Where land and sea meet,
There’s energy.  Nature’s endless symphony.
Forever the tides rise and recede.
For these are the waters of eternity.
And all this time we’ve never stopped spinning.

Some nights, crows haunt my dreams.
Yet others, this addled heart is anointed
In all the moments I’ve heard your name
Whispered in the manes of horses
That run with the moon.  

Let’s not give way to dark imaginings.
Fears and phantoms; the murderous frenzy.
Forget the clattering plates,
The rattling bones,
The skeletons of long ago.
The smoke that billows from the factories;
The dead and naked trees.

Tonight a mother sings her baby to sleep,
Holding her close, feeling her breathe.
When her song ends, there’s still so much solace
As the rocking chair creeks.
Somewhere on this earth there’s a sky so wondrous
It’s like watching a thousand beautiful flowers bloom.

Set afire your Phoenix-heart
As the new sun rises in the east.
And set ablaze the skies
Of all your days and nights.
And rise.
Rise.
Rise above all the ashy aged suffering.  

These columns won’t collapse.  
These foundations were built
With the mortar and stone of souls and passions past.

Stand with me on the bow,
Under the midnight moon,
And ride these currents of discovery.
For these are the waters of eternity.

“When the Sea Sleeps”

This ship creeks.
The planks bend under the tides of time,
and echo whispers of a renaissance from long ago,
telling tales of dusty old thrones.

Alone, I retire.
I long to dream.
This bed still has your warmth.
Here, your dust has settled.

Desire hangs in the air tonight,
it weighs me down with thickness,
the heaviness that strands us in the doldrums of love.

When the sea sleeps,
I lie in the stillness of lingering memories.

I ponder all this emptiness.
Yet, deep down we know
nothingness can’t exist.
Somehow, something more than this.  

And we listen when the captain says,
“Be patient, for the wind will come.”

Our lifeboats, adrift,
their arrival, posthumous.

Atonement—once momentous—now meanders
in the zigzagging of rambling vagrants,
(who may have committed a sin or two).

Crooked now, old beggars, bent double,
hunched over the dying fire, fading embers—
while the coyotes circle tonight,
close enough to hear their hunger.  

As of late these days
have a drunken sway,
and times goes the way
of lost dogs and old men,
to place of tin cans and sad songs,
of a distant harmonica,
of truths that work against us,
if we let them.  

Tree-top moonrise; drowned drunk fruit flies
in our wine, make us long for one last Dionysian night.  

Before we sleep, we’ll plant our
ghastly emblems in the mire;
things to be remembered by.

If my father died mad, will I?
I wonder, sometimes.

Street lamps flicker tonight,
and so stumbles your ghost,
fumbling down the road,
going as far south as south goes.  

In my dream we walk
the white dunes of Yemen,
heading to the shelter of your heart,
where windows face pathways
leading us to waterfalls.  

It’s that time of year—
the sun’s shifting on the stones,
casting bigger shadows.

We’re lighting the torches earlier in the temples,
wondering what’ll happen if they fall.
Wondering if we’ll crumble,
if we’ll be able to keep the hearth warm.  

The dimensions we live in,
the dimensions we’re given—
our shadows cast ripples in time;
our other selves frozen in ice.  
When will they thaw out?  
And what to what?  

Seeking those who’ve solved the mystery,
bringing meaning to being;
while we share this time and space—
for a little while at least.

In times of drought, you tend to forget
that your conscience was once as cautious
as a crow’s wings upon landing.

But now your armada sleeps,
and your oaken hallways stained in crimson,
are tucked in and snoring a gluttonous ignorance.  

Things that make you think—
the men who built this house
meant for better things.

So strange the ways we cannot see,
we’re running out of everything.  

Drunk on wine and mead,
waking memories rising from the time
we crossed the Arctic Sea;

The ice, the earth, the sky, this land—
the vastness that spins under God’s listless hands,
as we walked on water
above abyssal planes as dark as space.  

We never quite perfected our escape, in the end—
always the frigid indifference in how the man
becomes a gentleman, then a caveman,
and, perhaps, a gentle caveman,
and at times, a barbarian,
ever thus the everyman.  

But on this night, the captains rest
in armchairs, if they can,
and the cupbearer’s hungry looks and filthy rags,
make every dying toes even colder.  

And you’re terrified by the thought—
the dread that rests on the precipice;
there won’t be enough in your cup
to help you forget
the city is burning tonight.

Full moon tides pull us tonight.  
Our twins, sent away on a rocket ship.

We’re of an age now
where the winters grow longer,
the storms darker, the rains harder,
the summers shorter.  

The academy is split—
the stoics, the skeptics,
the purists, the academics,
the existentialists—
what is and what isn’t.  

While we wait for the day
crows fall from the sky;
but there’s one thing you can count on,
we’ll be clutching one another
beneath the rubble.  

The fisherman’s wife sews his nets at night;
the whiskey sea, the gentle tide—
human driftwood floating home.  

Remember the train we road to Salem;
we game up our seats
so the old women could sleep,
and we felt good.

These memories move more at night,
When the cradle moon hangs low over the sea,
Leaving its luminous path
To a kind of glory that may never come.

The train-whistle echoes in the lonely night,
Carried on the open arms
Of moonbeams that invite us in,
Caressing the pines with indifference;
Reminding me of the nomad my heart has become.
Seeking a cure for its malaria,
Grasping at this fleeting peace.

“El corazon,” the painter sings.
The canvas and his suffering.
This heart wanders the dark
And dank alleys of the past,
Where pools of nostalgia run down the gutters
And gather in the ruts.  
Some of these pools run deep.

And far below your wreckage rests;
Sleeping ships of ghosts and gold.

We ponder the impossible,
Wanting all things palpable made malleable.
I’ve never been drunk on defeat before.
We will blunder our way to the high road,
Letting whiskey footsteps guide us home.