Suppose there is a reason,
After all,
For why I grumble at dawn
Yet fall short to day-ify
The night

My mom never forgot
The time I was born:
12:48 pm.
I was born into daylight...
On the outside walls, of course.

I don't usually think about
My birthtime too often;
If I happen to catch this minute by sight,
I know then I am well alive!

The day from sunrise
Cuts sharply with light.

The night in dark guise
Hides all from the sight.

Between them but lies
The gilded lie, twilight.

Maybe
I would let you hold this power drill
To make a little hole
In my skull.
From where flowers
Will for hours and hours
Bloom, sprout and flourish,
But that only your love can nourish.
Tonight,
While I’m waiting for the daylight
I have an inkling
And start to wonder if what I’m feeling
Is not an illusion
I’ve had in the mirage of my confusion.

It's telling looking through
the window’s eyes ; 
a room with a paling grey glass view
befogs the clouds reign inside the storm
Often feeling misbegotten regret
for the unfiltered passing glimpses,
whetstone honed and splayed ;
raw hues of a latent life exposed

There's an uncertain hidden shame
in the unheard truth
starving out in the cold;
dwelling in a petrifying silence
of a common hunger
the lonely do ache
  
Merciless hunger pangs
manifest and shake
with an unrelenting bitter taste ;
loneliness grapples and grips
like a silent earth quake
rattling a rib caged heart — writhing
as Autumn bares the trees
  
A jagged ambiguous fault line
ripples through the hollow echo ;
a bolt of lightning caught in a bottle
strikes — silently contained
swallowing the unspoken words
in a greater good

This broken merry-go-round
keeps turning round and round;
the great mandala spinning on
like a worn out hamster-wheel
without a conscious trace
of going anywhere out there

The place you come from
is gone when you leave it —
even if you really never
feel you were from anywhere
but a thousand unmarked mileposts
from out here somewhere adrift;
a pilgrimage towards understanding
why sometimes I don’t know
if I know who I am — or could have been —
waiting on a threadbare prayer

One-day the winds of change
will shapeshift — bye and bye ...

"When the light that's lost within us
reaches the sky"


Jesse Stillwater

November 2018

A boy’s bloodshot eyes
guide his body
atop the dry
mountain pasture

The daylight wanes
A mass of tents flank him

He shakes his head
with a wince
to the sight
of a tent that he calls home

The daylight wanes
A mass of tents flank him

The words welcome home
are scribbled
on a cardboard doormat
with permanent marker

The daylight wanes
A mass of tents flank him

Looking at the vast open land
below, he sees



    billowing clouds form shadows
    that undulate across the terrain 



The daylight wanes
A mass of tents flank him

He rests his head that night
feeling peace
knowing
this too shall pass

Lost in the moment,
With only daylight between us
Letting the spark ignite
~Carol F