Flora and Fauna

I strain my ears, desperately in the least

Twisting my neck into any shape

Will it give me satisfaction?

Desperation fruits nothing as it has for all before me

Why do the flora and fauna implore me?

I speak not their language, stammering and babbling

Littering the breeze with my formless words

Less of form, brimming with meaning

A chirp in the dark, a rustle in the shadows

The wind stirs a comforting white noise

Am I poised to take this over?

A caw says maybe as I slip into a screen

Screens are docile, I do the imploring

They reveal meaning and hide nothing

While flora and fauna speak in code

Screens operate in preset modes

Flora and fauna have nothing to say here

All knowledge is clear, maybe too clear, it’s so bright

Screens fill in the night

Until I know everything by sight

But eyes surely close, sight is lost

Tossed aside like yesterday’s knowledge

Day by day, human and screen, flora and fauna

I listen not to hear their words, formless words

Their musings aren’t fraught with screen-like ‘meaning’

It seems I only wish them to be

So a form cannot capture the formless, a screen cannot capture the wilderness

Flora and fauna speak in code

I am still in a preset mode

Day Too Many

The day brings sheaths of white light

And like white on a screen, white on a page

I can only stare blankly, not fully involved

The light fades and the sunset is lost below the horizon

From unrelenting sleep I suddenly awaken

Only having been awake for hours before

The amount of solitude in the room is stifling

Just now I have registered its creeping presence

A slow reach to a sigh and then necessary contact

The laughter, like smoke, perpetually curls

It envelops the company, the mind, and unfurls

A special kind of company I have come to know

The night concludes before it has ended

An approximately applicable soundtrack plays

And it’s a long drive home, a movie reel on a record player

The porch light outside is filtered through paper-like blinds

Their softness offers me blindness to the darkness I displace

Bed is welcoming, but my presence alone renders it aslant

Sleeplessness chips me away through every yielding glance

There is the timepiece that thwarts my attempts to dream

A special kind of dream I have come to know

Gray Harbor

I come here too often

I stare at the remnants and shell of a tight-knit house

And the sight of it rends me knotted with regret

To know a man had built it so carefully and clean

And lived and cared for its beauty until it gleaned

In the sheet-like sunshine that shone from the city

Only today there’s a gray sky on the harbor

A cityscape rendered unfocused by rainfall

But the rain is halted at city’s edge

I’m left only to wonder if it comes my way

And I assume that it will, as it always does

This house has trapped me here, but it never tells

It will moan and creak in the wind but hush the shells

Of other schemes and plans washed up by ocean swells

When they speak of their troubles and regret

This island has not been littered enough, yet

It is far too clean to be of concern to those in the city

Who are all caught up in their weeping and self-pity

From the rain and waves that made this island so shitty

I come here too often

I stare at the remnants and shell of a tight-knit house

And the sight of it rends me knotted with regret

To know that I haven’t visited the city yet

Five Swings

It’s a quiet ride through the streets that gets me thinking

The processing of ideas, visions, and grievances

They all weigh hard on me and so weigh hard on these wheels

These wheels that are built to take me away from what weighs them

And it’s a quiet ride that’s got me thinking

As it was, the city was my dreamscape, I the lucid dreamweaver

I wove the nightmarish into alleys, the humble folk into the streets

Feral animals let themselves show, quietly observing and judging, I’m sure

But for myself I kept the wandering waterfront

The quietest quay where I found myself after hard days

A breathtaking silence

Balanced by the breath given to me from ocean winds

The winds wafted and cradled the concepts I released

Whispering, “You’re right, absolutely right, quiet now...”

What if she were here?

The quiet winds slipped the concept back into my mind

I can’t feel it

Oh, what if she were here

There are five swings, all gently swaying from the breeze

But there is one swing that sways from our weight

Our perpetual, rhythmic momentum

Our smiles softened by the night

Our laughter cushioned by the breeze

A moment so fragile we’re stirred by drifting leaves

To the end of the pier where we stare, wordless, as the port lights of Charleston glitter on the water

In parallax the lights are a sparkle in her eye as her profile moves closer to mine

As quiet as we came, it is quiet as we leave, as she leaves

The winds waft and cradle the concept I released

Whispering, “You’re right, absolutely right, quiet now...”

An Autumn into the Sun, a Spring into the Core

The bed is a mainstay and I rest in it

The past comes as a tall mast and I contend it

But as I am born to walk, I walk around it

And so I pass, but am never able to surmount it

Staring into dark, my bed eyes take over

Sight is unclear and my eyes compensate with forms

Forms of beauty and forms of the strange

My mind takes its time to rearrange forms to molecules

And so it goes tonight, the world is an atom

The world I am forced in and what is brought to me is the nucleus

And I compartmentalize my idolizations, small and fleeting as they are

As electrons that fly fast and invisible around this nucleic world

And I can’t help but notice, even through the unbearable speed

That dictates the motions of my world

And that I am surrounded by atoms of worlds around me

A reminder of the haves and have nots

And the grieving, the thankfulness, the desire and the disgust

All within a paradigm that these small worlds make up our own

What is our solar system and galaxy but a giant atom?

A fall into the sun

A Fall, an Autumn into the sun

So follows a Spring into the core

And I find myself coerced to implore the sun

Fission is not an option, as such my options are few

Give me a chance, Sun, to renew

I ask for fusion and so an integration of the new

My only option to remain within You

And through this an exclusion from space’s Winter vacuum

The Corner I Saw Bayside

The wind is cold, the air crisp and the ground hard

I’m following someone but it’s not my thoughts

And I float by past all the noise of bars

With the constant buzzing in my head of oughts and ought nots

Shamed but determined and ready to finally end up somewhere

A quick left, I’m drawn to the space ahead

And in the space a swing that lolls back and forth

A measured and quiet course

Someone was on it but they’re gone now

This is what troubles me

But wait, there are two versions to this story

One is fulfilling, the other hath greater glory

One true, maybe one false, the other being exaggerated or false

Either one is suitable for me

But I know my film is going to tank

And I will have wasted good storytelling to failure

So I’ll ask you to hail your cabs if you’ll miss the greater glory

Because this, well, is the actual, uncut story

Paranoid, fluttering in the wind

I’m like a length of celluloid

Every image and thought represented, frame by frame

But theres no sound, no projection

I’m alone

Suddenly a projector, yes!

Yes a projector! This is what I’ve been waiting for

And now I wait no more

To finally see what I want to see among the cold and black

The vacuum that I know is God

I walk down the center of this hallowed pier

Turning to the right, yes there’s the corner I saw bayside

I would be there if I was Him

And so I spoke and sighed, choked and nearly cried

Lost myself to the ocean but I swam back again

And every grievance I had ever had blazed skyward

Forward, backward, parallel and perpendicular to the shore that edged me in and

Oh He was listening, I know, just too shocked and high to show

Me what I was asking for, what I was asking to know

Why won’t you talk to me?

The ocean’s so wide, so vast

You must be there, you mustn’t cast my blazing words overboard

I want to see you, I want to see you, I WANT TO SEE YOU

The ocean’s so wide, so vast

You must be there, you mustn’t cast my blazing words overboard

I want to see you, I want to see you, I WANT TO SEE YOU

The wind continued to reject my words, blasting them to my face

And it thought them absurd

My arms were weak and my body slow

Like a tall, tall tree trying to turn toward the Sun

But I turned, only human, and left the pier of my dreams

Passing myself by the projector

Witnessing the awe and disgust traveling over my face

Slowly, as it was cold outside

Disbelief and anger with the ending of the picture show

Both of my selves turn slow

Like two tall, tall trees trying to turn toward the Sun

And we go back the way we came

The space from whence we came, again as one

And in the space a swing that lolls back and forth

A measured and quiet course

Someone was on it but they’re gone now

This is what troubles me

Nature of a Falling Sun, Pt. 2

I was leanin’ on the house today and saw some folks starin’ at the sun

I was thinkin’ to myself ‘Well shit, you can’t see nothin’ with the sun in yer eyes like that’

Anyways, they started scramblin’ and screamin’ that the sun was gettin’ bigger

They was yellin’ the sun was goin’ to hit the Earth soon, you know, shit like that

I looked up yonder and sure ‘nough that sun was gettin’ bigger and we was gonna die

Them folks was carryin’ on about WHY and WHEN and how big the sun was

I thought to myself ‘Well hell, why are you worryin’ about them insignificancies?’

I mean it don’t matter ‘bout why that sun is fallin’ or when it’ll fall out the sky

I just know myself that the sun’s fallin’, it might as well be now, and we’re gonna die

That there’s just the nature of a fallin’ sun and that’s how it’s gonna be

Them folks need to quit their cryin’ and yappin’ and quit givin’ a damn about that sun

I keep thinkin’ ‘bout what my neighbor John Ezekial Rice said when we was talkin’ about it yet

‘We all’re gonna die and I’d say in these last units o’ time we all do what the fuck we were here to do all along and love and care and forgive and forget and remember and chuckle and pray and share that community we all done forgot all them years ago; goddamn them self-indulgent folks and goddamn that fallin’ sun.’