Now

I go spinning into tomorrow, pirouetting past today, dancing on the shoulders of NOW.

In Knowing

You look out and all you see is blurred. There is distraction, but not a curiosity. You are through.

This poem is an allegory of the river and a life derailed. I have found that nothing gets life in focus more than facing a life thought near an end. Having been swept up in rapids during my years as a whitewater boater, I saw this as appropriate in explanation for the ups and downs of life and the challenges we all face.

--

When you look into the misty tomorrows
And yesterdays
When you dwell on the currents
Churning and turning to and away
Do you linger in the spell of dumbfounded hope
Or do you cast yourself into the rapids
And dash it all against rocks
Drown your desperation
Your fire
Your spirit
Curse at the canyons the river has carved
The horizon lines you see hinted at
Ahead of you
The falling, twisting and turning
That no longer matters
The weak arms and legs
That no longer listen to the pleas
Of a still fighting conscious

It does matter
You know now
It does
And you will do anything to be let go
From this place

A friends hand reaches out
A branch or log awaits you
Or a bend pushes you toward an eddy
You are free
You are no longer desperate
You are seeing
You now know what is important to you

You KNOW and there's nothing else holding you
You have your own rapids to make
Your own twists and bends to form
Your own canyons to carve

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

Nature knows

I am set among a thousand facing houses where a thousand trees should be facing, but there isn't. Instead there run streets and sidewalks, byways and highways. They are sandwiched between. What honest living is that? Nature should be our companion, not our slave.

--

Nature knows
I am a lie
She has left me with only
Memory

Yeah, there is green
Beneath my feet
I know it
But it does not know me

Yeah, there is green
Above my head
I know it
But it does not know me

Where did honesty wreck
Where did I disembark from her green decks
How did I end up contrived and lost in my own home

Nature knows
I am a lie
She has left me with only
Memory

Going Astray

When you are in the high country, you look out upon the forest and see those countless green miles spread out before you. And, yet, once among those many trees, there is no looking out. There is no seeing beyond that green veil. You are concealed and hidden from the world. For humans there is an instinct still desiring the security provided in those mossy isles of fir and cedar.

--

To where shall
I amble through forest?
Shall I Levitate
Over canopy
Or sink into fecund mud?
Shall I plainly stab forwardly
Through brambles
Mossy isles
And lose my way
Hopelessly
To nowhere

That we exist

Humanity, like all beasts, exists alone here on Earth, far from anywhere. No matter how smart and powerful we become, we still depend on this lonely planet, on the edges of the Milky Way, for our survival.

--

As fragile
As desperate
As weak

As strong
As powerful
As destructive

You wonder how
Why?
For how long?

That we may exist, here
Now!
However far into
the future

And how
We can just as easily be

Washed away by the seas
Buried under the mountains
And lost within the sands of time

Dream On

Dreams are what lives are made of. Whether they are accomplished is not what matters. What matters is that they are believed in and that they are a part of you that you hunger for. Without that hunger, the life force that pushes you will not sustain itself. It will sicken. So, dream sleepers, awaken.

--

You're leafishly, houndishly
Drifting
Running, spinning
Expeditiously

You're fiendishly, spectacularly
Believing
Hoping, dreaming
Faithfully

You're not slipshod, slapdash
Half ass
Casual, lackluster
Serendipity

So dream on, dreamer
Awake you sleepers!