A Momentary Standard

Like the sheen of soap bubbles are half and half blends

of lightwaves combining without and within,

our split personalities dually depend

on the contrast of inside and out.

Like topical views of an ocean that’s blue

turn ten shades of gray once the sky is removed,

such is the vantage point reflecting you

without some kind of beautiful reference.

Inside rudimentary, physical math

all lonely particles long to attach

in a romantic context, combining to mass,

like our love longs to be met with love.

Like nitrogen filters the hue of the sky,

blue, purple, pink perfectly coincide  

with the cyclical sunrise and dusky decline.

Such are shifts in our concepts of heaven.

All self-perception’s a papier-mâché    

laid layer by layer in spectral array,

till balance of darkness and light obtained

by the standards of one single moment.

Partially Perceived

I partially perceive the dark. I boils from out my skin and floats

into a billion rising suns sustained in seas of black.

The dredged and deepened tunnel of the latter evening’s open throat

swallows whole the glow of globes in gravity’s endearing grasp.

There are no friends, no love in this. No such terrestrial antiques.

Alone and throbbing primal seeds of exploration sewn.

From egoless and wordless lips, the coming language that we speak

are syllables synonymous with distant dreams of nothing known.

No crimson cradle savior’s blood. Religion feels a foreign theme.

Inside the frontal lobe of god, synaptic stars connect the thoughts.

Single cells to whales, puddles turned to sails that scale the seas

of darkness partially perceived inside a billion burning dots. 

Ever in Between

There is no sound upon the moon…no ether for the waves to move…

no shouting I hate you, Hate you too. What would be the point?

Both our stupid mouths would open, realize exactly no one’d

listened to the shit we’d spoken. Nothing more to prove.

There ain’t no gravity in space, ‘cept round some planets sparsely placed,

so if we cried our tears would trace a billion different paths.

If I was mean or you made me cry then both our eyes would be

like sparklers on new years eve, exploding in the black.

There is no night upon a star; a seamless day, a single dawn.

A light that just burns on and on will eat itself in time.

Without a care to make it through, we’d live a love that just consumed

us both. There’s no more me, no you, for passion can’t survive.

There is no time inside of light, for at that speed the clock unwinds:

the future is the past is right now there’s only this.

So we could lay our bodies down, count every star, trace every cloud,

let the scattered moments compound…we would just exist.

A black hole has no answer and no math that lets you understand

what escapes and what just can’t find its way back home.

So as we pull each other in and gauge the place where each begins

we’d find the balancing depends on things we’ll never know.

All that lives outside our bond -the stars, the moon, and space beyond-

are simply mirrors built upon reflections of our dreams.

So when our love is put to sleep -there’s no more you, there’s no more me-

the end will stretch on endlessly, forever in between

all the hateful things we said, every cloud that’s overhead,

a perfect sun that never set, and tears that floated through

a wave of light where time was stopped, the blackest hole in which it’s caught,

where half escapes and half does not…there’ll still be me and you.

Fleeting Medium

A mural of the word Fragility composed of porcelain,

a million tiny pieces fluttering beneath a will to hold

themselves together in the current of a future undetermined,

shivering inside a silent wind that softly blows.

A painting of the human heart, a medium that never dries,

a brush that can’t be steadied by a pulse that never stops,

a labor made of love, an undertaking undertook because

the art of life is our attempt to blend the bleeding drops.

A photograph of tears, a crystal portrait of a painful year

that builds and builds and finally spills into a single gem,

the aperture is infinite, yet finite as the moment spent

capturing the lonely drop that fell upon the lens.

A sculpture of a thought, a bronze embodiment of something not

poseable by standards of a concrete measurement,

a bust that’s turned to dust from shoulders to the neck on up,

a ball of clay misshapen as surrealist wet cement.

The frailty of art, the instability of all we are,

a feel that can’t be captured when the center can’t be kept,

so let us fling the sand, the truest portraiture of all of man,

and in the end the effort spent is all that shall be left.

The Likes of Us

From clay, to coal, to diamond, onto glittered dust that floats away…

a wish upon the lips of god and mangled smile of death…

a billion bodies rotting on its tongue, a forked and flickered flame

hissing through dimensions where the likes of us are kept.

Condensation into cloud, back to rain, condense again…

a simple sketch of dreams that live outside of shape and form…

countless decomposing leaves as wreathes atop of dead beliefs

which time decays and rearranges till the next is born.

Such are we, the sum of this, the taste of god’s too cryptic lips,

a song that’s sung by serpent tongues splitting either way…

dust of diamond, skin of pearl, the sparkled sheen that coats the world,

caught beneath a pile of leaves and poems of muted waves.

No Gift, No Choice

A thousand pens are killed, ink is spilled, countless pages filled

and crumbled into clumps of cluttered thoughts that drift away.

Documented moments spent around a line of time that’s bent

into a knotted ball of thread, unread and void of praise.

My compulsion is confinement, a commission given by

a god I don’t believe in or my silent, shadow side.

A seed that blooms to thorns that prod the base my worth is built upon,

pokes and pierces till release is bled and satisfied.

There is no gift or choice to this. Expression is to just exist.

The withered soul of one who holds their talent, never I.

A mind that moves in metaphor, a spirit shaped in metered form,

a slave to placement and arrangement of poetic lines.

Pen be cross, and paper, savior, crucified by riverside…

a monument to effort spent, unnoticed and unknown.

So it goes, the ink is dried in gracefully symmetric lines,

paralleled to worth of self which will one day be shown.

Native Tongue

Take a dream and separate it, crux by clinging crux.

Alchemize it down to raw material. What do we find?

Scrape it, grate it into basic particles of dust.

What constituents remain by which a dream’s defined?

More than cranial composites calcified inside a skull,

cerebral tissue dividends of single cells to sponge.

More refined and polished than enamel of the words deposited

upon the forking posture of our native tongues. 

Self to Self

Mood ring, color captioned, tele-tubby-esque projection screen

flashes random pink and static pixels floating up and down.

A transitory state, scrolling through potentials to display

emotional arrays exchanged from inward onto out.

Sometimes just a single color, oily sheen or pollak painting.

Sometimes solid images. Some literal, some not.

Sometimes metaphorical. Some change and move in animation.

Often just a stationary, blank and tiny dot.

Fiberoptic elements are woven in and out the skin

of solar plexuses connecting thoughts to smaller veins.

The curse of the continual expression of the things within,

an open book exposing every precious, private page.

Attempt to rearrange the folded layers of complex emotion,

rendering an outward image irreflective of

the picture held inside. Try to hide it, sharing none with no one,

keeping self to self, and everything else, what it was.

2nd try

Dip my heart in 20 shades of shit and dumbness, paint it pink,

bedazzle it with sick neurosis, let it dry and tie it to

a tiny little chain. Inscribe their name, ask them to do the same

and wager which ell break and bleed before our fleeting time is through.

Looks so pretty hanging round their necks … some starry metaphor,

knowing that the source of every light you see’s already died.

The end precedes beginning or, it’s done and over long before

the 1st attempt has been absorbed into a 2nd try. 

All That I Pretend

Sometimes when I’m alone I like so sit and just pretend

I’m floating on a wave inside a sea that never ends.

An ocean made of memories and dreams and space and time,

that’s colored like a rainbow of kaleidoscopic shine.

I pretend that I’m a part of everything that ever was,

of history, and yet to be, of moons and distant suns.

I pretend that everyone who’s ever lived and everything

are lyrics of a simple song the ocean breezes sing.

I pretend that planet Earth and every other world and star

are sparkles on the top of waves that break and drift apart,

to shine atop their surface and reflect into a sky

that’s cradled in a kind of love which we cannot describe.

I pretend to talk to god, and every answer that I seek

is found inside the perfect feeling that I am complete…

…just a wave that’s floating in a sea without an end,

where everything is me and I am all that I pretend.

Month and Mood

It all came in today, the rain, the sharper air, the lack of warmth,

traveling upon the crest and currents of a colder thought;

a lonely, lingered air, the frigid combination of a shared

month and mood discovered through the balance that I’d lost.

Mornings filled with radio alarms –talk talk- the sleep is light

but comes in folded layers, heavy blankets, darker dreams.

The thoughts begin again. A billion bodies crawl beneath my skin,

a billion prodding limbs that bend and force me to my feet.

Work is now a sedative, a means of substance, no more.

Writing has become a tortured test of fickle will.

The sun suspended in a wind that suctions up the light it gives,

drifting overhead, so still, so lacking, so it goes.

So I move inside this month, this mood, this winding winter binding to

the cyclic symptoms of a new neurosis to embrace.

Loneliness, dissatisfaction with the sex and interactions

meant to supplement to the want the weather has displaced.

And so the winter goes, the colder seasons of the heart and soul,

with layers of emotion snowed as lonely glaciers laid.

But, big as they become, the sum will slowly come undone and float

as tiny bits of memory drift and drown to be replaced.

River Black

River black before me, whisper secrets, speak of sickness, sing

a droning song, and ambiance to set the mood for this.

Feed the lines to me. Feed me lightless depths and darker dreams.

I’ll write your body as a shadow underneath my fingertips.

River, make me guess. Project the shape of things that shouldn’t be,

myriad mirages in the fog that floats atop your waves.

Hallucination rising as my body looking back at me,

a distant figure dying in the different shades of gray.

Endless river, speak of things I’ll never understand,

offering yourself to every ocean, letting go,

syphoning your spirit through the frame of a forgotten plan,

sediments to eulogize the god that’s drown below.

River, tell me something of a different kind of life,

where light is but a flicker, sound is silenced, breath is gone,

where pages saturate and break away, diminished line by line,

and ink floats to the surface to dissolve inside the dawn.

River black before me, take these words and add them onto yours,

a second verse to muted movement, saying not a thing.

I’ll feed the lines to you, you sing them back without a note removed.

Let me bask inside the blackened silence that you bring.

Growing the Gutters

A world behind the shadow of another shadow casting more,

like strings of paper puppet people pressing hip to hip

and flung as one dimensional accordions projected toward

the place where mind and matter merge, decay, divide and split.

We hide behind, within, beside and all around ourselves it seems,

and dream in sheets of paper fluttering in gutters grown

along the sides of roads that wind from you and back to me

between a solitary path that leads in the great unknown.

A chasm of causality that swallows all effect, for real.

Belief belays the buckled belts and broken ropes we climb,

cliff to cliff to precipice, meandering the grand abyss

and blackened, bottomless existence buried in our minds.

The notion know as Nothing is still a thought until the point is lost,

and truly finds its meaning reacquired in the gap.

But gaps allude to bordered boundaries surrounding missing spots,

where once again the Nothing gives its meaning taken back.

Inside of this we breathe, the vacuum lacking solid substance.

In sweetened air we share the bare necessity of life:

a notion grown to juxtapose itself and balance balance-lost

between the streams and paper dreams that flow from you and I.

Pearl by: Jeffrey Kinsey

An unspoken word polished slow to a rainbow,

the small opalescence of one immense thought,

a sharp sound inside of soft lips that won’t open,

smoothed into something so perfectly lost.

Confessions of love, names for god and small secrets-

these pearls we compress under oceans of doubt.

Why speak up when tides rush in just to recede again?

What if it all leaves us once we make a sound? 

A lifetime of dreams on the tip of your tongue,

a scream that weighs so much it crushes itself…

the feeling folds in, folds again and then hums

a song made of all of the things we wont tell.

These little gifts we keep inside the shell of our own gravity…

breath is held and lips are sealed and so the silence goes…

our colors, words and secrets shrink into a tiny masterpiece…

a perfect pearl that's hid beneath a heart that no one knows.

Many Middles by: Jeffrey Kinsey

Chaos in the center of the thought’s the only constant here.

The crux is crushed and deconstruct, dissolving out into

all surrounding points and principles, as middle touches middle,

overlapping every angle that arranges you.

But, such lends to the dream of life and love and death and interaction:

creamycream into the blackness, spiraled out to hug

fractals into pixels into pictures that connect the little

pieces of the many middles merging into us.

Not a point to point to. Point it out and watch it swirl around

your index digit digified into a billion squares,

or geometric, hexogenic dots without a center in it,

floating through the deconcentric middle that we share.

Nothing clings to nothing clings to all dissolves and drifts away.

Our points and principles and purposes are purely mute.

A polyseismic schism of the middles we imagine in them

are the gaps that open up to swallow every truth.

Simple Thoughts by: Jeffrey Kinsey

Simple words and thoughts, let’s keep it here. Don’t let the air escape.

Let’s bottle up the borders – keep the gods and science out.

No psychology. Let lovers leave. Let outer space recede.

For in this bottled moment no complexity’s allowed.

A flower’s just a flower, made of color and of touch.

The breeze is just us breathing-in this moment that we’ve trapped.

The sound is turning down. Our sense of syncope’s enough

for us to understand the words and thoughts our feelings lack.

No such thing as pain or broken hearts. No such abstraction here.

No heaviness. Just levity. Inflate and drift away.

Bottled in the buoyancy of blankness, floating on the sea

and tidal waves of all excessiveness that we’ve escaped.

Ahh, the peace in capturing the simpleness of shutting down.

From rapid static, synapse turn to underhanded catch.

Slowly, slower, goes the mind. No such hurry. No such time.

Past becomes unmemorized. Here, nothing has to last.

Inside this space it’s easy, lose the meanings, let the borders bend

up and round the  breathing of our focus getting lost.

Let’s sit still and let’s exist. No questions and no answers, just

bottled-up inside the beauty of our simple thoughts.