Writ in fire - amnesia

Where is the fire behind the pen, the blazing sunlight flaring from this nib? Will my writing resurrect in sacred embers, penning these dying words from phoenix feathers? Oh Keats, I understand, what does everyone want from me? I'm inscribing these in flames, leaving fiery lanes of diction known only to me, and soon on and on forever. There's a furnace beneath my feet, and it's hell on my heels. I fear the diving deep, knowing it could be the last thing, my carving letters into the sea soon washed away. Thou was not born for death, immortal Bird! I wish you not half in love with easeful death, nor consign to fate your final breath, for it is not on the end we dwell, no, nor on misery does happiness hold her sway.
It's a gambit; this all was. I notice footsteps in the dust around this head of mine, and they race around in obvious disdain of geometrical similitude, and though they neither exit nor enter, arrive nor leave, I never see whose feet these footsteps belong to. But I love whoever it is, for the delicate rhythm and the stubborn willingness to disturb the dust and dance the dream, I love despite the hurt. If you fall in love with the volcano, you are bound to be burned, and if the sea, why, what ripples can you make in such a thing?


Blind woke up, and he was. Around him, capsules similar to the one in which he lay also swiveled open with a dry, ratcheting noise, and Blind attempted to orient himself in the room based on the sounds, but his head pounded and his mind eked along like an ice floe.
He remembered nothing.

Fingerprint Trails

There are a lot of questions and so few answers going around. Like a freezing night with a tiny blanket - do my toes freeze, or my face? My left side or my right? Or perhaps all of me can be covered, but poorly, with a ratty blanket, gnawed and thin with age. And it's so cold.

In my last several trips to visit my family, I noticed something interesting. Sitting outside the rooms where each family member sits, when they were alone, I heard nothing. But the instant I moved and made sounds in the hallway, down the stairs, past the rooms, they would start talking. Not necessarily to me, though sometimes, but more frequently just tiny snippets out loud. Why? Why would Phil suddenly find it necessary to say to himself, "This next scene is my favorite" when watching a movie by himself? Or Sam suddenly remark, "this guy isn't doing any of the right things, so we're going to lose soon if I don't play this next portion right" when no one else is in the room as he plays his game? Why would my dad suddenly comment on how fantastic a portion of mythbusters is - who is he talking to? - or mom laugh and exclaim how much she loves this show?

No one is around - who are these questions for?

Me. Me?

You see, when I wasn't making any noise, there was silence. But when I moved, suddenly someone is listening, someone is there. They don't know who, but each one of those people wants whoever it is to be interested, to be intrigued enough with the question to saunter in and be enchanted with his or her life. Not even to answer the questions, or statements, whatever they may be, but to invest their being in a response. I have no answers, but sometimes I can be, and be in the right place, and that is sufficient. And I hope that when the time comes and I'm spouting off cries for help or calls for assurance, that someone is there, someone does respond, and drops in to offer a little human contact.

Fingers leave oil prints on freezing glass, like foot tracks of a beast who went not far. Is it better, then, this glass, which brittle breaks into countless shards, than steely metals which when bent do bend, and so ceaselessly endure the pain? It's not me who asks - no, not me - but the fire-breasted robin in the trees and the japanese sparrowhawk as he wheels above the leaves, in air vaster than mountains and even seas. Questions without greener pasture or silky answers, warm as summer eve; questions at whose gravity the beast falters and falls, after but ten steps of dreams. When the weight of the world rests heavily, so heavily you cannot breathe, it's love or flee, struggle or believe, and under certain lights, shattered glass coruscates, bright as those endless stars.

Driving into the Valley

Turning on my brights, descending down the Shins road, this light only accentuates an eerie twilight splendor. Another world we've entered here, shadow shapes in charcoal replace what daytime placed before - robust pines are hefty arrowheads, rolling hills are timeless, cresting waves, milky moonlight falls over a maple explosion, captured and frozen in a moment of firework display, and houses pleasant during sunlight droop into witch hovels, strobed in the lightning of my headlights. It is a spectacularly fae land, celtic and mysterious, that bowls this gentle valley of home. Mists burbling over the hilltops and sliding over bald peak are a breath caress against the window of night. I've never, may never, know such love.
Crawling, creeping, clawing, time comes with clandestine fervor, covert against the clamor of daily motion. Stop and breathe, please, or in brief steps, breathe in this living day, love this beautiful clay of people. An extravagance, then, this life. The first great grey in a season-wide eternity of such. Gun-metal skies swallowing this year, and crying tears mourning the lost clothing of trees.

Closes and Opens

A spectre haunts my frailty, a ghost I've forged of devilry. With dreams, awake, entwined, cold as listless lies and lives, phantom echoes of ancient angers arrive and cruelly wave as passersby, then smile. The fellowship's shattered, into ashes thick in black winds. Every cat's tail of nine slicing through my mind leaves paw prints of crimson mysteries behind.  Nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals / the power of your intense fragility. Lovely letters, in the dark night storms of survival, when I've jettisoned my soul, and dreams die derelict on ocean's floor, while others simply shipwrecked float as flotsam food for fishes - can you hand me the rope? You are waiting for another, my bathybic apparition, no matter, dear. Watch me flounder here. Salty eyes flood unnoticed in the sea, married to my maritime eventuality. This is a sodden and sorrowful swan song, as your look lingers across another open ocean, not mine, with spring sky eyes and stolen time. There's love in those eyes, not for me, not for me. And it anchors deep within my veins.

There's gold in grey days and silver in the skies. The sunny rays are forsythia smiles and the trees marigold denials of icy chains. The purple gates of dawn blossom wide, and an old locomotive thunders across the heavens, leaving billowing trails in cumulus piles.  What if a much of a which of a wind. Here is the rain awaited by leaves with all their trees and by forests with all their mountains. People stopping and listening - when the sea's overhead and below, where to go?
Where the sea meets the moon-blanch'd sand
Listen, as the finches flit and sing, the newts wiggle beneath the drops of rain which plunk against the lake-drum. Pay close mind to the vessel cutting gently through the loose-leafed wine of this intoxicating inland sea, above which the hooting owl with offset eyes swoops into the underbrush with frightening speed, and the goats clopping up the hillside stones bah and bleat away this autumn squall. Nothing so beautiful as sunlight and rain tricking light into rainbows across the lake and between the trees. There's love here, quite as strong as the infinite, beating brisk and bright.





"Do you believe in dichotomy?"
"I do, and I don't."


somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully ,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands
~ ee cummings

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.

Alabaster and Birch

If the world were etched in alabaster, tinged only as bleached bones, might I know the difference? Could I imagine colors if none such existed? Are there rainbows of reds, if only my eyes could distinguish those tiny stripes, dissecting each hue into a new dimension of flushes and shades and brushes beyond what my vision perceives. What of touch or smell? Smells of fear, love, sweat and must, salt and sulfur, metallic and rust - what layers doth my nose not pierce, my fingers not feel as I trace each digit across lightly grained wood and the ridges and tales seeping into stone like palm lines and annular rings, storying of fires and storms, sunny seasons and pressures of the earth and waters. Might I touch a stone and find my heart broken from its tragedies and travails. Might I unravel the dreams of trees?


http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20732

I was reading various artists of poetry this morning, and stumbled across this piece by Carl Sandburg. Honestly, I think this piece is a bit brilliant. The poetry embedded carefully in exquisite prose is a marvel, and his execution of color and imagery carries me deep into the forest, the wilderness itself.


A surreptitious delight shrouded in brilliant white, a calvacade of birch, upright and majestic, and slippered in lava leaves. Wind brushes along the path, sweeping ember sparks into the air, crinkling autumn stirred aloft for brief moments of twisting flight, as eddies of breeze whirlwind the fallen leaves from the path and deposit them besides. Promenade por Paradiso. Smells of birch and lichens blend with redolent tastes of pine and violets, and the sound-song sings of the crinkling leaves beneath yellowing maple trees. Is this a temple or a time, this chill forest fire, blazing burrs of Autumn rattling my bones. When the moon's yellowed as ancient parchment, the sky's denim blue covers these sanguine woods, fae light conceives a primal world, precious as eve's garden, and no less silent.

Squalls and Serenity

I had a post prepared regarding an interesting abortion article I read today. But I'm entranced by the rain, and my words tumble through my fingers in incoherent patterns. It's the clapping of a thousand tiny hands; the swishing of new seas, without names, sloshing across blackened streets; whispers of wind whisk the water into waves, rippling into rising mists. What was I contemplating? The deaths of unborn infants? Les enfants mortalis?

Why such somber notes while these tiny percussions plummet to patter against the slanting roof, drizzle down the gutters, and puddle and pool across the green grass? Waters collecting into droplets, streaking down the windows into pools along the walls, forming runnels in the grass towards rivulets in the roads, gurgling into drains against the curbs and stagnating in rainbow-swirl pools on sidewalks and where the road dips and deepens. Sugar maples slap their branches against the walls, the oaks jettison browning leaves, dogwood whispers with the whimpers of butterfly wings, and the regal pines ruffle,  but stand proud against the prevailing winds. 

An excellent night for philosophical dialogues while sitting under fleece blankets and sipping ciders. One of my roommates and I, we discussed determinism and predestination, miracles and divinity, Christendom and creation, stories and mythologies, culturally infected beliefs and ideologies. I've missed long philosophical dialectics full of witticism and crafted hypothesis. I could linger long into the night on such musings, if life permits. Tonight, life does not permit. Humbly and thoughtfully, I retreat into the darkness of the room, and listen once more to the rain's storming outside these screens. Makes me want to set up tarp and tent, and sleep beneath the soggy heavens, snug against the bristling winds and tearful clouds.

Oh, I wish I lived in a log cabin with a loft and could listen to these sounds until morning. The power flickers. We'll see who succumbs first: the storm or the electricity. Let the tempest of this night commence.