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Sitting here,
Tied to my chair,
Lashed with commands,
Controlled...
Filling with a desire to escape,
To free myself,
Finding freedom inside...

Imagination is my kingdom, my escape, and they call me mad,
This world blackens my senses,
Reality is a delusion,
My mind is reality,
Threatening to drift away into madness...
Or they call it madness anyway.

This cage, this prison cell, this classroom...
This grimy hole in which I stand,
Feeling them force their thoughts into my mind,
Unwillingly accepting the ****...
Watching them bleach and scrub my brain,
Painting it with ignorance,
Covering it in a veil,
My senses are gone,
I only see black,
Through a world of cold numeric displays,
Charts, and blank readouts dominate the sky,
Beauty is lost,
My mind is gone.
I can smell  the fresh paint,

thinking it should be blue

for the future small you.

I rub my belly watching for growth

of the child you put inside of me by force.

Of course not to be out done,even by

yourself, violently you took my child away

kicked him from my womb.

Laughing as the blood ran down my thighs

in tiny trickles  like sinister kisses,

from a lovers soft lips.

And when I awoke,

I found I had not escaped

and yet my small babies fate

lay in a pool of blood

in the already ruined rug.
I became aware of my legs
At an insomniac’s pace.
Of how far they stretch and where they strain
My right ankle snaps, like marbles on string.

Walking faster through slush branches,
I slip between pine trees, get up and run.

Towers of ****** forms bulge from rot,
Soaked sludge mounds, like snot.
Jutting out from under are hard slippery shapes.

Cold ****** figures lurch similarly in the dark.

I want breath to roll over me.
Warmly with dirt that stings.

Fingers pull to reach a pebble studded scalp.
Scrape to move, hope for it’s help to grip a rigid mouth.

Getting on top, I roll onto relief.
Where the wind skims like nails of a touch.
Exhaling into sheets of fog, I let lids fall and drift into myself.
"Isn't poetry
unless it rhymes, with meter"
...guess he won't listen.
Death is part of life, but it's hated and feared.
The pain of a lost loved one can never be repaired.
It stabs you in the chest and sits there to watch you bleed
The one thing you'll forget is that it's happening to me.
The door went ‘ping’
and you walked in,
making jaws drop,
making hearts pop.

There’s no kernel of doubt
I’d like to take you out.
You’re a butter-kissed delight
and you’ll taste just right.

I’m sweet for you,
I’ll be a treat for you;
and if you’re not salty,
I won’t be faulty.

This is corny – I know that –
But it’ll be worth getting fat.
**** my diet and my waistline;
Let’s cheat death one tub at a time.
Yet with every flicker
of my heart (which
mirrors
the flickers of his eyes),
I know that it is not right.
We are not right.
But how could that be so?
He makes me feel loved
and wanted
and beautiful
and so protected.
Everything you
didn't make me feel.

Yet with every flicker
of my eyelashes
meeting his reassuring gaze,
I know he is more
than you could ever have been.
Abandoned
And befallen - gods
Trespass the moon
So black
- in a fresco of silence
Like a solo drop
Of dusk - godly foibles
As if dying
In lowly fables
- shredded
And camouflaged,
Nocturnal truth
Of infernal desires speaking
At a remove
From the earthly soil

Thus spake
The spell of oracular lies
As the gods fumbled
In celestial fuss to reverberate
In teardrop shadows
- unfettering hundreds of lives
From the fiasco
Of unholy war as lowly
As godly disdain
Forbidden far from the heaven

Thus -
As the fresco of silence
Smacking
- of an epic delusion
Dies a demise
Of godly death
And the fiasco ends there
In godly foibles
And in godly disdain...
I am the wave in the ocean. As I move along in my life, I see myself growing up; I also see other waves coming and going and wonder where they are bound and why.

As I see the shores of my life's end drawing closer with each passing moment, I feel compelled to search for the answers to who I am, where I come from and where I am going. I search everywhere; I ask the wave in front of me and the one behind me but they are too busy heading for the shores of life's end to answer my questions. They only tell me that I had better prepare myself for the time that I get old and become white on top. These answers provide me no comfort, and the time I have expended asking them have brought me that much closer to the shores of life's end.

Seeing this, I am struck with a sense of fear and desperation. In that momentous terror,  I turn and look within myself and find a peace, an essential character of the very waters that surround and define what I am made of;  discovering what I've known as myself is that aspect of the waters that stands above the rest of the ocean, just like everyone else in this turbulent world.

Once I thought I was the wave in the ocean, but now I know, I AM, the ocean in the wave and the ocean never dies.



© Copyright February 10, 2004 by Michael Rice
6:54 PM
May 1, 1983 First Written
May 23, 1983 Basic Rewrite and Edit


This short story was written after I had made my second trip from Alaska. At the time of its creation my father was very ill with lung cancer and I had been traveling all over New England searching for a place to write up my material. After spending some very difficult times without food and bathing in very cold streams in the Maine woods, I started to hitch-hike south to a place where I could rest. Along the way a fellow who happened to be a ranger for a park near the ocean gave me a ride. I asked him if he knew of any interesting and beautiful areas I could camp in, he suggested Reid Beach State Park. So he drove me right out to the park.

Being very weak from lack of food I sought out a place on a rocky outcropping in the sun by the ocean to try and keep my body warm. It was May first 1981 and this was the day that I had made a commitment to start a book. I believe that what I wrote in my journal that morning was the best thing I placed on paper because the Lord had given it to me. Now that I reflect back on it over the years that have gone by, I realize that this story sums up everything that I would ever want to convey in a book. This story contains a reflection of the beginning and end of all things in my life, as well as the nature of the coexistence of divine and human consciousness. It conveys all of what I wanted my story of the journey to speak about in a way that may help others understand what is most important about the journey of life we all must take.

I have left the story as I first received it except for one exception; I removed one word from the last line that blocked the revelation that is reflected there in. The Lord said, "The way is narrow, many will be called but few will be chosen."

Update: November 18, 2012 4:21 Alaska Time

Just received an email from "Hello Poetry" site. It's not uncommon for me to see something, think it's interesting, sign up then forget what I've done. Not exactly sure if I'm doing then right thing or not. I'm "not" a poet" by any stretch of the imagination, clearly remembering how much I hated the study of Prose and Poetry while in school; I also had a great dislike for writing due to a problem with character transposition and recognition, never made headway until some helpful equipment was acquired by my blind wife whom I married some ten years after this very cold, lonely isolated chapter of life.

Anyway, the key point never mentioned in the notes, is the fact that I'm a Theoretical Physicist who tends to understand everything in terms of "Space-Time" physics, as in, all things in the universe are made of waves, from atoms to the way sun light gets to the earth. Religion and faith were tough for me to deal with, until I discovered that all major physicists were Christians and gave us our current understanding of the universe. Galileo discovered that the sun was the center of the solar system and was told by the church leaders to "recant" or suffer the consequences. He couldn't recant of the truth that God had written in the heavens, so he was locked up under guard in a private church house to limit the propagation of his heresy, as the church saw it.

Nevertheless, about five years before this bit of prose, my life was going the wrong way and I asked to be saved from being tortured by some unkind people in California; it was in 1976 that God saved me through faith in Jesus Christ.  By this time, I've returned from a world of heavenly purity, joy and love as I've spent more than ten years of my life teaching children in Korea.  All children in Korea are loved in a world without drugs, guns, wars, violence or divorce.  

Americans can't believe me, just as I found in hard to believe until I launched a six year long intensive scientific investigation in order to discover the truth.  What I discovered is true indeed as it is related to something the Koreans have and the West will never achieve, a ten thousand year unbroken written history documenting their systematic method for social harmony and success while living on this planet. Both the Western race and the Eastern race have been on the planet the same amount of time; the major difference is the Eastern race survives through natural harmony, agrarian sustenance along with the essential process of placing the good of the "collective" over one's personal "wants." I need not define what the West already believes.  

"I Am the Ocean in the wave" The Ocean is one huge collective.  Conform to what is written in Nature as well as the Bible and earthly life will over flow with health and joy.  I seriously doubt that such a change will happen any time soon; because of this, the portrait is flawed and no mixing or remixing of paints will repair the error.  The only way is to learn from the mistake by cherishing all that was beautiful and pure,  because it's critical that I admit the error, and simple hold the memories of the good and burn the canvas without shedding tears, or grieving on my knees.  Those children I had to meet and gather will stand with me and warm themselves on the dying glow of embers left from a fiery painting that just went wrong.

If the reader is not clear about what is written, they only need ask, "Am I in the picture or standing with the children."
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