Butterfly in a cage,
Bruising your wings on the bars:
Butterfly, just stand back
Until you can see how far

How thin the distance,
Between you and there;
The freedom you seek,
Past the barred air

Then fold your wings together
As though never to fly
And squeeze yourself between the rails
And waft away, on a sigh.

Humankind is the raging mist of tears in the night
An echo of sobs left behind a star capped mountain

We each are dying as soon as we arrive
Day by day, every heartbeat gets subtracted

We beat our bodies against unyielding rock
We wear ourselves out on the anvil of earth

Hope flies away faster than evening shadows arrive
We are shallow-graven letters on icy stone

A rusting planet circles a dying star-
Just how many ways are there to die
And does it matter once the fire has left the heart?

I run for years, I run from fires
And frowns and harsh words and barking dogs
I run to love and away from disenchantment
I rush to judgment and retreat from skirmishes
I run headlong into many arms and bounce from chest to chest.

I fall spinning over cliffs and across boundaries
I swim fervently up tributaries and tumble over falls
The longer I go, the farther and faster I run
Almost as if the distance in itself were an achievement
Still at the end to be moveless, and not one remembers me.

Oct. 15 2010

like dulcet lovers
twins on the Aegean
two hearts beating in time
bis vivit qui bene vivit

never shall innocent blood be shed
yet the blood of the wicked shall flow like a river

time ran by leaving ****** footprints
time mated with a vengeance
does time run down or simply run out
of time?

never shall innocent blood be shed
yet the blood of the wicked shall flow like a river

blood speaks in a rush
and mumbles in corpuscles
blood measures heartbeats in pulses
between two hearts
a silken cord of caring

never shall innocent blood be shed
yet the blood of the wicked shall flow like a river

time answers all questions
in good time
souls are thin rivers
running into the same
shivering ocean of memories

never shall innocent blood be shed
yet the blood of the wicked shall flow like a river

hearts are cymbals
beating out the old refrains
in time

*He lives twice who lives well

The earth will know your flesh,
Embrace your marrow’s last memory of bone
More encompassing than any lover.

You were received from earth's body,
As much her child as sky’s; even more perhaps
When you are no longer breathing.

Into raw earth, you will change incomprehensibly
As incorporeal as starlight itself,
And nameless as shadows in moonlight.

Just as daylight dies, you disappear
Down into the deep foundry of death;
Swallowing darkness, in bowels of earth again.

I and Me own different planes within the skull;
I settled in the frontal lobes
Where I can usually vote aye or nay, as it strikes my fancy
Controlling the higher thought, the calculations,
Schedules and contingency plans.

Me dwells deeper, inside the ancient brain;
The place of reptiles, receptacle of instincts
While I dream of ice cream sodas, ***, and journeys,
Me might dream of large snakes, have nightly dreams
Of terror, mass exterminations and die-outs,
Experimental lobotomies and spherical supernovas.

Me worships planetary deities and various idols of glazed stone.
I gave up dominance to Me, who can hijack My main processes
When confronted with extreme danger or duress,
In order to have the majority of say the rest of the time.

I and Me get along well mainly because
We are never occupying the same place for long,
Sort of a marriage of convenience;
All my logical reasoning can't turn Me aside
Once her wire gets tripped.
So I spend a lot of time doing damage control-
And hopefully, Me stays asleep.

She steals serendipitous words from the dead
Ranges them on comely pages,
Sybaritic springs filled to overflowing
Metered precisely, to the raving adulation of crowds.

Only dark closets speak to me,
Crying out their hoary linen secrets
While musty airs clog my lungs.

Why can't I have ghosts, fragrant as wind,
Free as balloons, loosed of their tether,
Instead of pilfered dust *****
And scattering bed bugs?