deep inside the mountain tunnel

a needle of light

a dream cast all in blue
choked on trapped steam as
the rising roar of the train's whistle
blows stillborn from a weathered pen
deprived of ink for the final pages
of an invisible masterpiece

she said she didn't want to get old as
she danced in her red and white striped sweater.
i thought, "your eyes are young" as i looked down
and tried to keep the beat as the music
erased the seconds from our minds until
they passed like secret, unspoken whispers.

memory is a story.  it's not a
clean story.  it is a story without
a beginning, middle or end.  it has
many words and pictures that are unclear.
plot points can be revealed at awkward times.  
supporting characters become leads and
leads become extras.  the narrator can
be unreliable.  rising action
can build to an underwhelming ******.
quotes seem to appear from unknown sources.
it is full of story threads that don't go
anywhere, like romances that never
bloom and confrontations that won't happen.
many problems are never resolved and
there are stories within the story with
no discernible meaning.  the hero
confronts many obstacles, but it is
uncertain as to whether a goal was
achieved by doing so.  despite these flaws,
the story reveals a truth, like all good
stories do.  the reader is the author,
and the author the reader.  "and so on".

saw a movie once where a submarine
went into a tunnel underneath a
glacier and surfaced in a tropical
paradise full of dinosaurs and cave
people, then a volcano erupted
and destroyed a bunch of stuff.  i thought to
myself, "this movie is really about
people's hearts", but i guess everything is.
sometimes the world speaks to you in weird ways.

sometimes you make a picture in your mind
of someone you knew or someone you lost
it's torn and the colors are faded but
sometimes a picture is all that you got

"what is it like to think of a poem?"

"it's like walking down an empty street at
midnight, listening to your footsteps, then
hearing a song way off in the distance,
somewhere around the corner, maybe from
an old radio in a windowsill
and you only hear certain words, certain
phrases, so you write them down and hope that
in some broken way they read like music."

always seeking the
exact words to marry for
the perfect haiku