Live like an unappreciated stranger
in your own house.

Become the careless talk at family dinners
about the disappointing child
and pretend like it was all a joke
and slowly lose yourself with every
echo of drunken laughter.

Look into the eyes of someone you love
and realize how you can't feel anything
other than dread.

Become the lustful thoughts of someone
you can't love
and watch them cut themselves
into pieces for you, when
in the end
all you can say is a pitiful "thank you,
but I'd rather be a lonely wreck
drifting across the sea."

Ask yourself to be found
in a map with no direction
and with nothing but your
faulty heart to guide you away
from home.

Pretend like the music
disappears into the background
of the screenplay your life has become
and the screen slowly turning black.

Find the dread
in your own heartbeat.

Take off your clothes
and see how you sewed every misgiving
into your skin like a story you
never want forgotten
and marvel at how bad your stitching is-
can't even hold yourself together.

Hear the sound of the rain
and wonder why
the grey clouds of your heart
never go away with the same.

And then the day came,
when the risk
to remain tight
in a bud
was more painful
than the risk
it took
to Blossom.

canyon wren
sings her sweet song
perched upon
the piñon-

for my love
who lies beneath-
the cottonwood
twee twee twee
tsheeeeee.

:)

r ~ 10/3/14

My concerns for us weigh
As much as the neurons
Firing the thought
Of
It.

I am a craftsman. My hands are made of clay.
They're soft and wet and mould silhouette.
The last I made were without shadow,
The next will be more musical.
They will be spin around me -
Chimes in a western wind. Chimes of a different figuring
perhaps to hang in branches, simply as decoration.

If I rest, there will be no forming.
I fear this.
I fear the unmaking and forever sleep.
The chimes will awaken me with their shadow-music.

*
Squalls and storm clouds move inside me.
I hear thunder. Some say
they see change coming.
I see constant weather. There
is purpose in their forecast,
no in-decision and in a precise moment
the exact snap of thin ice.

*
I awaken before a bridge - reaching far across a rocky canyon.
Going to the edge and leaning over I see
the darkness of endless sleep. I hope to hear
water song and the expanse of rain-dreaming.
I wait at the bridge for a traveller like me to pass -
I will ask him to describe his journey and
The way ahead which I have not yet seen.

People always say
how dreams do come true,
how wondrous it is
to be submerged into visions
that belong solely to your mind.

What they never speak of,
as if trying to forget,
is that dreams of wonder,
dreams of light,
can turn to darkness.

Suddenly, dreams of a perfect world
become the horror that we try
so desperately to escape.

Yes, dreams do come true,
but what no one ever tells you
is that nightmares are dreams too.



                                                                                                                    (w.n.)