Clouded Time

does it hurt to be so alive, rent open wide, so wide, the entire earth crashes inside, swallowed  in the hole of thee? your heart, its unbelievable size and pathetic gravity, remembers everything in dime-sized eternity.
Life seems to be a window, and I’m not sure how to work the latch. The weather outside oscillates between pleasant and frightful, and is often obscured by night. Am I glancing outside or back at my reflection? Figures pass by, quietly, and the wind rustles the screen. What can I offer the lifelike trees, wandering so close, so distantly?
Only a week until my little brother graduates high school, three weeks until the last of my greatest friends in this world are married (barring brothers), five weeks until I possibly own a house, eight weeks until I live only in that house. There is too much going on. I want to make slow, crazy decisions, like a predator, like a warrior, like a grandfather cat walking through the underbrush, like the tentative steps of the moon over the pool, as the clouds hanging overhead. I saw them each one, caught as daguerreotype frames on a vast, panoramic imax of life: the zeppelin emerging from flames; the mittened hand, reaching through snow; the shark with remora, gliding the ocean heavens; the dragon with arched spine and folded wings, all curves and sweeping motion as the ancient Chinese worm; the archipelago of turtles and ducks; cotton candy piled up and shredded by the coyote cloud.
This, too, is life, and every moment reminds me it’s time to crawl through the window and enter the sun, soak in the elephant sky, and run wherever the wind guides.

Clouds and Mysteries

How low and flimsy the clouds tonight
resting scarce above the grasping hillsides,
having been granted the treasure of flight
they squander it, curious at these ants who scurry
the endless seas of grass and streets below
how carefree they seem, when to us
they live so slow - we rush east, ever east
to our doom, crying and thundering as we go
with the stars in reach, why must we linger so
low and heavy above the vineyards and prairies -
what did we want? was it just more time?


I had something I wanted to write about tonight that excited me. And on the way home, I thought of something clever I could include, but somehow I managed to forget it completely by the time I had prepared for sleep. I think I'll read some Agatha Cristie instead.

Clouds - Hello Oregon

tell me true the topology of clouds
not the south, but the upper drifts the sun sees
and kneads across the heavens with winds
glacial-slow, an eventual avalanche forming valleys
cliffs and caves - a geography most will miss
staring so steadily at the ground
what phantom-hand nimbus molds these,
sculpting light into shapes
the dreams of mountains, rivers, oceans
flooding the heavens, where the wispy cirrus
are a curious circus of foam floating up high -
a shadow world whose transience races
from the ocean to the mountains
splashing against their sides with a percussive sigh
where the clouds cry with gold-eye sun shining by,
a friend on one side embraces only tears,
the other paints the rainbow
...


It's been a week since my last entry, and I've missed writing.  I visited my great friends A and S, and it was impractical (and silly) to blog every night - though I did bring my journal - and so I just enjoyed my time with them as much as possible without bringing the baggage of writing regimen into my visit. I had a lovely stay, and I love and miss them very much, though it's good to be back. Wearing shorts and a t-shirt and getting on a plane and flying up into the blue sky and back down through the glum grey and the musical rain that races in little white chips across the airplane windows, and seeing my friends again (JS - yous guys the best), and enjoying a meal and Sherlock - yes, I miss my friends in California and a piece of my love is with them always, but this is home, and the northwest is where my heart would have me.

Meteor Shower?

Vulcanus burns in my gut, Mercury wings through my veins, Minerva crafts in my mind, Morpheus, control thy my dreams? The mountain's heart boils and beats, smoke rising in balloon plumes. Sandy crags melt into obsidian glass. The earth's gorge rises. Tempt me, tell me - drawing lines into circles without beginnings, endings, or only beginnings, endings? Inquiries without satisfaction: was the wind brisk enough today? Were the clouds sufficiently grey? Do turtles even enjoy child's play? Madness, elucidating smells only in colors, sculpting poetry of a headache, convincing whales they might fly, if God draws that square circle.
It is not, it is not what it is.

This night is a mad night, a sleepless night. Words tumble past mythologies past vagaries, sweeping into dust devils of thought, mirages. I imagine the northern lights, metallic, plasma dance in fickle pastels and galvanic, impatient, shimmering curtains, as thoughts, leaping across my mind like these meteors, streaking as searing lines across this night. But gone! gone! Clouds cover my conscious, and ideas are skipping stones bouncing into sand, never sinking into those silver patined clouds of architect. I suppose I'll watch the shooting stars instead, and wish just one more time.