At one.forty-five, anti meridiem
I blink, half-sit-half-lie and squirm
in a cartel of intricate inquiry.

He must be hurting inordinately
to wish me death and calamity.

Who and where is he?
How and why does he?

Simple five-word questions
seeking conclusive resolutions
for well over a millennium.

Frazzled and woefully sapped
from this anarchic, chaotic task
I turn for the promising refuge
of my orderly book-rack.

❋

Over and over again,
I read the masterly treatise
and really try to take it as a guide.

❋

The book has foresight.

It says there is no death

which my friend has wittingly wished me
in his anguished wrath.

Life is eternal, infinite.

Only the spirit changes over
to some other wardrobe
or maybe transitions
to another dimension
purgatory or paradise.

❋

We never really die and likewise
the loved and the not so loved
also survive.

❋

But life often defies explanations
not to mention all expert expositions.

I feel sadly feeble and disillusioned
to see

an orphan having the nose
hard against the grindstone

a spouse lonely and forlorn
fighting it out all alone

a disconsolate father
devastated by the departure
of a youthful son......
or a blooming daughter.

a dashing soldier
who somberly carries the cadaver
....the cold inert clay of a dead comrade

a pining sibling.........
a friend irredeemably lost.........
the poor dead without
and ****** with the ***......
a zealot who lost the plot
or martyrs who bravely fought.....

❉

The book says they are all here
and we still find them nowhere
at least not as companions
in our worldly sojourn.

The author exhorts -
those who are gone still see us
feel us.

And I smile wryly, a little ruefully
at the still living, stranded passengers
in one too many crowded lanes
on this gross, physical plane
devoid of all succor even from a ghost

slippery yet subtle.

If only there was a real life Whoopi †
we all would be as lucky as the demure Demi
and Patrick Swayze would do the reel drill
in real time indubitably.

Alas!!!
celluloid existence is pure imagination
.....just neat fiction.

And the impeccable book.....
though elegant
seems utterly untrue.

❋

I therefore can not take heart
from the prophesied fact
that the dead are not really dead

not ever, or at least not yet....

Yes, they may be right beside
but unless we cross over to the other side
or they someday decide to travel back in time

the living will always be somewhat dead somewhere
and the dead will always be somewhat alive somewhere

accidentally meeting.....
sometimes......

from across the great divide
in a nebulous twilight

but mostly waiting, waiting....
for the wait to end

and to be terminally united
either fully alive
or completely dead.


† Reference made to the 1990 film 'Ghost'. More information at:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost(1990film)

All defined, labeled, identified.
like quiet children who stand aside,
                                                    Silent as a dusty book,
Captivated by their own shoes,
must be pardoned, must be excused.
Those who mumble and avoid your eyes,
them do not mind, they’re just shy.

Imagine if everything still and reserved
Were undermined by such a word.
What would we say of those calm characters
mountains, towers, poetry, flowers?
If perchance one afternoon we met the horizon or the moon,
Are we to say that because often they stand away,
Afar in photos, landscapes, scenery,
off center, silent, beyond the sea,
That these defining features of the sky
Should be cast off and labeled shy?

Those amongst us, who silently
Live largely in their reverie,
Hiding behind their books and journals,
Heard not, but for the scratch of their pencils,
Will name you someday;
They'll have something undeniably brilliant to say.
Should you disagree, consider and think,
Violent, boisterous thunder is the voice of silent-seeming lightning.

The neighborhood sleeps robustly…charmingly.

✽

I sit quietly
utterly breathlessly.

Listening sadly to the inveterate, rasping wheeze
and pensively perceiving the impelling, piercing eagerness

of my dismal, labored breath.

Constrained to stay put, there is little I can do
but to repeatedly browse through
a raft of 'get-well' messages
which have consistently traversed
across your sedulous time-tables

surmounting the bustling maze
of the capricious world-wide-web.

I think of you and your caressing ways -
Your determined thriving to bolster me
through my trance-like medicated days;

planting a flimsy little flicker
to my dead-pan face.

✽

This bantam lightweight note intends to modestly denote:

♔ my incalculable gratefulness for your unqualified wishes

and

♔ sportive acquiescence to my maiden experience
of loving your love

quixotic and so cogently beyond
the most adept shot of the Cupid's arrow.

I used to live in paradise—a long,
low ranch house,
sheltered by the tangle of cottonwood trees
that lined the creek. But as with every Eden
We believed in the magic of that world down in the creek,
where the greenbrier curled
around trees and scratched
our legs and the water oak tipped lazily
over the stream as if in a constant half-state
between dreaming and awake.
We believed so fervently,
so completely,
that the trash tossed down
from the nearby overpass
became heavenly gifts—oil cans,
garbage bags,
tires,
empty cups,
all hidden among the scrubby willow oak.
We collected them like greedy misers.
pieces of glass in a discarded Ziploc bag,
and they shone so brightly
that we believed them
to be tiny pieces of falling star.
And in our desperate belief,
we made our paradise.

…But I fail to grasp…
I really do.

And I fail to write too
about the colossal confusion
in my mind's realm.

To be free must always create glee.

And freedom, consequently,
must incontestably be
the loftiest of all bounty.

✽

…But then they say:

Do not run away from your instincts
…of survival, love, anger, ***…
for if these instincts were not of value,
nature would not have given them to you.

And I muse: Is it true?
Is it?

this incomprehensible link between being free
and the ineluctable visceral slavery?

Won't it rather be that no sooner than you begin to try
to attach (or detach) value to this view or the flip-side

freedom…would indubitably fly

…away?

And then they say that one must surrender.
And thus I agonizingly wonder:

when the mind doesn't wish to unwind
…to let go…
and you bully it to do so

you still cannot be set free

for it is only they who say:
Whatever you resist
shall persist.

✽

And I fail to grasp, I really do,
the cryptic intent of this concentrated glue
of chaotic desire and cardinal instinct
inherently inbuilt
by nature's very own inscrutable mechanism
in (wo)man's puppet-like plight

and then making salvation

the sole noble right
of a free spirit.

✽

An afterthought mulishly survives:

Why?

I have tried to forget you
on numerous days
and in numerous ways.

But you say invariably,
"I am yours, sincerely".

And I search yet again
for the vestigial chains
that bind you and me.

I think of you;
and your fascinated face
peeps artlessly through
the haze of a former age:
Oh! those inaugural, elegant days.

I look up.....
expectantly, readily.......

A hesitant keenness surges......
timidly, momentarily,
then bleeds away briskly, desolately
..........mortally.

Just a few fossils abide:
Some frosty images
and evaporating voices,
......sobbing quietly
through the nasty silence
of the night