sciolist role-play
comparing pain
pretending to pretend
and all very serious
starving
no food, no roof
but, man, full of meaning
giving it away

Some people in your life will be rivers.
Deliberate,
refreshing.
If you stay you will be contented.
If you make your home on the banks
you will lose your voice,
carried eventually to the sea.
Even some who attempt to cross
are swept away.

Others will be like cairns.
You will depend on them
but they are
the type of guide
you leave behind.


Some people are like ledges,
cliff and crevasses
too steep to reach
too deep to know
made unreal by fear.
There are those who live below a stark face,
some climb over,
some never see the next valley.
Some wishing they had let a river take them.

There will be plant people
and animal people.
You will love them
and eat them.
Your warmth
will be their pain.
You will cry in the night
beneath their skin.

There will be maps.
There will be a talisman.
There will be rot that finds you when you are away.
See these people.
Feel them in your pockets and around your neck.
Map kept close,
pragmatic tutor.
Close, though not so close as the talisman,
all comfort and beauty.
Not so close as rot,
with you always.

People!
People!
and
I,
knowing people,
am known in turn.
We fold and flow
harden, drop
burrow, drift,
and soften,
becoming the cloth  
woven in waking.
A map, a river.


As clay,
at once
shaped,
the hollow in
everyone's hand.

Met in the foothills,
already the valley rivers
memory.

Through that longest of
mountain trails before us
I can not guide you.

All the same
a way is made.

Treeline.
Alien boundary.
Dying stone
receiving sky burial.
We like foreign guests
do not speak,
bow our heads.

Waywards
learning
customs
without hands,
without eyes.

You can not guide me
because we are the map makers.
Knowing
new
the path as we walk it.

I can not guide you,
but I will beside you
reach the peak,
new eyes, new hands,
and when the moon shows
we will find our footsteps, together
down the mountain.

runaway rest
gets the sunrise watched,
electrical chest
counting cycles by notch

Sleep
on a question stuffed stomach.
Gut turn and fingers
take space made
for nothing.

Sleep,
mind
who
cricket left to sing
alone.