Tripping on the Floor

Your scarf was on the floor,
waiting for your head.
Your ears were restless,
waiting for a sound to come again.

How dreary, thoughts of socks and paranoid eyes.
You thought of your face,
then mouthed the words to a song.
You thought you were alone.

Hunched over your knees with your head on the scarf,
you tried not to move.
Someone out there will love the way you howl in the cold.
Someone will study your eyes and noises
as you burn with a fever.
They will drape their hair over your skin and smile.

You held your breath in ecstasy, waiting,
as the phone came crashing to the floor,
ringing once with its last words.
Upon the window, the rain nodded off.
How graceful it is in its exhaustion.

A tired voice once read, pitter-patter on the pane.
So long, pitter-patter on the pane.
So long ago, you were afraid of death and painted faces.
You were blond and wore red socks in the rain.
You cried until dizzy with self-pity.

You were tingling all over, waiting in an accident,
grinning behind the ruin of your little world.
Now you were tripping on the floor.
Your socks were gray.

Your hands melted out of reverence for the buried few.
Hail Mary, hello, how are you?
Deeply, I breathe thine roses.
Deeply, I dove for the moon,
only to miss everything.

96 Remembers 69

Ours was the grey by the willowing bay,

Where tides, alone, took dry away.

I let mine flow with nothing to show,

But that was nearly a century ago.

Might I have saved those colors I shaved

For just another year,

Would I be brighter and most of life lighter?

In sight of that, I fear.

Still, home is the place, no matter my face,

Where ambrosial colors draw near and embrace.

My sun-dried sin, so real back then,

Likely that he has forgotten again.

Beyond the I of the Glass

Behold the cruelty of tomorrow,

A bridged world of electric settings

Spreading moments and names

So thin, manageable, pale,

As ghosts try ghosts on for size.

Seeing you see me, close as to kiss

Yet far and real as the stars –

Bodies between memory and actuality –

I smile and find the night charming.

Goodnight, goodbye

Is as much a curse to the sun

As a removal of a face from a face

Or to die.

Two figures in dense, violet night

Face a glass pane.

No pity or despondence in their sighs

Upon the glass betwixt their eyes.

Behold the light drifting by and through,

Upon your face, a streak of loveliness.

Speak, and if silence only sakes your thoughts,

Think to love beyond your voice and grasp.

We spend our mind beyond that glass:

A foggy blue, synthetic wall, perfectly in the way,

Unscathed and cold by touch.

The weakness of our form fixes our thoughts

And fascinates us with the unknown world

Beyond the I of the glass,

Yet still and silent are the stars.

Oh how they shine! Bending our forms

To dream and sing and scheme of the divine.

This obsession with what we cannot obtain alone

Separates us from the objection –

Each self, upon feet, upon a bank,

Fearing the waters of chaos and drowning in

The unnatural acceptance of I won’t be,

Goodnight, goodbye –

And fills our hearts with longing.

I dream of the warmth on the other side,

Of the smells and shades christening my breath.

Beyond the glass, the sounds are clear and igniting.

My spirit, none-sided, sends me through the glass,

A colorless, thin resolution dividing –

To those moving lips and shadows,

Sounding not, minding not –

Where fallen soft, your hair, billowing grace

Asphyxiates despair.

Traiku for the Man with His Head in the Sand

Sunrise in my eyes

Sunrays in my box of sand

Imagination

Triassic jewelry

Priceless rot of savage time

Museum pantomime

Once fierce now hallow

Secrets safe without a sound

Sleeping underground

A Trio at Dawn

As the moon shine will affix

Upon most secret reaction to pressure,

Sands intercept tide-tales through secret transaction of treasure.

Soft, as voices in leaves freed,

Rainfall, overwhelmed with yearning for the sea,

Doubles down, tossing out lengthy promises of pleasure.

The secrets, passed through a mix

Of fresh air, fruit flies, and lust of some measure,

Drift like perfumes, sightlessly seen, filling clouds with jealousy.

The sycamore, the sky, and the mind between

"Departure, Serene"

A whisper to the sycamore

In the holy warmth of summer

Shrouds our hearts among wildflowers.

These greens and shades of earth

Neither call us to a table,

Nor point to the beaten paths of fathers.

Simply and softly,

These woods whisper of the truth

In our mortality.

The wind laps up the dew,

Nudges the morning listeners,

Peels the leaves from the trees.

The vines long to dance,

To hold themselves together.

By the silences, the ibis lands,

Red as an apple, lonesome as I.

A consideration and departure, serene.

We rise, climbing in the breath of the sun’s praise

With our spirits outliving stage after stage of affairs.

We grip the majestic –

How the mountains wait in confinement,

The streams of life, content to wander

Through the sumptuous stone blades

And to the ocean, what a grave site.

Her mighty waves, like wings,

Lift to expose coverts, wild,

And plunge into the face of permanence.

The woods, in its course, mend mortality.

As a shell clinging to a shell,

A cicada fixed upon the sycamore,

We remember how loyal these colors remain.

And still our memory separates us from this canvas.

The bleakness hangs us with green sashes on,

A part of the past hanging just past the arm.

Strength discloses in the grazing of our hands,

A whisper to the trees.

The Lion-hearted Man and His Summer Moon

A roaring at midnight

For the light I adore

Did nothing but my peace restore.

Darkness deepening signs that curled

Into these lines of yonder world.

Sightless state draws passion from

Sunburnt fashion, what was numb.

Canyons rolling sounds I’ve made

To such astounding everglade,

Where a heart of woes roars from my face,

'Tis soothing hum in such a place.

A region conscious as blackened street

And I slackened above my feet,

Relaxed in unoffending tide,

Your beauty sending light to guide.

(Out, you shone to kindle then.

I hope to dream of hope again.)

Every stand ‘neath mystic moon

Is now cordially bound to June,

When resting means return to thee

And waking streams of poetry.

With her face in my dreams

I am cornered tonight,

Seized by what I bravely invite.