Exiting the void without

Sinking noiselessly into my third skin

The daylight behind, a trailing blur

What happens in the night makes less sense



First suit donned when in groggy waking light

Momentary protests at the dawn

Fumbles with our old mechanics 

Still creaking from the evening’s slumber 



Second when, in flash-bang charge

The workman’s curse sets cast its truths

En route to jobs and errands laden

so heavily without grit or grin

Sea legs now acquired 

Us, with our souls bound by order

So eager for the day to end

Hours lost and hours spent 



And when the clocks call for quittin’ 

Sudden surge of tired smiles

Play light the facts that choke our freedoms

Setting out now to town to celebrate them with friends



None for me though, I’m a goner

What happens in the night makes less sense

A step towards home is both backwards and on

Leaned back to indulge a simpler sigh


I’m always leaning back on something

Crutches groan and boulders shudder

Captured moments deep in pockets 

Whatever helps the day roll by

Bending in the breeze
Little satellite martyrs
Silently earthbound

Hourglass suspended
Whispering in the driveway
Effervescent glow

Business of birds
Curious inclination
Feathered dinosaurs

White oak sentinels
Unknowingly contribute
Soon to all be bare

Distant voices hum
Neighbors are running errands
Inaudible tasks

Visceral lenses
Golden season takes its course
Contrived wordlessly

Brown figure stalking
intently towards a front door
the UPS guy!

Going indoors now
But not because I want to
My *** is asleep

Caught on the softest azure cloud
Ruminant noises drifting
Buzzes of no consequence
Call for attention nonetheless
Arrived today on my doorstep
The humming mental spaces found
Lifted in airy somber cloud
It won’t be cruel, I think
this time


No need for alarm
To quake the fabric of this place
These walls don’t move
Fractured boundaries broken still
Past visits from the same blue menace
Fears bottled for future virility
Nightmarish mysteries a veil


Won’t be wary now
To be kept warm by apparitions
Events transpired underwater
When I lived underwater and
Not only ankle-deep
It’s all better now
To compare is to regret

Turncoat faith in work, in the old world
What value in your toils
Futile swear-words and broken shards of glass
Caught in your eye, put ‘em there yourself
But you knew no better

The world was an ugly, dismal place
But it was all okay for you
so charged to task and back
Every single day
Like any of it meant anything

But rise up the old world did
Intrepid race to innovate your
Father’s and father’s flaws
At once
All worth a ****
“It’s all worth a ****!”
Voices ringing in your cradles
Grandad Uncle Sam
a suit-coat conviction urging
GO
Wield for us the changing tides
Gotta believe in something anyway
Why not yourselves?

Adventist gene pool satire
Odd sciences in, only the ones
that God ordained to be
Capitalized
Identical regretful mug
You all wear it

Balding crowns on white oaks bend
With hues of copper, autumn red
Cascading tears of summer’s end
Around the head of winding trail

Swiveled sights, to west I think
To higher road, the longer route
Of upward path and downward leaf
And acorn kicked by toe of boot

Off quarry’s precipice I stared
And stalked my way down switchback’s sway
A clearing under open sky
Suspended time in humid air

Dreary miles above the trees
Snatched up my thoughts from where I kneeled
A marble laid by thorough hand
Miasma swirls in charcoal field

Though it behooves me to confide
In scenes of dreamscapes carved in wood
The pendulum of modern life
Beckons me onward as it should

Keep your peace, keep it near
Hang it beneath your eyes
and in your deepest of pockets
Ending of breaths
When you’re out teetering
On the edges of all things
of which you’ve grown so fond
a Balcony, front porch, car window
Whispering names to the abyss
Seeking her face in a crowd
and curves in gentle tufts of smoke

Haunted by the voice in the dark
In the corners
Though it is all your own
Multitudes of chatter
Speaking all at once
Cannot ousting the quiet
Boisterous rings of silence  
Hangs heavy in the air
Drowning all, muffling words
Numbs every sense

But I have left myself here
to be drowned
This dismal, tangled world of
Decaying empty spaces, wasted
Where nothing is the way it should be
And no one is the wiser
Such is the universe I’ve made
Where I laugh about being mad
and you helped too
Everyone chipped in

Forced cogs tinkered to
We manufactured our weariness, you and I
Cut from the same cloth evenly

Burst seams on our paper-slim Bedouin souls
Footpaths crossed by happenstance
But it was called a different name

Dampness from corners of eyes torn
From mediocrity to mediocrity
We hung ourselves from pendulums
We aged heavy as boulders do
And the voice of our clock drowned hours into static
Like the half-assed shoves of breath
That carried our wishes downwind in the summer

Our clock was a mirror then
With all those spinning parts
I only saw my own arms moving
Saw them heaving so
A mechanical Atlas, bearing upward the load
Salvation gained by loosening grip on it all

These haunts, these woes resurface
These selves of mine so cleverly buried
But never very deep

Only within the cloud of our story
And all the pretty little words that comprise it
And whichever inflection chosen
One voice at a time
Like painting with a single color