A night’s palette

To be among the night, twisted and confined to its fingers of darkly shadows and colorless palette, I am caught up in this web of imaginings. One, while on a roadtrip to the southwest and hiking into Death Valley, was a thought of an artist behind who paints me into a scene (some non corpreal being). The idea was wild and stuck. What came of it was this poem while at a hotel in Idaho.

--

Do I awaken by happenstance
Or by bidding?
Between me and a night’s grand stage
Is no one –
I stand alone

There’s a fettered absence
Of sleepiness
And of time
Only shadowy curtains
Opening into forests and mountains
layered line over line

It is like an artist of dark moods
Painting in shades of grey and black
Who magically alludes
That color is but a few short hours
From bleeding onto a canvas
Too mute for most

It is like me
Perhaps is why I was awakened in the night
To be painted into place
By an artist
I can't see
Who moves the strings of me
Like a painter does a brush

Starry Eyed

On this mountaintop, I am alone
I am not compelled to speak
To hide emotion
To entertain no other but myself
And if I grumble a word
It is a gasp!

It is here I am to be amazed
To be let out of my inside
Into the outside
Full!

I find too much just enough
and too little, a waste
I am compelled to gamble
To leave this mountain
So that I may return

As a starry-eyed child is fascinated
Like new is fuel
The more, beautiful
The less, satisfying

Stream warbles
Wind chimes
Forest hymns

Your mountainous eyes
so wildly feral
demonstrate to me
your true colors

I hum a song
as you glide to sleep
Me awake, imagining
You asleep, dreaming

Out beyond to the heavenly lands
The color of my eyes reflect
A million adventures
A million lives

Subterfuge

Somewhere on the edge I adjust fear,
Sadness does not echo,
Happy does not pierce,
Fluid is my only vice,
I must move these feet and hands,
I must rise upward.

There is no action without reaction,
There are only sensory strings swarming my mind,
The smell of broken rocks acrid whiff,
The quenched thirst from a mountains liquid vase,
The sound of nothing human born - only nature,
The masquerade of wind and snow embodied together
in form and function.

Pleasure is writ in success and failure,
Determination is born of will and grit,
And in mountains there are men without disguise,
Life does not pretend to be,
There are no deceptions here,
We each walk in devotion,
Leave with a mind cleared like a meadow is of snow,
From it Spring will come
and a garden will rise from the cold
and for a short time you will flourish.

There is always balance!

Everything is bound to that,
Life and death,
Risk and reward,
I give credence to it all
and to my fears the most,
They are my boundaries shuddering and shivering,
twisting in the guile of desperation,
From them I learn to endure;
There are no smoke and mirrors
where man dangles from heights
and clings to cleft to escape gravity!

A wilderness may be my subterfuge,
My vial of emotional substance
that tempts me,
And motion forward may unbalance,
Yet, not everyone learns,
Not everything is fair,
but some learn enough
to balance in a world tipping.