I’m fading away, backing off from life.
Echoes of joy and faults pass like falling stars.
Every day has a few drops less of strife.
Silent shrapnel crashes in soft and witless shards.
And I’m shrinking from the Now;
I couldn’t even tell you how.

Moments of ecstasy and pain are sealed,
Like shrines to a life I still know.
Etched in summer’s softness or in steel.
I am vanishing, but I don’t know where I’ll go.
My once-beloved and my son are here.
One ignores me, while the other
Watches in helpless fear.

Five A.M and I am by myself…again.
Sun washes in with sorrow in its face.
For the thousands of times, I have slept alone,
I feel like a stranger in this place,
I once called our home.
Now it’s a cage to me,
Filled with broken promises and mis-matched lace.

I am going now, heading toward the West.
Leaving memories and pain behind with a sleeping wife..
Every day brings me closer to an end
Leaves fly in the road behind me, remnants of a life.
I am crying for the misspent years.
But no more of those; I am changing, switching gears.

September 17, 2010
Edited – January 5, 2016

I recalled the smell of junipers warming in the sun,
Or maybe mice nesting under the cupboard.
Or bleached linen hung out by Mum,
Reminds me of something about Dad from long ago,
You ask me…to say if it was gin;
There are things I can’t tell you, Son.
Some people think that it’s a sin;
So just use your imagination.

Another time I smelled crushed daisies of
The housemaids, I remember from Kleßheim.
Thunderstorms rolled down from the Alps at night,
Then turned at morning into clarified, buttered sun.
They remind me of someone’s blonde hair,
I just can’t tell you when or where,
So use your imagination.

Scent is the most potent mnemonic,
Triggering mystical cells inside,
Creating a stream of biophotonics,
Rapture returns in histrionics,
Tracking things from skin and hair,
To lips and eyes, to a groan, an intrigued stare.
Things we can never tell another, even if
He or she or they were there
What happened in those brilliant days?
Only imagination can say.

Crystal hanging in the window at nine o’clock,
Rays strike the glass, opening up the past.
Before me spreads a wide, green lawn,
Ladies and lords stroll with their finery on.
I sit and watch, while the procession advances,
Tricornes doffed and stays undone in dances.
Until the satin, silk and brocades lie on the ground,
Gavotte kisses become tender, sensual rounds
And naked, youth flees into woods.
And everything is happening;
Everything is good.

Sitting on a throne of stacks made of poems,
He rules, or thinks he does, up on his mountain.
He hates a rhyme more than
The buzzing of a fly or scuttle of a rat.
They remind him of his paucity of skill.
He rolls a magazine tight
Swings it at the rhyme, “****, ****!”
He shouts.

Up on the throne, he rambles onto paper
Vers libre, je crois.
Looking down, he sees thousands of admirers,
Coming to hear him read
His old poems of war and death, and lost love.
Only a daughter, who is “hot”, for him to ogle.
They pick up girls and eat chicken.

The past is a patchwork quilt to him,
Ragged, frayed and faded.
He screeches out memories!
Then doodles them onto the cloud,
He loves to brag
About his computers, his awards and his printed stuff.
It is all he has.

Old man staring out at the oil rigs
Of Bakersfield, he can’t rhyme about that,
The run-down houses and cracked streets.
Browned like toast by the driest air!
But he has been places, studied things,
Allegedly—what does he remember?
So he is proud, insolent in his old age.
Who can tell him what to write?
Only his publisher.

On the swampy fields of an exhausted war
Of a country torn apart in strife,
Warriors fight for their own causes,
For peace
For bread
For glory.
But one has loyalty to neither side.
A shadow
A snake
A Traitor.
A spy infiltrating their defenses.
She knows all their secrets, and yet she knows nothing—
For who doesn’t question the point of their existence?
She knows nothing of the future.
Why try? You find nothing by searching the murky waters of destiny.
And nothing is what she cares about.
She leads a lonely life.
A mercenary
A thief
A Snitch.
The **** of existence.
But it’s an interesting life.

At least for the time being.

It was many and many a year ago,
  In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
  By the name of ANNABEL LEE;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
  Than to love and be loved by me.

I was a child and she was a child,
  In this kingdom by the sea:
But we loved with a love that was more than love—
  I and my ANNABEL LEE;
With a love that the winged seraphs of heaven
  Coveted her and me.

And this was the reason that, long ago,
  In this kingdom by the sea,
A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling
  My beautiful ANNABEL LEE;
So that her highborn kinsmen came
  And bore her away from me,
To shut her up in a sepulchre
  In this kingdom by the sea.

The angels, not half so happy in heaven,
  Went envying her and me—
Yes!—that was the reason (as all men know,
  In this kingdom by the sea)
That the wind came out of the cloud by night,
  Chilling and killing my ANNABEL LEE.

But our love it was stronger by far than the love
  Of those who were older than we—
  Of many far wiser than we—
And neither the angels in heaven above,
  Nor the demons down under the sea,
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
  Of the beautiful ANNABEL LEE.

For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams
  Of the beautiful ANNABEL LEE;
And the stars never rise but I see the bright eyes
  Of the beautiful ANNABEL LEE;
And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling, my darling, my life and my bride,
  In her sepulchre there by the sea—
  In her tomb by the side of the sea.

A subsonic growl emerges
As the red wolf plunges forth
From his concrete cave.
He shoulders aside the weaker creatures,
In his rush, for the men inside
Live for the hunt.
The siren howl is high at first,
Wild and eager, hysterical.
As he gains his stride
On the pavement path,
His whine swings into a rocking pulse,
Keeping time with the fire,
Or the blood spurting from a man.
Behind the pack there is a white dog,
Sturdy and square, trained and sure,
With a lyrical howl.
He keeps pace yet there is no lust
For the hunt, no need for blood.
They circle the waiting disaster,
Disgorging men in black and white,
The hulks rumble as they wait.
Wolves lick up the flames
While the white-dressed men
Lap up the blood.
The wolf prowls as the flames die
But stands guard as the
White dog points to the man.
He has chosen to save.

I said it was not meant for me,
But what did I mean?
For any youth, any love,
Whose prey who might be,
On whom you’d lean,

In your semi-corseted skirt,
Or dressed full fig.,
Stalking into town,
Shocking men in wigs,
Luring them into false love,
As others had been?

Would you capture me,
Chaining my soul to your heart,
So I must carry on playing
At your command?
I see your dress under the piano,
And your boots and pantaloons;
The piano is not my voice,
Though you insist it is.

I shot a drunken man for you,
Which made me more your slave.
You woke urges I suppressed,
Too strong for one so frail.
With words you pushed me
But caused music to pour
From me as love did.

A storm of disapproval raged all round
Our Paris nest of love and art,
You came and went like a soldier, shielding us,
And at home you urged me on,
To impromptu inventions,
Yet causing us to depart.

Packed into a cabochon,
You shanghaied me,
Away to Majorca
And the wintry sea.
Your searing love and the island’s cold
Were too much for me,
And I escaped with my art.