Fever Dream

I've been very sick a few times in my life and it was a very frightening experience. This poem is an attempt to explain the mental wreckage that you become when a realllly high fever eats at your thoughts. Well, at least what it was for me.

There I was in the middle in no place but here
everywhere, it seemed, was on vacation, but not fear
I was inside all of nothing peering out toward the lifeless mechanical orb
Somehow captured by the clinging cold fingers like dirty hands, dead and lifeless they absorbed
My fear hollered, “Let me free!”
I was a prisoner of the white fog - the fever dream

I raced across this un-reality, I moved without thought to another place
this feeling at least convinces me “I must be elsewhere?” No taste.
But this place is known you see so I move to another...race to another
I frantically dash to others strung out in rows
more, more, more. All the same! All familiar!
Such loathing of the familiar, this same-familiar surrounding me, drowning me

I grow sick inside and attempt annihilation
by summing up all my inner powers
and stuffing them into this beast that will not change
tying stifle it
this deranged place

and

with a bloom of blinding brightness what I wanted is won
all is destroyed
and there is emptiness in the place of change
and growing sadness in the place of rage
I am left with a realization that what I destroyed
was not a thing, but myself and there is no destroying that
It was a chess match and I played both sides
knew every move before it happened
so rather than destruction, there was defeat
every filament of me, defeated
and now nothing is left is seems
nothing at all
nothing in this empty wasteland, this mechanical orb
but the clink, clink, clink, hammered fists that do not dent
hardly make a sound, hardly salve the fear
as you fight to survive the merry-go-rounds spinning and spinning
and you think that maybe time is without measure
no change marks its passage, but you tire
and tire and tire and tire and you believe
there is no escaping, no fleeing the fever dream...

Beauty

“bEaUty”

Beauty is the bounty
That breaks our hearts
It pulls us forward
And grips our souls
Filling our minds
With wonderful sights
And leaving our minds with great delights
That which beauty gives
Lives in our minds as a gift given
Never forgotten
You should always
Look to the beauty
That presents itself in life
It will leave you with plenty
And ask for nothing in return
You just have to see it
For what it is…

Echo

Silence!
Listen.
Nothing.
Whisper to it!
It will whisper back.
Laugh at it!
It will laugh back.
Be quiet!
And you will hear nothing…

Soar

What would it matter
if I flew to the sea
What would it matter
if I just grew wings

Wouldn’t it be better
Up in the ocean breeze
Wouldn’t it be better
Born to be free

If you could do it
Float like a feather
If you could do it
Would it even matter

Cause you have two legs now
Born to stay aground
Cause you have two legs now
Earthly-bound

But you can always dream
Cause you are free to believe
Free to do anything
Even fly above the sea…

Our Heritage

I travel back to the beginning
To see how the beginning had begun
How I arrived I do not know
Yet I knew I was there

I was thrown into a black-filled limbo

I was troubled
The day was dark and the sun just a lifeless orb
The BEGINNING!
Across the great between I could see other stars
Whose flames raged, flickered, or remained lifeless
Just as ours

From my vantage in the listless void
I could feel a change blanket the sky
LIGHT!
A dim glow that grew into a flame that would burn through the eons

Around me I felt movement
My eyes searched
And I saw planets forming
I saw ours third from the sun
I watched it!
I watched all the Sun’s children being birthed afraid and defenseless

I watched them grow

Time passed and the children became planets
And the third planet from the sun became our
MOTHER EARTH
Whom birthed each of us
Children of the land and sea
Grandchildren of the Sun

I smiled...

Vision Sea

I rise out of body
and float up into a sea of nothingness
I am in bliss
free of body
free of limits
I rush forward in such awful bounty
Yes, this ME
FREE!
I seek no destination, just some destination
amazing
this vision
this sun, at which, I am gazing
such blazing, powerful chaos
I seek it
consume it
I am for a moment, a sun
and my radiance
light!
and from this place in flight
I rush to find life
right here
a somewhere between nowhere
A fascinating place that faces me
In spite of my ugliness
So coarse and dim-lit in the space between nothingness
In the face of so much beauty, so violently castrating my mind’s
meaningless thoughts
and everything
to the Universe to which I sing
I find in symmetry more meaning
beyond small or big
But
to where and why
we are alive
toward the consciousness of what is
and in search of other life
In the midst of this vision sea
I cross a freeway of minds
so much more than I am
I am swallowed by them
they enclose me
overflow that which is me
and I tear away, scared of these things
and I run to nowhere
free at last in somewhere
of one mind
of one self
of one heart
and I beat my way back to body
and lock myself away
from the bigness of it all

Dream Journey

There wonder I through the halls of the past
I see there the journeys traveled by travelers past
In the future I travel through the eyes of the travelers
And I see now the adventures ventured
and woe what journeys journeyed by me
to places I dreamed so far, so high, so deep, so free
the boundless opportunity to see anything I could dream
The ocean erupt in life on Europa
A star not unlike our own remind me of home
and to summit a mountain in leaps and bounds
and descend like a bird to the bottom down
to defeat and defy the earthly rubric of do’s and don’ts
How satisfying mind flying

to be defying


DEFIANT!

to inseminate my fate with imaginative abandon
to travel across a ghostly lake as a phantom descending
and to allow the fascination with my life to peel back the eye
and to see the blue depths for a glimpse of our design
I am reminded in that moment
that life is a thing of beauty that meant
and when I die, I will die alive
with a smile that weeps
the wonders and memories I adore and keep