Pearl
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
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.
Many Middles
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
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.