Days Gone By

Sun kissed waves like glass does gleam
As sparkling, rippling, beautiful streams.
Takes me back to yesterday
When time stood still in childhood days.
The salty taste of days gone by
Of warm sunshine and lullabies.
Memories linger still to comfort me
When life bears down without relief.
My mind drifts back to carefree days
Before life’s hardness took away
The Innocence of childhood wonder
That Often fades like distant thunder.
Seashells and sand between my toes
As Salty ocean breezes blow.
Memories as dear as the gentle sea
Are always close to comfort me.

In the moment just before wake,
The last fragment of a dream eludes my grasp.
As I cannot distinguish thought from memory,
I am astounded that my imagination could conjure such bliss.
If only at will…

Not every night, but some,
I see what I am capable of.
Mind at ease and running free,
Latching on to these ideas
That exceed my perception.
And my attempts to recall or review,
Are but failed attempts, futile.
Deemed too beautiful for consciousness,
But from what I can remember-

I fight, I play,
I sight, I run from beasts.
I find, I make,
I lose, I have the world.
I live, I breathe,
I meet, I die sweet deaths.
I fly, I kiss,
I smile, I love it all.

The fluidity of instances, the current of time,
No-these do not exist in my mind.
Or are rather transcended,
Bent, broken, then mended.
Allowed in my altered state
To transform and create
A world where everything is designed to please me,
While, simultaneously, my fears run free.
Ah, but not too much to handle.
I have fragments, puzzle pieces, crumbs…so little.

Oh sleeping self! I beseech you
Spring alive and come and teach me
All the wonders you have known,
But sadly do always withhold.
Revise my mind, what poor creation.
Have mercy on my indignation.

Am I really to believe
That you are so wiser than me?
Smiling, sleeping beauty, I
Foresee the dangers of the eyes.
Masterfully handicap
My body to this nightly trap.
Thus looming possibilities
Of habitual retreats,
Delights in excess to relieve
Me of my duty to receive
Signals from reality,
Abundant sensory deceit,
Of forlorn mental interactions,
Of achieving distant affectations,
Obtaining hopes and admirations,
Beholding nonsensical perfection,
All this, too more, are so designed
That my mind can never wholly dine
On the enticingly addictive
Highly imaginative symptoms
Of the body’s hidden fluid source
That rarely tends to make its course.
But holds great power menacing,
As well as gently flowering.  

I envy you, my resting mind,
My well worthy unconsciousness,
Whose power is tempted unconstricted,
Whose fascination’s limitless.
Who teases me, a window shop,
An ocean reduced to a drop.
The very inkling I most relish;
Waking memory’s a feather precious.
Delicate and dancing ‘round,
High hopes, in journey, treasure bound.

***** hands, gun-powder face
Pressed against holy robes,
Begging final forgiveness.

The father holds his son,
The grown boy
Clothed in military brown.

Steady, mourning lips whisper a prayer
Into the ******, sweat-soaked hair.

His life leaking away in the darkness of the stain spreading across his chest,
The soldier sobs.
Because his eyes have been dry
As his brothers have fallen around
And before him
As cities have erupted in boiling flames
As he has been torn from the inside out by the sounds of human suffering
As children have died in his arms
As mothers have cursed his name
As the world has grown black and charred beneath his feet.

He weeps,
Shaking in the arms of God's servant,
The sins of his work
The guilt of his rifle
Burning in his chest
Hotter than the biting bullet.

The words of the priest
Are drowned
By the malicious hum of aircraft overhead.

An angel of death
Finds them kneeling on the cobblestones,
The holy man and the soldier,
Folds them into its inescapable and
Unbiased jaws
And turns them the color of
Fire and gunpowder.