A flutter of white against stained-oak desk
laying in wait, it anticipates
the first mark on blank surface
dots, loops, lines, inscribed representations
to illustrate unseen curiosities
to anchor their essence into the visible
for you and I to perceive.

The meaning of growing up,
Perhaps lost in translation
I never realized what it meant,
To lose your innocence
And the feeling of playing catch up,
When the train had left the station.

Do you see me for who I am
Or do you see me
For who you want me to be?

I feel
As if I'm filled with black blood

We are all so
Tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny

I feel
As if I'm filled with black blood

I'm a hanged man I'm a fool

I feel
As if I'm filled with black blood

We are all so
Tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny

Do you see me for who I am
Or do you see me
For who you want me to be?

My blood is black

The
baseline
of all perception

is what you look for
not what you look at

you find
what you have largely projected

Do you see, grasp in the nowhere and nowhen
the whole picture?
Register the tedious highs, lows, widths and breadths
before your private, iridologic rainbows?
Like grasping the rims of “allness” on the path of a forest,
letting yourself grow a vertigo, fragile and docile.
Every, every time you meet up with a person,
do you encompass in your grasp, mind’s eye, all they are, all they are,
at that one very time?
My vision dims out into dependence, when glasses leave, when the forest my attendance seeks
in utter loneliness without my harmony with it weaved.
I no longer have in survival advantage
but it feels more than right to fall, give over,
I give myself fragile, more just, and fit.
In that vulnerability I can see more than
a healthy eye can: Van Gogh’s work on my trees’ leaves.
That is what all presences, forms and life’s skies are for:
fragileness, undoneness, nothingness, reasonlessness

'      Life's signs

'               and meanings

'      perceived by

'               all our senses

'                       and being's

'      foci of attention,

'               can divine

'                       from within

'                             and without.



'      That's if our inner-eye

'            isn't clouded by

'                  false-ego,

'                        self-conscious self,

'                              or doubt.

In aubergine,
And my kind wanting lies,
The rise and fall of feet, a formula's delta,
That I once called 'who I am'.
In thumping heartbeat and trembling fingers,
The graceless clumsy of nerve to embrace,
That fierceness seen once in the mirror.
There for a second, or less than a second,
Just before blinking my eyes.

In letting them choke on my lashes,
I steeled myself for the reveal;
Saw what I'd always believed of myself,
Named her too much of a burden.
A slick thief of my mother's love,
That canted towards disappointment.
Something called falsely pretty,
Instead of more accurate words,
Like a sly and foolish imposter,
An amateur of imitation,
Masked as a girl with pride.

I traced every deceit,
A cord, or a rune, on her body.
Twisting words that fell off her tongue,
As easy as catching a snowflake.
Those ones where she claimed she was smart,
And deserved to be cared for, somehow;
Pressed into her elbow's hollow,
The dips and the swells of her shallow crests,
And the unearned keel of her hair.

Standing there, wishing for someone, anyone
Real to approach her and rend,
Down the walls of her cowardly fortress,
Exposing all of her nothing,
And petty shoplifting;
Leave her there at the apex,
Of all that she was and could not be,
To drown inside the hot blackness of oil,
And what she perceived to be justice.
Not thinking, for all her lost, learned logic,
That these thoughts, too, could be lies.