In calm waves of imaginings  I am mermaid,
Always chasing you through the towering tides,
Disappearing between each scalloped crest;
Only my tail visible, sticking out at odd angles.

I have lean, strong swimmer's muscles; I can swim for miles,
Nearly keep up with submarines, ships, ferry’s,
For a limited time. My hair tumbles down
As though a nest, like *****, twisted seaweed
Around my face’s shipwreck-glass eyes
And sunscald lips.

I follow keenly the scent;
Something, someone who’s precious- human scent,
Pungent, earthy, vivifyingly attractive,
Counterpoint to the ocean’s ambergris.

Meanwhile there’s only horizons of teal water all around me,
And roving sky above; my sole company most days.
I swim with just the barest hint
Of whispered memories,
Something so far and long ago;
He who knew well the secret heart of me,
Within my fishy innards
And  in spite of my appearance.

Sometimes a stray dolphin befriends me,
And travels for a distance beside me;
Speaking in strange, native high-pitched dolphin talk;
And dolphins are interesting, but they are not men,
And they can’t comprehend what is it I follow

In the blind, long-aching of unknown distance,
Or what I pine for nightly, in my roiling watery soul
In the solitary caves, of this twilight world.

There's magic in the air
When Cinderella dreams;
Glass slippers may appear,
As odd as it may seem.

When Cinderella dreams
Of jaunty men on horses;
As odd as it may seem
For magic reigns, of courses

Of jaunty men on horses,
She dreams, in her little bed,
For magic reigns, of courses;
And it dances through her head.

She dreams, in her little bed
He has come to take her hand,
And it dances through her head;
She'll be Queen of the little land.

He has come to take her hand,
Glass slippers may appear;
She'll be Queen of the little land:
There's magic in the air.

(Pantoum form)

The lighthouse keeper and his son, one day
Were out on the rocks, by a blue-water bay

As the sea, their bare feet was laving,
They saw a mermaid, they first thought was bathing;

With long dark hair and eyes of green;
Like the mist of a loch, that sings.

She was struggling and sick, in the foamy sea
So they took her to the lighthouse, above the lea.

She begged and pleaded, to die in the sea;
But there in the lighthouse, she seemed fated to be.

A clawfoot bathtub  became her home,
And there she stayed, never to roam.

Some children taught her some words and rhymes.
To help her to pass all the weary time.

The lighthouse keeper thought she was his own,
Though from the sea, she was merely loaned.

Sometimes a midnight, would find him there
Combing her damp and tangled hair.

In her long confinement, he was the one
Kept her sane, since she could not run.

They had long discussions until daybreak,
Entirely by looks and gestures they'd make;

She taught him secrets no man had ever heard;
How she could still the sea, with inaudible word

And how she could tell by the look of the moon
If spring would come early, or winter too soon.

And how the waves, did murmur below
If the weather be rough, or the hard winds blow.

How she'd loved and lost one merman that
Had gotten too close, to a fisherman's net.

They'd had a child, by the madman's reef;
Was eaten by sharks, and how they'd grieved.

He fancied that someday, he'd like a kiss,
For kissing a mermaid, seemed like rare bliss

But something forebade him, to come that near;
So he was content, just stroking her hair.

One day he found her, dead in her tub;
Her heart had broken, all for his love.

No mermaid can tell human men of her heart,
Or else they'll spend their lives far apart,

It's a law of the sea, older than time;
So this be the end, of the mermaid rhyme.

The robotic surgeon didn't blink
Smoke, swear, or fool around;
He was the newest design of science
His metal feet firmly on the ground.

Robotic surgery was the latest
Improvement over the manual kind
There were no variations in technique;
No reliance on flaky mind.

He was diligent and precise
Cutting flesh to invisible templates;
He never erred and he never missed
Never once paused, to vacillate.

Trusted beyond the regular surgeon,
Using his fragile, shaking hands;
The robotic surgeon could do anything
Because he wasn't just a man.

The newest miracle of science was hailed
As the end, to the older style;
But one day the program blew a fuse-
And he cut her head off, by a mile.

Forgive me if I chewed too fast,
And swallowed up all your niceties;
Crunching the pastoral love letters,
Stiffened with a backbone, of dried sobs,
And not fully tasting the briny salt of the tears.

It's just that I've been starved for so long
For some genuine emotion in another
That wasn't drying at the bottom of some jar,
Or trapped in dust on some faded bouquet,
Forgotten in the back of a seldom opened drawer.

And even if it had to be love, so be it-
Though sorrow often tastes nearly as sweet.

When I was just a child, they were just a married couple;
Older, middle-aged, nothing distinguishing about them at all.
I loved swimming in their swimming pool,
Until they upsized, to a glitzy neighborhood of rambling,
Ranch-style houses.
And they upscaled, to exotic, foreign vacations.
Brought me back a Hawaiian volcanic stone, with emerald flecks,
A salt and pepper shaker set from Israel.

She was a clothes horse, always kept her figure,
Dressed slinky but classy, for an old babe;
Visibly stood taller, if another woman
Ever complimented her clothing or style-
And they invariably did.

My dad said that when alone with her husband,
That man would brag about daily *******
From his office receptionist, at the end of the workday
Before going home. I was older then, tried to imagine
How the shared exchange could have furthered
Some ancient, nightly excavated ambition?

Alone with her once, my dad said he made an innuendo,
Some playful joke which he had since forgotten the point of,
Probably due to the more stunning reaction it caused.
He had always loved teasing with words,
But he said that she had dropped all suggestion of pretense,
And she had told him then, You couldn't handle it..
He still chuckled about it, long after the fact.

Funny how for all those years, what I remembered seeing
Was a mostly colorless couple
Who always drove large Cadillacs.
And how in the later years, he could only move
While tethered to his oxygen tank,
Though it never hindered his smoking.

The shortest distance isn't the one
We find waiting under mid-day sun;
It's the one winds through the street,
At the lowest point, then goes beneath;

Or the one who calls at three a.m.
Needing coffee, or tonic and gin;
Needing a ride, to anywhere
Some place that’s dim, and never clear.

It's arms that wrap around our own,
While knowing, it's an unsafe trek-
But still a journey, we know too well-
The paradise-encumbered road to hell.

The skies are cloudy with a chance of love:
With you, I'd paint all the stars above;
My hearts on fire, and there's a chance of rain-
Unless I'm wrapped by your arms again.

The skies are cloudy; but the sun peeks out,
While in my heart there can be no doubt
The weather there has been just the same,
Since I first heard you speak my name.

The skies are cloudy, but underneath
Love has taken my heart; the thief,
So now all weathers that we see as two
Will show us skies that are always blue.

The sky is the quartermaster
But you are it’s eyes,
Currying favor from
Life’s narrow surprise;
The days of your weather
Arrive fair or foul,
Delivering artifice;
As much as allowed.

I sail in your auspices,
Partake of your airs;
Not minding the skies,
Whether cloudy or clear,
For found nowhere else
Are the things you are giving;
And till your arrival,
It’s not really living.

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 want to disappear now, into the smell of books, old ink,
Moldy columns and perfumes of dried flowers.
What keeps us alive, bundled into these bodies,
Are incoherent strings of dna the gods of our existence,
Do they determine if our days are mostly carefree
Or slipstreams of inchoate agony?
Does the loveliness of life arise from its randomness,
Or the randomness from incalculable beauty?

Why do some pay the ultimate price,
And some never seem to pay anything at all?

Is my breathing my tithe, a piece of each day that's unwound,
Tribute paid to the universe, itself but one hallowed out-breath
From the sphincter of time and inconceivable distance?

I can wrap myself up in pages of words, in folds of paper
Trying to cover myself in understanding,
Yet no man holds the keys of what we are,
Or what we are yet to become; faith is all we inherit
In the orbiting chaos of time, we find once-living shreds of it
Always in free fall, floating forever through the continuum,
A whispered message from the secret heart of being,
To never forget, that the smallest mercies can save a soul.

There’s a humming above the rain
Evil sinners plot against the land,
Fly buzzing ghouls, adrift the spirit
But above all, I remain a man.

Alas the wind had died
So small beneath the mast,
Alack, to the devil must go
Sundry memories that pass.

So brilliant beneath the dreamscape,
Quaking stares above the fire.
Be watchful; the vision's going
Smoking ruin inside the pyre.

Shift to intangible, across the water
Without a backward glance;
Shimmering pinpoints in the distance,
That hollowed, ghostly dance.

The steak tartare had painted toenails
And manicured hands of polished silk;
Mouth with apple, daintily wedged,
Floating in a bath of milk.

I helped myself to a silky ****,
Sliced across it's still-pink grain,
Seasoned with a squirt of lemon
And coarse ground pepper, for a tang.

The seasoned broth was the finest gravy
To moisten the neat cuts of meat,
And sweetened fat, in a frothy pie
Ended the repast, with a treat.

The sun in splendor
Gives off light,
And she has not
One fear for night.

By a candle's flame,
I dipped my pen
In day's cold light,
To begin again.

The moon in purple
Hides his face,
His lacy silver
The barest grace.

By a candle's flame,
I dipped my pen
In night's starred sky,
To begin again.

The Earth in green
And blue's, arrayed
And far time, at her door
Has lain.

By a candle's flame,
I dipped my pen-
But where time's going
No man has been.

The tongue lies but the eyes tell the truth;
Never comes the day, that you could believe
The odd flowers, all growing from one root:
She says she'll stay, but anyway she leaves.

Never comes the day that you could believe
How different plants grow, from the same-sown seed:
She says she'll stay but anyway she leaves;
Your heart says flower, but your mind says ****.

How different plants grow from the same-sown seed,
In the bloodied pact you made, her blood was fake:
Your heart says flower but your mind says ****;
You know you still want her, though she makes you ache.

In the bloodied pact you made her blood was fake;
There's no more trust, just the carcass of lust,
You know you still want her though she makes you ache,
She says she's yours, but her words are more rust.

There's no more trust just the carcass of lust;
The odd flowers, all growing from one root
She says she's yours but her words are more rust:
The tongue lies, but the eyes tell the truth.

The universe has rhythms
To rock itself to sleep;
Praying Jews at nightfall,
In front of stony walls;
A slow-circling hawk
By a fortress deep,
And a dozing child
Where a woman weeps.

The universe has secrets
It touch with guilty hands;
Buried unmarked grave,
Of one who was not saved;
A war to break at morning,
When death will have his day,
Words of peace on dying lips
They can never say.

They each write about it as it sees them fit:
Poets and writers, pouring out words;
Keeping to parity their own souls wit.

Snatching words from thin air, as they sit,
For they each have their own distinct worlds;
They each write about it as it sees them fit.

Giving to the page their own token bit,
As the truth deep inside them slowly unfurls;
Keeping to parity their own souls wit.

Writing's something they never can quit,
Scribbling's something they to all else prefer:
They each write about it, as it sees them fit.

Life to them is never just a skit,
They would never want to go unheard;
Keeping to their own souls wit.

From piece to piece, their busy mind flits,
And their heart singing just like a bird;
They each write about it as it sees them fit,
Keeping to parity their own souls wit.

They said he was known, to talk to his axe
As if it were the best comrade of his,
Amid the rumors about, he had a rich father
Must have fueled his rancor; the life he had missed.

So local horse slaughterer, became his career,
Ready day and night, with axe in his bag;
Sick and old cows, horses and mules,
Made short work with his axe, of the ailing Nag.

It was his work and he was quite good,
Most skillful with axe; and strong and fast.
With his constant friend, in it's home, the bag,
There's many an animal, breathed it's last.

His work left a smell, upon his person;
Some sick horses had the smell within,
And a small girl at play outside, could not miss
The man going by, with strange smell on him.

Under the radar, he plied his trade,
Coming and going, near invisibly;
Never suspected, if he was the one
Gave fatal blows their timely delivery.

Like a bad choice come back, from the past
To haunt the rich miser, in his worldly domain
Of such stern stuff, there's no doubt he'd refuse
To his fatal undoing, and terminal pain.

A child would have his toy,
And a man would have his girl;
As brides must have their joy,
And god must have a world.

They're things that, made for each of us,
As though our name were printed;
And don't forget love, peace and trust,
By which our life gets tinted.

Though I think, we'd live on love
Alone; if things were short supply'd-
And just a slit, of bluest sky-
And breadth, of a lover's sigh.

The conjugate of idolatry,
The alchemy of flame,
The Astarte of pure harlotry-
And nomenclature'd name.

The lode-stone of sly coquetry,
The compass-stone of hearth,
The balanced stoichiometry-
Broken waters of birth.

The Vestal of impurity,
The perfidy of shame-
My blood in you runs truer red;
This craving never tames.

This longing, he says, is nice to feel;
Like magnets attract, if could never repel,
Like two birds in flight, each other's trail;
And finding your thoughts, in the mind of another.
Never to touch your soul's secret lover;
That fire which burns, yet never singe
That tear which falls, yet leaves a tinge
Of color, on a dampened cheek-
And red rimmed eyes; how they could speak!
But this longing has to say it all for me
And those two birds stay forever free.

Though heaven marry innocence to madness
Or witness the soulful wedded to the ******,
We must not think that god delights nefariously
In deadening all our dreams with what's at hand.

if you have something real to say to this world,
something else will come along to fill up all
the available time; truth is the one thing
not allowed down here

the self is a repository that has been
collecting things since the first man
had the first thought, and if you don't
believe this, the primal fear of deadly snakes
still remains very much awake
in our dreams to this day as a warning
of imminent danger

your thoughts get strung out
from place to place
when you travel, and others
can read them like signposts
along the highway

i can feel you arriving before
I know you are traveling this way,
and the dying can be felt leaving their
bodies before they realize it
themselves; departures and
journeys are not what they seem
down here

loud music frightens in the presence
of others; the loudness will unveil
fragility and capability they did not
know you possessed

because I can be so deadly
at the heart of me, I must pretend
to the innocence of a child
or risk execution

Three-two-one, Boom!
Said the guns,
Of Eric and Dylan.


Eric portrayed as mastermind,
Dylan as the follower, the disciple;
Violence: the school of after-hours.


Just say no to sawed-offs,
They proclaimed, laughing;
But by the end they were saying, hell yes.


Eric's nose broken by the kickback,
As he played a game of hide and seek
Under a library table.


But the fun wore off, alas;
The fantasy lived out was not as fulfilling
As all the dreams they'd shared.


So they went on to hell together
To see what trouble they could raise there-
And left us all holding the bag.

Truth, beauty, justice in your words;
A worship of the sky unfurls.
Through Michael's eyes
The heaven's turn;
Of his pure light,
Some oceans burn.

Mankind has visions of a kind,
To strike a fancy in the mind;
Our heads turn too,
Like cogless wheels;
And in some eyes
See heaven stilled.

I catch the light upon your brow,
Though some ships sail, without a prow.
And when you steer,
And when you go,
Subdues all fears
In those below.

A soul is light and bears no weight;
It's courage challenge hapless fate:
In starfields far
And quantums deep,
You've miles to fly
Before you sleep.

Time is short, Jesus said:
Before the **** crows thrice,
Eyes burning like ten thousand suns
Weeping at the wailing wall, stretching
Across a valley of broken sighs.

Time is short, how could we forget
The child we smothered, inside of us;
Dumbed him down with memorization,
With bus route schedules,
Black-booked itineraries.

Time is short, and full of woe
As the evil of the day triumphs again,
And our grief is always sufficient unto us:
It fills up the raging emptiness-
When it comes knocking on our door,
We no longer act surprised.

To another shirking duty do I die
Swarmed by specious crowding thoughts that sped  
We wed in black, so dreaded black to tie  
The altars bones of white that lined our bed  
And followed constellations in our heads.  

My addled weight of whetstone you've become  
With tons of stones in wooden bladed sling  
Past summers clouded face hung heaven's sun  
On bark you tried to dry the deadest things  
And on my strumming soul threadbare you'd sing.  

The nightmares ran past colored vats of dye  
As shifting shapes geometrized the rune  
What dyed the pigment in your furthest eye  
Was joined with the paler canvas tones
And cracked the varnished face our pebbled moon.

To he whose fingers itch to feel her breath,
Dragging her boldly, through tall fields of grass;
She whose flowering bough is stillborn death,
The graveyard plot's the last place she will pass.

Beauty is the short answer of the muse,
To meet the cymbal crash of longing storm;
It's headlong rush, to light the shortest fuse;
Frightening fury, to douse the trees lantern.

The last hour springs, like whistling in the wind
Pliant captive, makes her way toward him.
His grasp less tender, than were any vise
Broken in his grasp, her bright eyes grown dim.

If even love could be borrowed or stole-
All live in danger of filling that hole.

It's not your typical kind of date,
And he doesn't often date women;
But he's alone, and you're alone,
Though it feels so much like sinning.

You can't refuse his offer,
As he waits for you to dress,
Something casual’s best, he says;
It’s good enough for this.

The scenery floats by slowly,
For he doesn't drive too fast;
You're both old enough by now
You want the time to last.

He has a patient smile,
As he opens up the door;
You're alone now, far away-
Though you've been here before.

You eat dinner, watch a movie
While you sit together, close.
There's alcohol, but you don't drink;
Neither of you likes those.

You want to be clear headed,
To remember every thing.
And then it's late, and pretty soon
There's nothing on the screen.

So you go back to the bedrooms,
And you lie beneath the sheets,
And then he comes so silently,
That you can scarcely breathe.

He lies down full beside you,
So quiet, so strangely still;
And finally says, half-strangled,
We'll begin, whenever you will-

And so, you start to kiss him,
As you think of somewhere far;
The past he's tried to leave behind-
He only wants you to kiss his scars..

People who always are writing of ***
Are like birds, always writing of feathers;
We know it's their specialty, and they're proud-
But find another subject, for crying out loud!

For half the fun is in chasing the one
That you want to handcuff to you (in love);
But don't leave behind poems, on your nightly passes
Like deflated balloons, lying in grasses..

I sit surrounded by the carnage of the day’s efforts:
Words dismembered, metaphors bled dry.
I flap my wings in discomfiture at each glaring new
Example of mechanical fallowness;
Words hung out on clotheslines of manipulated
Speech patterns, wherever they could squeeze in-
Between the wet, moldy socks and twisted, bedraggled underwear.
I am a trained chicken at best, trying to force something out
At least partly digestible. As I peck out the sterile notes
One by one, on my red toy piano,
An automaton digs thru my internal filebanks, the flux of
Catapulted words continually bouncing over the chickenwire;
Escaping to flap heavily upward towards the trees:
And there to look down beady-eyed at the
Flopping, feathery decapitated blight.
For good reason, I hail from a long line of extinct dinosaurs.
Clucking with irritation, I see someone else has
Already laid all the good eggs, the golden eggs;
I can only scratch out some maggots and hope they hatch.

Transmogrified through the written word,
I see myself through his agate eyes;
Shall I take up then the sin of pen,
Transmute smooth paper
To invisible sighs?

Secrets suit him best of all;
A blackness from which ink disappears;
The word written down remains only a whisper,
The heart has it's stalwart lock and key
Which safeguards well it's timeless tales.

For he's the unturned phrase of a day,
Which empties deep into me my own;
And the faint, far echoes slowly returning,
For a thousand years:
Bedrock of my soul.

A word forgets how to write itself
A smile forgets who it first appeared for,
Everything and nothing owns this treasure-store world.

Tears sprout where laughter used to play
Everywhere are the ghosts of dry fountains
Which once poured out existence like a pitcher.

Who has asked for nothing yet received all?
Who hasn’t tried to go home to the singularity again
Only to recall that there is no center?

God and creation have no point of origin
This is why everything JUST IS.

An embrace down here is how we remind one another
We are the heirs of omnipotent cause;
Planets jostle at our lightest touch,
And at the knifelike sound of a scream
One galaxy cannibalizes another.

Everything we know is a single exhalation
In an endless stream of breaths:

Remember you are only breathing so that you can create,
And all created things contain the conscious whole of creation
Safely stored within them.

The day is an anvil which beats out the soul
The mettle is forged by the long days of toil
The molds are all filled with the same molten ore
And no part is greater than the strength of its core
If the metal should blister, no working will matter
When struck by the hammer, the piece will soon shatter
If the welds are too shallow the thing will not last
If the mettle is poor it cannot do its task
Though painted or bored, its nature won't alter
If the work ship is true, then it need never falter.

I am the universal signal mixer
On frequency h-u-m-a-n
Intaking and excreting vibrations
Decoding and synthesizing inputs
Receivers attuned and continuously engaged
Transposing matter and energy
Into light patterns of thought
Touching all waveforms
As a lover touches himself and others
Energy frozen into matter
Love frozen into form
Stretched to the very limits
On the blueprint of time, eternity
As dreamed by, yours truly

There are people to whom
all your words are just the pause
that's interrupting their own talking


There are others that see
the pearls and poisons of your days
as just another act that curtains rise and fall upon


But to some, we are like the lone bird
that's slowly disappearing against the farthest horizon
even as unseen worlds grow large inside of it

We all come in naked, alone
Kicking our cherub feet
Eyes taking it all in
We seem to fall so far from heaven
Like solitary stars
One by one
As we grow up into our own fledgling orbits.

Life lived like paupers
Straining for food, and liberty
Each of us limited by aloofness,
Chains we face, every direction
Innocence fled farther away
As the heavens nightly blaze
In their eternal dance,
Invisible beyond self-enclosing walls.

We leave all alone
Still naked beneath the sheets
Eyes frozen in their last frame
We hope to be arriving soon at heaven's door
Like smoking incense must go upward
But nobody can make us any promises
From the chaos here.

Every man, on his own trajectory
Each his own hard-bitten tragedy
Nothing promised, nothing gained
Till we circle untold worlds, again.

The vampire really craved him some blood,
And thank god; they'd just buried Mrs. Flood:
He pried open her casket,
And was using his ratchet-
But her fluids had turned thick as mud.

Two vampires decided to dine
On a lady, whose blood was like wine;
While pausing to savor
It's delicate flavor,
One said, the House issue is fine!

Vampires sleep days and fly nights,
They are known to be fearful of lights,
And feeding's quite a trick;
It's got a big kick-
Though impossible, with bad over-bites.

To a vampire, an ****'s a feast
On the blood of man, bird or beast;
And he's not into zoology
Psychiatry or psychology;
Doesn't even care, if it's deceased.

Vast leaped the candle's flame,
Kissing grotesque shadows.
Blinking eye of the holocaust
Enshrouded by shards of night.

Drunken fevers illuminate all secrets.
There is one hour between darkness and dawn,
When the beauty of desperate things eclipses time
And destroys the expectations of reason.

Violet, in her blue dress
Of fresh, giddy dreams,
Flounces under waves of wind;
Twirling and bowing
To dandelion greens.

Throwing caution to the breeze,
Unveils her heart
With envious ease;
A natural flirt, and temptingly close
To feathery pink mimosa groves.

Step into the mirror; just go with faith:
The mirror is another dimension that you can enter into
And gracefully approach it, not faltering
And lift your shoe and step through it, to the other side
From where you will see your life going in reverse
Until that last hiccup, before you were ever born.

Step over the bridge; and do not cling
With hands desperately squeezing, breaking off fingernails,
Holding to that last slippery scream, and falling inelegantly
Like a wisp of a ghost, once suspended above the river
Which people will see and then say,
Did you see that? It must have been a bird.

Step out of this life and into the new one
And break all the mirrors, and bust up the reflections,
And do not fall headlong into the panic-stricken past,
Lost in mourning, for whatever it has now become.

Do not look backwards or ahead, but inside
Do not look to be saved, do not look to be reclaimed,
And only then, all the miracles of creation
Will be released from Time’s distant cradle
To come wherever they are needed.

We had snowflake symphonies,
And foreplay arguments-
So long as we both shall live;
So long as we both shall live.

We had silverware tympanies,
In tiny apartments-
So long as we both shall live;
So long as we both shall live.

We argued every numbered day,
But we could never stay away-
So long as we both shall live;
So long as we both shall live.

We watched as love stretched out his wings,
We listened just to hear him sing-
For love, he's brought us every thing;
So long as we both shall live.

Welcome, to your long dying-
Unsaid words, empty gestures
The substance you always searched for
Was never real, and you discover
We will all be dying alone
Of grief, of the faux, negligible existence
Everything taken away at the end
Dark holocaust swallow us whole
And strangle the last sound we make
Welcome, to nights of tremulous tears
Inside the winding cloth you've made:
The teeming brain's multiforme emotions
The day you were born, an empty place was created also
You were never too rare or special to die
The train whistle announces you've been left behind
To contemplate your impersonal end
We are clothed of the same dust
All arrows point in the same direction
Both the high and low road are a mobius strip
Eternal life, but a dream of dimensional matter
Held for a short time in *******-
Time on any scale is nearly invisible to us
Welcome, to your long dying
Which is but the first breath of non-existence.

We must not be sad
Under an ancient moon
Where the glistening waterways move
And the owl and the night hawk listen

Trees that reach out with strong branches
Caressed by a tender breeze
And loons flying over the thatch
And eyes that are darker than these

In the hollow beside the copse
Waits a figure, in the tangled deep
Praying for another chance
While the priest and the laborer sleep.

We practice it in our sleep,
That final flight into the ether-
The one from which we will never come back.

We're riding high, on the cresting wave of moonlight
Sceaming past fires of flaming suns
Far into the cauldron of multicolored night.

The slip-knot of time slows down
Long enough to drag our cocooned soul
Into the nearest sphincter of a wormhole.

Who could have guessed
That darkness would be the bone-marrow
Of so many subtle and exotic hues.

Racing through veils of blown out stars,
We pierce the raving annihilation of space
Weaving to and fro, through the comet trails.

Our voices still many light years behind us,
Stretching out, in the neural photonics of joy-
Only echoes returning, by morning.

we string up our words of pearl
dangle them, on finest fishing line:
butterflies, and large birds of prey
both are born from the same effort;
a monster, or a holy man
enter in through the same channel
and even though love and hate wrestle
every wee-hour of the dawn
to see which will reign that day,
we are never fearful of the weapon
we hold in our own hand
but only of what they might hold, in theirs.

Genitalia are so amorphous;
They have no chance at heart or conscience.
Identifying characteristics; maybe,
But who spends time studying such a thing?

They are only the messenger;
First at knowing ecstasy,
Last to realize abandonment,
The body's inherently secret code
Attempting to speak the rhythms
Of everyman's language:
Bitmap of the soul's holiest desires.

They can't diagnose trouble,
Or predict rejection:
They are only the saddle upon an unbroken horse;
And wildness all that ever breathes,
Through it's foaming nostrils.

And what is desire, but the body's own fire?

What must inspire the vagaries of the wind;
Such a variable vocal cord must it wear-
To mimic the voices of so many beings,
And still beneath doors, around corners it bends:
But seems less like a fast flowing column of air,
So that each second, we expect to be seeing
The creature that to anguish it’s voice has lent.
As if the hearts grief has been at once laid bare,
And all the pent- up melancholy given wing.
Ceaseless lamentations rise up and are sent
To the same lone spot where flings curse or prayer.
After hours spent howling, it may begin to sing-
Who can say sorry when at last it has went.
Peace reigns when it abides in its lair.
A stirred- up breeze few good things brings-
And what makes moan when there is no pain?

What's easiest in coming is never as appreciated
As that over which we must expend ourselves in agonies,
Give birth to, by fully stretching open our being.

What's easiest to lose is never forgotten again;
We had it once, in the sweaty, half-closing palm of our hand
Studying it for long seconds, contemplating it's beauty there,
Imagining it to be ours alone, forever;
But something turned our head for a moment, a second
And at that instant, it flew.

The earthquake shook
Their eyes, in a teacup
The room floor raised up-
What were they listening for?

The dead hollows filled
In the stubbled field
The corpses to yield-
What were they listening for?

A low groan, a hidden moan
The moon on loan
Evil sown, to vengeance grown-
What were they listening for?

The footfalls came
Their souls to maim
And life, reclaim-
Oh horror, sustained:
Comes now the sound they were listening for..