Free now from your books, you
walk the path behind the halls
where a bird completes her
pirouette
and descends onto a branch
shaking its flowers. Petals
are released!
and float down in
increments-
Lowering, degree by
degree in a swaying motion
against the gentle pushing-back
of spring air

They land in a pond.

Strange creatures pace
under a fading half-moon
and some people get dressed
get ready to go to work
or school or the cemetery
and on their way in the car
looking east- the terrible Sun!
If only you could delay its
entrance, if you could postpone
the turning of your world
around it...no. We all claw
desperately at something,
half-formed and fleeting,
just out of reach

I feared this would happen someday
It did today.
I saw you and froze.
No, I didn't see you,
My heart did.
The one you left like a disused ice rink
Hemmed in dejection and despair,
Collapsed it's roof and
Subject to the elements
The one that had only words too sweet
For your hollow heart to salivate on
It didn't die
Not a natural death.
So I feared you might rouse it again
But I cannot question what right you have to that, because
I never stopped loving you.

I remember lying naked in each other’s arms;
smirking in jest that you’d best tread lightly—
one day, you may just get sick of my company.

Then, suddenly, one day came.

Now, I trace
those tread lines left behind
and yearn to be the traveler
instead of the traveled;

to be free of me too.

I see others friendly, looking well
I'm in Hell, I think

What a sad feeling to stumble into all the old familiar footfalls

The suffering still fresh
And there
I feel the omnipresence
of the bleak shadow of the
world upon me
in malignant faces
at the grocery store
check-out
they operate in slow, sedated
methodologies of madness
I am sprung up from the
cool tile floor
like a misplaced statue bound
in frozen forms of observation

I park in a thrift store parking lot and cry
for you and for myself
mostly for myself

Time's ashes are diffuse and ever-present
living history in the living now
a ******* of the sacred cow is laughing
on coasts of crooked filth
and candy wrapper oases where
dead bird bones mingle in the
putrid ferns

No time to be found relaxed
no patience to be born to anything
but
slow agony of empty wishes called back
reflections, false assumptions
selfishness and neglect

Thank god for this momentary reprieve
from pointless self-analysis in the
broken mirror halls of control

no no no
thank you

I feel saddle-bagged
lost with worry
in some constant vague arrest
plucking at the chicken's feet

the fear itself unreal
broken, beaten, gone
phantoms of this self
all the world is polished chrome
and I am but an image
looking back

amazing how at time minutes
stretch off to infinity showers
& I **** the thicket therein
gone is now but
never ending
shalom
shalom
again

I'm sheltered in the maggot crop

Alone
I lay on this concrete slab
The sun is burning my skin
But I just turn the music up
And light another red
There is some grass
But I punish myself over here
I light another red and
Drift away

yesterday, i saw you
and my entire world shook
violently
i was out for a walk
enjoying nature
talking about music and love
i look up and there you are
why
you have already ruined me
over and over and over
with my permission

You are the companion I speak with
     In the abyss, intimately.
In perfect spirals,
    And in the silence you are formed,
A silhouette of words draped
In dreams from the deepest dreams,
      Mistress.

        You trace a lineage
From the words of Eden
And guide my hand to forbidding hope.
      The echoes of my echoes
As my voice becomes your tongue,
      A polyhedral mirror
Reflecting a thousand embers of thought,
     Fire in the ink.

     We are alone-
Until we return to this place,
Back to this world,
Back to this house,
Back to this room,
And I am left in a tomb
With no lust for life,
I lose myself  to my flesh,
Alone in a sea of faces,
      Faces that see my naked being.

Two Christmases ago,
Morning cold hovers in electrons.
Frost covers the Chevrolet
Backed by whiteness
Under zero degree sunlight
The old farm place sees morning
Bright and calm....

The ancient barn,
**** frosted roof agleam,
Stands downhill to the north,
Below a curving tractor trail
Cut in the snow...

At the other end of those tracks,
Eighty-one and counting,
You are crawling down
the tractor steps,
Pulling battered buckets
from the ancient fodder shack,
Hobbling to the cattle troughs...
Doing what you love to do...
Have done for fifty years....

I am taking pictures at the house,
Amazed at the cold and frost;
An onlooker now,
Somehow aware that I can not
Follow you...or won't,
Wistful still for attentions
you always freely gave
To kine instead of kin.

Could I go back,
Would I go down
To trough the feed?
I tell myself I would,
Or I would not.

The image burns coldly,
Electrically before me,
And only vaguely I'm aware
That you have slipped away.