels vigor pumping through veins,
a feeling typically beyond recollection
that is difficult to trace to its source.
Where is this power flowing from? Not from some
deluded sense that this small mammal could shift
a single bead of moisture in the sky, no;
where is this power flowing to? Its effect is . . . unplanned,
it is spontaneous in nature, even though it feels so rooted
that no-one, certainly not you, could move it.

This power? The source is invisible, the fate uncertain.

The purpose? Take note. This is faith:
to be so confronted by reality that your inner monologue
forgets to stay in a continuous loop; at last, you hear your part
in a greater melody; to concentrate
on something outside the ceiling of your skull.

Reality will only be itself.
Either project your attention outwards to trust the truth,
or blind yourself with anxiety.

The power you feel inside the storm does not belong to you,
it belongs to the Greater Picture. But, the choice is always yours:
hide away, or raise your face. the   rain
    begins
          to             fall.

Give enough faith
   strike a fulc-
*** for a balanced rack:
shift all the mass
   and the *****? It's an arduous tack --
Have you clutched a spring,
  felt the choke in the wire ring?
It is smoke to my throat-tight and tears.

Look: all the weight
   all the trust that I've fishing-cast
on a Man who's not a man,
  who is more than that.
For the love that's agape and
  that's flooding past
with no end-sign in sight.

It's Him whose advice
  that I pivot towards
like a rod guiding light
  guiding lightning fo'ards
But for once, though I list;
like some empty gourds
   I'm alack, lack-a-days.

God, I've a Führer, I'm a furious
man, with a shame, and a love
that I can't I just
can't
I'm in love
but it's broke
so rabbinical Man: what do I do now,
so lost? so lost.

We love each other.
Can't you leave me alone?
Am I a Job, to be taken from home
and broke? In the dust? In the pain, stupid
lust, and my tears? Where's the mountain
moving now?

Now, I'm just a fool;
you're the Lord,
and I know that too well.
You've a plan
  -- I assume. --
and sometimes I quell
all the fears, sheathe my dagger-filled eyes.
But I'm mad, God.
I'm mad.

So what now? I love you God,
and I've belt out my piece.
So what now? I was hoping
that this poem would rose-petal
to peace
but it's not. So I'll wait.
In flaming throat-tight and tears.
I shift my weight,
restless-pray,
pray that wisdom perseveres.

Discussion ends, and we talk on:
to clarify lecture, thereon
concerning life - the rules by which we play
as clumsy wise with books and blades,
chemists cutting to remake
the human form, and change, reshape
their lives with information, application
of our minds, the drugs concocted
via our thoughts. This the power -
and its light we cannot help but hope to wield,
for who declines the hands that look for aid,
to bring the flush to lives that fade?

Discussion ends, and we talk on:
I with slow mind, I ask thereon
for I am slow, but eager so
he answers, words like hands that move
competent in their purpose, and kind
to funnel knowledge to an empty mind.

Discussion ends, and we talk on
Still spoke of drugs and blood, thereon:
Influx flow in, efflux flow out,
the drug, first raw, march'd through a route
of enzymes who transform its love
for water -- made it dissolve
like salt in *****, strained away
with all your waste. Their hands are good,
those of your doctor, liver, blood.

The mathematics predict efflux
flow out -- flow in
influx dictate that concentration drug in blood
will rise - molarity
increased - at rate unchanged if not
that substrate concentration guides
the liver's rate:
a second order interaction,
see, reaction rate increases
until the speed
flow in/the rate
flow out is one, the same, and thus the blood's
molarity will change no more
-- this he taught me, as we spoke,
and if my mind wandered too far,
as it sometimes does, his hands
reached out - the type
articulate in words or digits,
which, touching, reawakened mine
to further sculpt my hands refined.

Wind walks wild -
there is no end and no beginning,
only movement:
the great big arms of a mother
on a sea of waterfall foam -
cold embrace that
can't be returned.

We shine with heat
that only certain beasts
will see -
we are a strong, wet candle
that does not gutter
so long as our rivers
of tears
are kept within.

Only a broken heart
feels the shiver in a wind's embrace.
Only a shattered mind
feels blown apart in the breeze.

I walk in biting snow,
my hand is up to strike
me, my face -
I told my arm to do that
when an autumn wind cleaves through.

First you see the front,
and then you see the flip side -
falling Autumn leaves

are like paper -
veins,
brittle webbing
transparent almost,
and impossibly made
with any human hand unless, of course
you plant a seed.

Winds can be troubles
turbulent, mindless, sharply
they pluck; and I hide

but I
am as concealed
as a leaf -
I ought to listen
to what is told to me:
you are no fool, to
choose to

walk in biting snow;
under trees, nearly naked,
but hard as packed earth

and I walk in biting snow,
no words to voice my thoughts, I lift
my hand
to strike
but I honestly ought to listen to the

dying, tumbling leaves -
both their front and their flip side,
the fragile candor

of their fall.

Steel blades cut lush blades
Their air-borne juices recall
Energy of squirrels

Leaping fur wraps muscle; mind;
Full presence; lush unknowing.

First: a soft statement
tolled out to a vacant page
ringing, and rebounding at the edges
as a quiet ripple set
to subtly amplify the light
of imagination.
The stone was dropped by --
what?
A hand that is as old as, or is older
than God.
It pushes through the water like a fish
without fins, it invisibly reshelves
the fluid memories from below
to above, below
to above until at last the rock,
the stone that is a soft statement at the top
of a once-vacant page,
clacks into place on the darker underside.

And then the poetry continues:
Crumpled Lightning;
A hailstorm of Words; Visions; Lines: Sparks;
all angled to mirror the space occupied by you,
even as it speaks of something else entirely,
even plummeting from every direction
to the point they blur - left to right, top to bottom -
the poem is a sheet of water,
a prism of distorted imagination showing you there,
you, clear as day, sharp as life
something, some piece of a thing, is made so clear
to you, a facet of life, a law of reality, or the inner clockwork
of a mind; you see just that much more of yourself
and that space you occupy in air, it is
that, though it may be masked by its magnitude, or its detail,
that is the quality what has wrapped your mind in a net.

So then the poetry concludes
with what?
Some three pillared, immovable declaration?
One scarcely held breath in the wind?
A clot of sky? A vein of iron?
You never fully expect it, no matter how often you are told.
Somehow, very likely inexplicably,
you recall some quality about beginnings,
drawing your eye to the top of the page
that started it all. The
First: a soft statement
an echo freshly familiar, despite
its elder weight; it was there all along
an echo, but an anchor of a stone
built for tethering all that poetry
to the underside of your mind.

These mountains are but a stand of trees
to the man astride that horse;
dark eyes are
massive storm clouds
or shadows cast
by towering presence
hidden in the folds
of an otherwise ordinary
brain. Power? There
is no end to this man's power
except the end
that will always march
shattering sheets of glass ice
with hooves so hard
they weather mountains.

Does he see it? The horse,
whose everyday hooves crack
one film of ice among many,
sees it; has a face
- most expressive beast on earth -
that speaks aloud
against the cold that runs fingernails along
the raw interior of her throat.

Yes, this man, like so many men,
make choices, and choices
have troubling consequences.

There is darkness
in these mountains;
because mountains stand taller
than the common countryside.
Sometimes, their height brings them closer
to the sun. At midnight, their peaks
are more distant than the depths of a gorge.

See the deeply set, tempered soul
ensconced in that man's eyes?

The horse is very,
very tired, and sees more
than mountains, icicles,
wisps of frozen cloud -
she sees beyond these and
beneath these, to a destination
frozen shut in the folds of an
otherwise ordinary brain.
Power? The horse sighs
and drips chilled mucus
on snow. Her humanity
she pours out and only a
frozen peak can see.

*There are humans
making choices
always leading
to the cold.

You set it glowing
We named it sunshine
You let us call it ours

Each day it moves us
We step down on the floor
It sweeps us out the door
Like we were shewed

We've diff'rent stories
Jointly we whisper
Do we matter at all

Sun-dusted cities
Flooded full of noise
An isolated sea.

Down in the subway
In silence we're binded
It's like we're all blinded
Indifferent stone

Each face is different
Jointly we whisper
Do we matter at all

We've diff'rent stories
We don't stop whispering
A soulful emptying
Are we alone?

Each night I lay for sleep
I hear an ancient speak
Lift up your eyes

Remember that you're small
You're still my all in all
Read then remember
then go in peace.

We're unique people
And we all fall like snow
No need for vertigo

Remember from
which place that we fell…

Hark! A sound echoes:
Black-winged flutes crouch on stone
Oddly elegiac.

One day while I sifted through the masses
Of books that fortify the walls of my home
Like paper stones
I found a forgotten thought beneath a destitute
Red cloth binding.

The page had seen a printing press once.
In the days when the corners were not
Crumbling
Before it had been left to drink
The sun
To shade an antediluvian yellow
And was torn from its spine.

The ink has faded away now,
Melted in the whispers of time,
All that's left is a blank page
And one word written by an anonymous hand:
*Palimpsest

Steam from a hot drink,
Immersing the nose
With sweet, foreign scents,
Dried ‘neath distant skies.
 
The night thrives outside,
Slipping outside walls,
Through open windows
Comes moonlit breezes.
 
Outside, owls inquire,
In soft, solemn tones,
‘Who, who.’ A question
Without an answer.
 
Though insects cry out,
‘Me meee, Me meee,’ like
They wish the bird spoke
Exclusively to them.
 
And I sit inside,
Listening to lives
I’ll never understand,
Made aloof by the day.

Wind.
whipping at your hair
which writhes alive
as your two narrow wheels
catapult down &
       down
            the grainy earth
            in loose clouds of dust
            while you turn
corners,
trusting rubber treads
to cleave to the trail
as gravity changes
direction.

It's a steep, slick path
and all you hear
is Wind
and all you feel
is Wind
and it's like you're standing
                 still
with an avalanche
of trees
and rocks
and time
crashing past your line of vision
as if planet earth suddenly discovered
it could fly
and at that moment
you discovered
the perfect vantage point.

Years from now,
When even the future is but a distant echo
In the ears of humanity's descendants
And the remnants of the present
- languages and cultures -
Are preserved on scraps of paper
With bits of faded ink,
Historians will wonder
At our casual representation
Of so powerfully destructive
A word.

Friends, I find, are like oceans.
In that their influences come
and go
with the tides
when fate,
or the moon,
Pulls them to other places.

A friend, I find, is like an ocean
because he or she affects me in waves,
which come
and go
and come
to change the person I am
one grain of sand at a time.

And when the last wave has come
and gone,
an event which may never happen,
or may occur tomorrow,
the artifacts they leave behind -
the lost kites,
the clouded glass,
and - most of all - the shells
decorate my life
and make it worth traversing.

And - most of all - the shells
herald forever their influence.
Echoes of their voices
everlasting in my mind.

The night grows dark; still darker.
My eyes in tears and water,
The stars fall far, then farther,
Until the sky is gone

The cold has dipped
I shiver.
The world has slipped
The river
That trails so far
I wonder
Does it taste of salt?

I wrap my shreds about me
Both wisps of hope and worry
As vague sanctuary
From bright reality.

I stand alone
Though others
Have come and gone
In druthers
As if some story's chatter
Moves still
Though I have stopped.

I keep my curtains shuttered,
Yet light, however battered,
Still fights, shines on my shattered
Spirit, still wracked with grief.

While my quiet's
Unfinished
And life must stay
Diminished
It's good to know
That sunlight
Still waits most patiently.

Sometimes, writing is just
Ink on a page, splashes
Of black
On white, shadows cast
On light, something that tripped
And fell
Just happening
To form patterns
We recognize.
Sometimes, writing is
Different,
The ink - which never changes -
Mind you -
Seems to shine,
To leap beyond
Its page,
Like the sempiternal clouds
At the root of
The waterfall,
Tactile
Everywhere at once,
Obscuring your vision,
Causing your skin to
Bump,
And Prickle,
All the while
Filling your ears
With the white noise
Of water.
It's when writing is like that,
When it seems to breathe,
Where you might read it once,
Twice,
And between readings,
The meaning changes,
Somehow.
The writer's pen
Has been left behind,
Still the story lives on,
Like it should,
Like it deserves,
And sometimes it's a vast novel,
Sometimes
It's a poem,
With three lines,
Five
Seven
Five
And yet, for all their differences,
They are the same: Two
Living, breathing, scintilla
Sharing
Ink-and-paper
Heritage.