This woman speaks in tongues
Foreign languages roll from her mouth
Like summer fog ladled over the rim
Of Candlestick Park
In the not-so-distant
Far far away of long long ago

This woman speaks in rotund sentences
Effulgent with vocabulary
That shimmers with the electrified joy
Of lights over Ghirardelli Square
In the not-so-darkness
Of the clammy and cabalistic night

This woman speaks with her hands
Impresciable, implacable, and inconsolable
As she tries to mold untranslatable words
From air that is as thin
As the promises she’d preferred
And purchased with the shards of her heart

This woman speaks in lyrics
Arpeggios of adjectives and alliteration
That tumble acrobatically with the intricacy
And grace
Of a hummingbird in spring
On the kiss of a blossom
Rich and fragrant and giving as
This woman speaking in tongues

When great aunt Maggie passed away years ago, the one thing I really missed was her angelic voice.
The swaggering, sing-song lilt of the mid-Derry accent was as sweet as the confections she used to pass out to us as kids:
The inflection, the intonation, and the slight lisp she brought to it was so gloriously unique but was never heard again.
I often wish I could go back with a tape recorder to capture it in all its glory and relive how wonderful she was.
Now all I have is a untranslatable memory that can't be brought back to even vaguely approximate what it meant to me.

And now here I am again with the same obstacle.
The same tones, the same inflections albeit through a different light have just been extinguished before me.
This time there was no digital device rushing in to capture our time before it ran out.
No instinct for preservation was forthcoming - we were too busy having fun & 'being here now'.
No, once again I am bereft:
All I I have is here (in my heart) and and here (in my head)
The loved sounds I miss will always resound there albeit without backup
Voices lost but not forgotten.

Let us not talk philosophy, drop it, Jeanne.
So many words, so much paper, who can stand it.
I told you the truth about my distancing myself.
I've stopped worrying about my misshapen life.
It was no better and no worse than the usual human tragedies.

For over thirty years we have been waging our dispute
As we do now, on the island under the skies of the tropics.
We flee a downpour, in an instant the bright sun again,
And I grow dumb, dazzled by the emerald essence of the leaves.

We submerge in foam at the line of the surf,
We swim far, to where the horizon is a tangle of banana bush,
With little windmills of palms.
And I am under accusation: That I am not up to my oeuvre,
That I do not demand enough from myself,
As I could have learned from Karl Jaspers,
That my scorn for the opinions of this age grows slack.

I roll on a wave and look at white clouds.

You are right, Jeanne, I don't know how to care about the salvation of my soul.
Some are called, others manage as well as they can.
I accept it, what has befallen me is just.
I don't pretend to the dignity of a wise old age.
Untranslatable into words, I chose my home in what is now,
In things of this world, which exist and, for that reason, delight us:
Nakedness of women on the beach, coppery cones of their *******,
Hibiscus, alamanda, a red lily, devouring
With my eyes, lips, tongue, the guava juice, the juice of la prune de Cythère,
*** with ice and syrup, lianas-orchids
In a rain forest, where trees stand on the stilts of their roots.

Death, you say, mine and yours, closer and closer,
We suffered and this poor earth was not enough.
The purple-black earth of vegetable gardens
Will be here, either looked at or not.
The sea, as today, will breathe from its depths.
Growing small, I disappear in the immense, more and more free.

To the T, like a letter I must of looked, accented only
by an estranged alphabet who longed for the The
surrounded by what in a room with no roof made of why.
Night hung overhead with billions of demarcations for the end of a thought
So with them I just stopped and learned that one may never be still.  
Even now we are some cosmic cursive spelling out a
fluid motion so concerned with dotting an i and thus it is forgotten what follows the pronunciation of the self.
A shadow come late of a lightness that we ought to translate but
cannot be contained with these inadequate vessels,
these symbols so riddled with leaks that when they finally reach terminus
become such tired tenants of exposure.
Like these letters I must have looked,
on a page made of mirrors who’s reflection all but apologized
for the failure to realize an ethereal hand tugging at my pen,
an incomplete cursive within without place, without name, simply without.
Not even.                                                            ­                                        
Like those letters I must have looked.

I woke up this morning to the strangest feeling-
I could feel you next to me.
Not your physical presence of course-
That remains unknown to me
Being, as it may well be,
On the other side of an ocean,
Atop a distant mountain,
Or in a different realm entirely,
Filled with mythical creatures,
In a place where poetry is born.

What I mean is I felt your soul,
Reaching out to me
After last night's late night drinking
In the privacy of my own room,
Come to tell me I was not alone,
Whilst at the same time saying;
"This is not you.
Well...Not the you I'm used to, anyway-
What went wrong?"

I hesitated for a moment,
Considering if this was
My own conscience speaking to me,
In which case it would be acceptable to cry,
But I knew such tenderness could not be my own,
And had no wish for such a beautiful being
To watch tears fall from my eyes.

"I don't know" I said,
And hated myself instantly for the lie.
This awe-inspiring soul, who had travelled so far
To share such a wondrous presence with me,
What right had I to feed it such ugly untruths?
I felt ashamed and hung my head...
"I hate myself." I said.

For a moment I thought you had left,
Sickened by this display of self-pity,
And my ghastly morning breath.
Then I realised you had enveloped the entire room.
In an attempt to bring me comfort.
You had filled the cracks in the door,
And surrounded each wall
From ceiling to floor,
And waited for me to speak.

I cried fully for five minutes at least,
And there was no beauty in it.
No gentle tears or quiet sniffling.
Just heaving sobs and ugly ****** contortions,
Interspersed with heavy breathing,
And snotty tissues.

When it was all over
I felt you on my shoulder
(Not my heart- you accepted, you afterwards said,
That I keep some parts hidden,
Even from myself), and then
We talked, and talked, and talked,
About everything, until I felt
We were only words- nothing more.
Not voices, or sounds, or written letters,
But just words who understood each other perfectly.

Finally, you explained to me
How to reach you, but, being a soul,
Your directions were untranslatable,
And I could not follow them
Despite my burning desire to,
So you went on instead
To reveal the purpose of your visit.

"Your soul is trapped." you told me,
"Within the confines of your body,
And I must travel so very far to see it.
It is the only part left of you
That still loves itself, and if it leaves
It is afraid that you will die."

I had never given a thought, before,
To my own soul, and how
I must have been keeping it,
Trapped under lock and key
Behind my own self-loathing,
While it yearned to be free.

So as you left I promised you this;
That I would learn to love myself,
So that my soul may find eternal bliss,
And find you in good health.

I assure you, beautiful one,
That I am trying...

Happiness is invasive
Search for an eraser
I am a mistake maker
I’m a fixer upper
You should paint my shutters
I shutter myself
And have a stutter
I’m aloof
Like you used to be
Before you stopped seeing me
Completely
Now I’m sleepy
And I lie my head on my pillow
Lots of things to consider
Possibilities hot like cinders

Sometimes your mother will look at you
like a dead language, some untranslatable
character. Speak anyway.

Sometimes your burning heart’s smoke signals
will make her weep and splutter,
or pass over her like incense, slightly
too sweet, and thick with silence.

Hand her an apple.
Know she might choke before she sees
the core.
Feed her anyway.

Sing your hymns with windows open
when the house is ablaze, do not
suffocate. Gasp through carbon,
remember who gave you your
stardust: you are
heavenly. Burning bibles
purges nothing, and screaming
into pillows
is not a prayer, precious girl.

There are situations in which one is cut off from the opportunity to do one's work or enjoy one's life; but what can never be ruled out is the unavoidability of suffering. In accepting this challenge to suffer bravely, life has a meaning up to the last moment, and it retains this meaning literally to the end. — Viktor Frankl

[T]here is no coming to consciousness without pain. — Carl Jung

Should the conflagration climb
Run till all the sages know — William Butler Yeats

Heart-injured in North London, he became
The Latin scholar of his generation. — W. H. Auden

It's urgent,
Imminent,
Fiercely non-communicable.
(Carry a firestorm in your veins.)

Secrets, secrets are no fun
Secrets, secrets hurt someone

The secret, untranslatable, hurts the secret-holder:
Frustration disguises isolation.
Distilled isolation is pain.
Purified pain is meaning.
(Carry a firestorm in your veins.)

Secrets, secrets are no fun?
Secrets, secrets hurt someone?

O, only momently!
Heart-injury transfigured is salvation.
(Carry a firestorm in your veins.)

my winter eyes are epic
emptied of the seduction
of never dying days
for now
but
still looking for an incantation:
this field this wave this sway
this maze this daze
the soul's substance
untranslatable
allusive
perfumed

some find it in the dark recesses
some insist it doesnt't exist
I contemplate blankness inside
my skin
my mind just a dream catcher
for illusions
a suspended note
an erasable tape
a network for the delicate architecture of moss
or was it mold?
some words have no heart at all
and we need canyons of tenderness, paths of joy
is it time that is dripping its imagination
in this turmoil?

the irrationality of mornings of violins of drums
strikes a chord inside
what is the basis of harmony?
so many shapes of wonder
on bridges, shores, sidewalks and hills
and valleys of the unknown
full of space atoms

a spirit of a shaman sits beside me
she calls me soul surfer
perhaps
god is
part violence
part beauty
part wonder
and I fall for it
when I find it
in the flesh
of the heart
only

You know, my love, that the worlds we have each created for ourselves
are galaxies apart.
Our language games are mutually untranslatable.

We never had a chance, my love. Even I know that.

We would never have been able to achieve an understanding of each other
deep enough
to overcome our fear of the unknown, (and utterly unknowable),
that we symbolize for each other.

The logical, brutally rational part of me knows that we could never have made each other happy.

So why must I, though you have been gone now for quite some time,
keep my mind on you all the time?

Why do I still feel this way, thinking about you every day?
And I don’t even know you.

I write this not to try to change anything.

I have lived long enough not to hold out for what cannot be.

Despite my unwanted, embarrassingly unrealistic romantic dreams from Hell,
well, not exactly Hell,
say, from the dark cave out of which fly the blind bats of activated archetypes,
inevitably,
we still would have had to face eternity, or the lack thereof, alone.

You are still looking forward to an eternal life with God and, I realize now that, ridiculously,
I still can’t stop dreaming of an earthly paradise with you.

Nasty business, my love, that we are each in love with an illusion.

What if we lived in a world in which our longed for illusions
were not just desperate self-delusion but pointed at some kind of Truth?

Do you think that would make us happy?

Isn’t it pretty to think so, my love? Isn’t it pretty to think so?

some waves just pass through me
I let them touch other surfaces
they got carried away by the breeze
or the lament of seaguls
my architecture or the scripture
no wonder the receptivity
but only if you feel the field
to understand the predator
merge with one
to understand a bird
feel the weightless air
to understand a flower
dream its sensitivity
to understand the ******* of dawn
let yourself be devoured
there is empty space
in the great chain of being
oh, how mimetic everything is
lust doesn't last, it isn't so obvious
nor the craving for shining surfaces
as an empty screaming in raw beats
it tastes like sand in the eyes to me

I can see more and more
the spinning of burned eyes
I won't let myself be
devoured by a false premise
no, no need no worries
beauty is the mother of
the night when
every wall shouts
our name
leave the door open
leave the seduction
to me

let your skin
surrender
to the labyrinth
untranslatable
let me be in love
with the sunstone
you'll find the right
melody
to leave beauty
unharmed

Untranslatable

are all these things you can feel!


so go outside now!

Pectoral diminuendo does not short change,

uncurls postraos aqui la eternidad empieza,

y es polvo aqui la mundanal grandeza.

Untranslatable take off your long pants.

Faith, justice, tibia, carpals compass breathing.

Long-legged, supine, o your Indian eyes.

(as transcribed from original ancient Muidic mud verses as received through tidal meditations, as some words are either untranslatable or can only be recorded in the sand, some rendering freedoms had to be taken)*

MY FEET
MY ARMS
AND MY #SEAGULL PRINTS#

WE ARE ABOVE
THE WET VEIL
IN OUR REFLECTIONS RIPPLE OUR FOREFATHERS, THEIR FOREFATHERS AND THE FIRST MEUK

WE WALK AND OUR MOIST PRINTS FADE WETLY
WHEN OUR FEET SINK UNDER THE GLISTENING FILM
THE #DECAYING SEAWEED# GROWS BETWEEN

OUR TOES

BUT OUR SHOAL FOREVER PREVAILS

52 Weeks: Whitman

The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and my loitering.

I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

The last scud of day holds back for me,
It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadow’d wilds,
It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk.

I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,
I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.

52 Weeks: Mullein**

The Red-Tailed hawk swoops by and catches just a glimpse, he tilts his head Dionysian style mouth slightly agape.

I too am a wild thing, I too am untethered,
And I sound animalistic in the dining halls of the tamed.

The final missile thud holds me in a sweet caress,
My likeness rockets earthward … tried and true and tired and truer,
I am coaxed into existence once again.

I maintain my aetheric ties as I know this is the roadmap back to you,
It’s nice to be enmeshed in the living once again even though they drain,
To drain is to live, one gives eternity to be mortal - it’s the only thing that ever made sense.

I won’t depart, I dig in my heels,
And I turn my back on the organized.

I am of the earth because I understand my antecedents … my mother’s mother’s mother …
And because of this knowledge of ante’s I can set prece’s, hopefully precisely.

I hardly know who I am or what I mean (on a good day),
But I am good for you none the less,
As our tastes and sounds and smells and touches intermingle.

And always I wait patiently,
for me for you,
for us.

the body of the name lying naked on the tongue

the touch of rust

the sunset at the change of the season

the sea coming home to a lonely shore

the lips asking for more, the ears the amorous organs

emptied of echoes, the cities built on bones

from scrambled noise emerges syntax

that conjugates attraction in parallax

and someone or not-one spoke a metonymy of solicitude

in the beginning in the end, in the garden in the ruins

events ever fragile, encounters that were almost nothing

the hounding difference between a thing and a word

between us and us

between the data, the predictions thereof

and the unexpected

that we have not yet learned to trust

the body unspoken, the touch untranslatable

this animal is my self
it demands care, quietness, aliveness
infused as it is with primordial light and dread
sometimes I am only ears and eyes and fingers
and legs and *** and spine, a stomach, a liver and
a heart, sweat, tension and craving, a felt unity
vital stories to be told in the forgotten language
of hope and despair, longing and refusal
there is earth in my hands, air in my eyes, fire
in my stomach, water in my skin
untranslatable whispers about you, the other-me
I am a thirsty boundary for the river of life to dream
sighs symbols rythms harmonies and virtues

songs are sleeping in my naked shoulders
he said untranslatable words:
I want to confiscate your lips
aerate your dreams,
and all the rest, you know

I’ve tried my skin today
as if a nest of lazy hours
free spaces I found
patches of unhope,
poppies and
the possibility of you.

joy creates perfect moments
sweet fingers
nothing to take in or out
no shadows inside fists -
I just love how the light rides
the storm of things,
horizons are passing through
my words
and

*nothing louder than the heart

There's a book of saints that has been touched by my fingerprints
But do not worry, it has not been sought open
Not by me
Or any

There's a book of saints and the others have stolen it from me
Translated it in a language that's is unknown to me
That is foreign
One that is on the tip of my tongue but it won't fall from me
Words like that do not belong in a mouth like mine anyway

I've left the notion of rationally a long time ago
Why reason with a stone?
When it will only be used against you as a weapon
The only breath of fresh air I have is my own
And it's dangerously decaying

Flowers bloom in my bedroom
But wilter in my closet
You see sunlight can not find its way in there
And I can't pry it open with my hands
Because every time I try they become flowers

But they are so beautiful
Executes everything so stunningly
That they leave traces of fairy dust
They are the most pleasant thing to see
It makes me want to shower them in gold
Show the world that not all I do is ugly
Or is unnatural

Because isn't it such a nature thing to do?
Bloom in the darkest of places

And isn't it funny?
How choices can be like flowers
Be alive so unapologetic-like
Except they are so fragile
Yet so elegant
Maybe it's morbid for me to compare myself to a flower
Since we all know what happens when winter comes
And I live in a vicious cycle of coldness

Nonetheless, there is no stopping my beating heart when the sun comes
Nor when the rain pours over my love
Drowning me in lavender

Do not worry I have seen what floods can do to fields of flowers
How they swallow up any life and destroy it
Send it to their death without a second thought,
There is horror in this world
That has been left to swim unchecked in these prairies for too long
Ignored and said to be harmless
Ignored when they drowned my fields of violets

So no I will not grow into a rose
I wish for you to follow me with this
Yet words to teach you my language are untranslatable
There's is nothing I can compare to the feeling of making a home out of one outfit
Nothing to make you understand when I say I'm okay I don't need to change
There are no words to transcribe the feeling of being content with your body
And what it can bloom

Ad infinitum*

embroiled       in another
waking            moment with
a bated            breath nothing like
this day           inclined only to obfuscate
its meaningless      joy of seeing yourself

in a pond        swimmingly doubling the inertia
of the koi       the day constricting within the verdigris
ready to          seal shut in hermetic   this vermillion eye
to wake up     into a long-held confrontation

       of   what this system closes in a document
       why bother this validation when valedictory


Ad nauseam

why bother     this   confrontation
when disappearance     this  space much like a long-held performance
   if concert is hermetic     in front   of a nonchalant audience

laudable     with  no sound,  an untranslatable music
      unhinged from the inherent risk of felling

an    inert   day   struggling   like    koi   trapped
  in a    pond    seeking  what it is   to transcend
   or   the  multiplied   joy   of seeing  yourself  meaningless

   ready   for   an  eye to   be   caught in  a  monotonously
     claustrophobic      *****   of    a   tremulous   middleground
   with   no   possible  agreement   other   than:

   this    potentially   demands   an  end
       when  beginning   you   are   lionized

  to    a   fault,   repeated,    trite:    *what for?

1.
I am optimistic enough this day clings to the highest mast,
is now born out of prophecy.
                           I pass by the old mirror: see myself: blear myself:
is blot to canvas, slit from the wrist of this home:
   I witness how it is to sustain beatings.

2.
In the empty lot, age 9, we wrung frangipanis and ruined
   the pedicle somehow a map of a history where this ground
  shook that was once an old cathedral. We blew

               bubbles out in the haziest of days, pallid and droopy
    the clouds identify in their short collisions – the stream that was
   the sky
       the  face of  my mother when found news of my would-be death
    1996, Kawasaki my mother's clutch on the soiled linen
                 beginning an autopsy

3.
I conjure a frayed upon image of death in its colloquial.
       a fractal of mistakes taken as righting out. I sense prognostication
when potential for a satisfied framed encounter or out of luck that was
       a night making all of this less than total.

I     remember the discoloration of the many lights – the sky beginning an
  erratum: this could have been your last – what is exacted here
        like a tarot, the culprit a newfangled man in the rearview mirror.

4.
How can I forget you – all of you? You wear light like karsunsilyo.
You are all flowers I arrive at a contusion of gardens.
  Rinse me with light – abandon me after.

5.
  Made air staler. Dew my maiden when lit
  from the matutinal – in tow, a bedraggled kite soaring in the heat
  one distinct summer,
      wish it pure that was I, almost touching the vermillion,
my faintest image of freedom was a bird trapped in between
   the venetian.

6.
  In a dream, I am pursued by a train in an alley – in the next scene,
I am being forced to take a plunge
       into a chasm: the fall did not scare me – but my acquiescence
made me flinch: standing before space, anesthetizing
       the skin so it made me more than metal, the clangor

   suggests a tragedy. Awakened by violent nudges
from       my mother: it was the New Year. Pyrotechnics paint the sky
over and over an ephemera in the bleak behemoth of this:
       a makeshift home ruined by untranslatable music

the sound of rain at 11 in the afternoon and a nearby funeral.

In the shadows of this room
Illuminated only by candlelight
We became liquid
Dissolving in the darkness
A chemical reaction
Resulting in the destruction
Of our composure
Rewriting our compounds
Until we fuse
Into a single strand
Of letters and numbers
Of thoughts
And untranslatable sounds
Fingertips working
My way through your construction
Mind calculating
The methods to solving our equation
Staring behind your eyes
Searching for the words
To write the story
Of what happens here
But there are no words
To recreate the mystery
Behind our explosions
The fated foundation
I placed within your structure

a gentle foreboding:

bidding salutation
and a formless farewell,

into a toboggan of
a bottomless memory.

when things begin themselves
as fine objects, i see their
threats of fading. refulgent light traipsing back to its console.
a tangle of words congealing
to become a forest infested with
voices passing through and perfectly occupying space.

or when you open your mouth
as if you were to say something,
its almost perfectness,
its straightening out the fringes
of my soul to rumple them again,
blue head nostalgia peering
through a soft drape of water,
something as untranslatable as
the shatter of a wave with its forgotten foam slowly making its way down the stairs of jagged rocks, leaving no marks on the very core of thinking this.

when you are about to claw your way back to a memory's drop on the silence of still objects,
reducing all wounds to scars
and there will be no commune
to still its message or tuck its blaring clarity underneath tongues labyrinthine without anything to say, and that what remains to be
conceived is

that this silence
remains to
be something familiar,
like speech - or departures.

Suddenly in a blinding flash of color
A new landscape and mystery materialize,
Before you can act you twitch and shudder
In the gracious beauty before you eyes.
The foliage illuminated unnaturally
The monuments of stone independent,
The world's depth enters gradually
Another time and trace resplendent.
A light enters view majestically relatable,
A transcendent being of light it stood,
It's native tongue soul illuminatingly untranslatable,
Without a doubt this being is pure Good.
Then a stroke of booming thunder,
A sound so terrifying your body leaves you,
A noise that easily tears you asunder,
That consumes your surroundings in a gray hue.
Without a thought you know what if,
Frightened yet unable to make a move,
Despite the beckoning monster you remain stiff,
Any courage you had failed to prove.
Yet again a blinding flash of light stressed
And now you are no longer where you were
The Good being

What is Christmas but the collected dead to say one last goodbye,
To speak in their fabulous, untranslatable tongues of old furniture
And the lacquered shine from the lighted tree and pablum of candles,
All that seems childhood’s undersong of pine and catch-full solitude of eyes.
Until the feeling past Christmas of unwrapped sunset and having said goodbye.

I am barely a real concept, whose perception is occluded by twinkling stardust and rust clung cogs.
I wonder of stars in galaxies, distant, growing with an untranslatable lull.
I hear my heart beat as a quasar, shifting as predictably as a deer scare.
I see three colors, 10 million shades, and only through my eyes.
I want what I don’t yet know I do not have; 20 more colors, the sixth sense, the seventh, and the eighth.
I am plunged into the vacuum that is utter confusion, are you not?

I pretend nothing. Reality is subjective. Unicorns are real.
I feel like nothing but millions of atoms of clinging earth and mass, holding in organs and bones, while knowing I amount to much more.
I touch other’s lives in a way I will never feel or experience, if only because I have ten eyes and *******.
I worry to awake from this dream of confused, polluted nature, if only because of my fear that a better may await, and I have been missed while dreaming.
I cry to remember some days what I beg to forget most.
I am a cheater of nature, a creator, a manipulator, and a murderer of sorts.

I understand the upside world that is held in the dew kissed blades of warrior plant life.
I say to the world “Be quiet. You’re thinking too loud to hear it.”
I dream of real, unaltered acts, people, and emotions drawn from a plethora of real fakes.
I try as hard as I can, knowing how little I’ve done, and how much I have not yet considered doing.
I hope for the world, as selfish as this may be, that it won’t shudder, quake, and crust over whilst I inhabit it.
I am merely the juvenile, bovine animal that will farm the future. No need to worry. Carry on.

focus drips over
a too fast heart rate
as i live
with too many layers on;
i am not barefoot,
i am hardly breathing.

where, where, where/within, within, within.
i shine an “oh-my”
on my lovely wife
and she goes to GOD and prays for me,
we love each other, she prays for our child.

i am too old to be selfish.
not a moon, not far away.
i am here
sight-grace burning the veil of the roles i cherish.

i am the world, i do not need it.
i have been given the greatest gift.

My head really hurts
  and I can't find the words
  to express how I feel;
  the mental silence is real.
The problem, however,
  is that it's not silent- ever.
There's always a dull noise;
  it's untranslatable to young boys
  upon this wide world- Earth.
What, I ask, would it be worth
  to try to find some truth
  in a mythical language that you
  do not fluently speak?

something untranslatable;  
but somehow
understandable.

Lost in transit,
I thought I saw a ghost,
with whispy hair,
and a broken nose;
it looked damaged.

I wouldn't have guessed
that I knew who she was,
no, I wouldn't have known,
had it not been for her
single laugh
that let me know,
I was her,
and she was me,
and that she had detached
many years ago,
wandering the world
without us together,
or that she was so far
into her lightweight, empty form
that speaking words
would be untranslatable
and we could not communicate
to each other anymore.

In every day of my long days,
In every way of my few ways,
I ‘m supposed to figure out,
The untranslatable with no doubt
My destiny and puzzles of fate
Accumulating as they accumulate
Echoes of stares in solitude,
And joys in grieved mood,
And thoughts of my shade,
When in silence they fade,
On my feet estranged
Within my foolishness caged,
I warmly come and coldly go,
Ignorant of what I think I know,
A smile on my lips I draw,
Welcoming unfulfilled fears,
I still have, I know- not of years,
A pale face with sightless tears,
And stream of my confidence,
Despite my victorious pretence,
Fails behind my false face,
Lost among  shadows of my race.

the body is atrophying,
rising from the bed is an
exercise in handholds, comedy physical
wall-grabbing, flail to fall, laughing at myself, still

my super quiet whispers in the bed
of imminent death go unheard,
as somewhat desired, but not entirely,
3/4 tween unsure and surely and surly.

the blood don’t circulate fast enough,
streams slow, sad songs Pandora accumulates,
and Spotify artificial intelligence finds more,
certifying a usual unusual, feel dust mites breaking off of me

<>

mind running in rivulets, fear floes,
courage-drowned, easy stuff
impossible, hard, beyond pale, summer melt,
drowning in self-disgust, hapless hopeless harmonic wastage

every deadline passes, dying,
easygoing no screaming, the
minimal, hard, past the behind, the pale,
the poetry is untraceable, untranslatable and never-good-enough

the easy out is steps away,
illusions are illusory, delusions offer no comfort,
stories you tell for amusement, leaving whimsical
dreams are practice runs, for the longer run, will shortly come do-due

the poem words die on the vine,
scorned silence, best is past,
appropriate ignominy is red-****** iced,
so it goes, no minyan for the funeral, no ten friends

the query repeatedly reappears,
how did I mess up so bad, some part
lazy, part afraid, humans, so much effort,
the voices-in-head saying, we’re plenty good enough

shelter can become a prison, an island,
fortress or prison, a salvation pretense,
osprey overhead, preying, feeding next gen,
hear-’em discussing options when “sleeping,”
his affairs in order?, which smile provokes the provocateur

my affairs long dustbin guests,
sand and atmospheric disbursed,
your next poem probably, granules contained,
for this is how all life is transferred, I’m in a tiny minute, in you…