nothings #2

 

They think you’re dead. Dust on the ocean. Fish food now.

Dead has four letters, one repeat so three. And dea isn’t a word in English so it’s incomplete or something else. A prelude maybe.

Always has six letters, one repeat so five. Not counting decades of linguistic change – they change numbers and geometry. All wayes. Not even just one word, hey?

Then there’s the big bad book. Now that nails mind and perspective to a fishing rod destined to stay empty. Some bait, huh? Do fish count the days to their next meal?

Forget the words and numbers.
Everything is lost if translation lacks a heart.

You don’t have to try that hard to see a full moon all the time no matter what the quadrant says.

By the way, life has four letters. No repeats. Soul food for the gods?

nothings #1

Tail lights glitter. Sawdust on ten thousand miles of ice and desert, chrome and mud. Between here and dawn, now and then. Where in hell are you? Dante ain’t seen nothin’ yet. He should talk to me.

so …

your place:
minimalist cold with
half truths’
mumble, glossing over
could-a never-beens
hiding from the dread
full rain

or mine
among untidy words
jousting for the couch,
climbing walls
to dance on ceilings

where
shadows flower, straggle
in flamboyant
mis-matched verse,
unkempt and without care
for staid perfection.
petals listen for the rain,
recall every fall.

muse-in

Muse is painful rapture. She or he or them. In you. Such depths of being lost in freefall are beyond lustful word cages which lean towards authority. It may or may be not your soul, a higher self or something Jung connected. Hot achilles’ heel of Freud’s womb-fetish. It’s fully, truly immaterial. It really is.

When the air is heaving, breathing right back at you, when it seems that something’s going to happen and you’ve no clue what it is, only that it’s way beyond even wishing to control, then Muse is present. So you give, no, surrender all – and expect nothing.

Can you expect nothing?

It’s like watching a gorgeous map illuminate onscreen at an alarming rate. Or that media player, describing tone in motioned colour. You’re a stunned witness and suddenly you know that you are a dark screen for creation.

On your perfect empty space energies connect, split open, multiply.

This is pre-word still in thought. It’s a different language here and words slow you down. So you tinker with a keyboard or a pen just so you don’t get in the way. Sometimes words fall, accidentally it seems, from the wake of neuron fire. You rush to gather them. These are the ones you treasure, nurture later, but not now because you might miss something on the screen and it’s compulsive viewing.

If you can, remember everything. Accept that you won’t. Know that you’ll mourn each loss, forever feel the trace of where each fire snaked through nerve and then left.

Muse journeys are so-willed yet always unprepared for. It’s not like you anticipate stepping out naked on a multi-laned highway in midnight’s rushing hour – but here you are. Hoping that you’ll never be the same again. Wishing you could stay forever because here is real. With its feet up on your ego while its cigarette is burning through your nightgown. And you don’t care about that. Even if it hurts. Even when it hurts. Only that it’s so.

And the voices say “this way” all at once. You can’t ask them to slow down, though you try. They don’t like that much. You can’t ask what they mean, you’ve only got a hair’s breadth of their language, a series of unfolding lightwaves not a structure. Don’t even think about it in those terms because here’s a vastness strong enough to dissolve rather than dilute essence. Give it yours.

Later, when you’re picking up the pieces of your self, it’s a comfort that the muse’s claw stuck purposefully in your heart cannot be dislodged.

Beloved token. Mystery. In You. Again.

sartre day

Sirens draw flat-line to night,
dream scattered owl-talk
fades while talons
skewer masked intentions’
pre-dawn dialogue with rage.

They hunt
we hide

behind soft curtains, held
in the net of disbelief.
A glimpse of what we think
we’re not. Entombed.

no clue

I’ll fingerprint this night;
luminescent daubs
might lead straight to you.

Still, lines cobweb silver
trace of thought,
belight the pliant bough
that holds my wait.

detach-mentally

Leaves scrape at glass, gather in a crackle,
fill yard corners with bright memories
and gossip at the edge of winter’s mercy.

Their brittle voices are already precious
ghosts, disturbing skeletals,
colours dashed against the wall,
to the ground, summer kites unbound.

I’ll move them later, gather up each voice
that was, listen to the echoes leaving
in the wind and wonder how it’s done,
this unstrung madness falling into grace.