Naked Snow

Alone I stand,

shaking.

Alone.

 

Insanity runs.

Insanity sweet and perfect.

None of you can touch me now.

 

Thew snow falls shallow,

yet the cold of the Earth affect me.

I twist,

I throttle,

Naked and alone –

my arms stretch out to my sides.

 

Run. Run away.

Run from the insanity that is within.

 

I am naked and alone in this snow,

and none of you

shall ever touch me.

Imprisoned

An old creak as the doors of the morning rattle from the sweet cover of unconscious dream.

The painful light of being bears down on me,

urging and pressing and warring.

In waking there is no repose,

Duty latches onto my first thought –

a schizophrenic voice,

maleficent and sharp.

There is no soft glow of morning here,

no quiet solitude before the dawn to prepare.

Here no sailors press the shoes of luck before the day begins,

for the night has been a brief pause only,

and yesterday’s burdens beat the dust of responsibility from their coattails

and into my sputtering,

coughing lungs.

Now the cold light drips down on me,

artificial and frigid,

it stings my eyes even as it reminds me that nature lies afar

just outside my reach,

just outside my sight.

I rot in this cage of the mind,

watching as each precious moment of being is traded for a morsel

and mortgaged for another sack of chores,

always waiting

always bearing down and pressing crushingdehumanizingdamningkilling.

There is no escape.

I have no metaphor,

no poetic analogy.

I am trapped.

This is Hell.

disgust

I see you there,

a glint in the periphery,

a flicker against the inane reality.

I see you there,

and I spit,

I have cursed my own blood,

discarded my own brother,

what do you think you hold

that I could ever value?

Be honored.

Celebrate,

for I see you there

and take note of the insignificance that is your life,

the banalities that are your thoughts,

blank unrecognition of truth,

blatant disregard for reality,

bold disdain for completeness.

I curse again,

claw at the scratch of the stench of your clothing,

vomit at the hint of your person.

Like the hiss of an angry cat,

I draw my shackles up against the social law

that protects the weakness that grows in your loins

and dilutes the strength of evolution,

stain upon the cloth of humanity.

Be gone.

Depart.

There should be no place for you here,

and I curse the ones that build

for you a house of woebegotten love,

misplaced

and displaced,

granting mercy to a mote

that should not be,

an unfortunate glitch

in the code of humanity.

I shiver and move on,

disgusted at the thought

of the taste of your mind.

union

It’s still there,
the ever-present roiling,
the ever gnawing
burning
devouring
consumption.
Oh, but I grow so weary,
I am spent
with so little left for tomorrow,
for being,
for myself.
Wave after wave after wave,
I flail beneath the encompassing crush.
Inhale.
It is so close,
a sweet reprieve through quiet bliss,
a mouthful of water,
a quick, merciful gulp of burning resolution,
it is so near,
my fingers touch that place,
chill and warmth and pain and acceptance.
With a sigh,
a breathy whisper I am gone,
forgotten and unknowing,
to sleep in undisturbed,
unknowing silence.

Stop.

Start again.

And here we are.
A meandering path from innocence to…
well,
to somewhere else.
Through torment and joy and fear and triumph,
to arrive at a place both ephemeral and permanent.
I am,
but I am becoming.
I am,
and I am not yet.
I am so weary of the trek,
and I no longer know how to justify the race,
how to envision the prize.

So,
I do nothing.
I think nothing.
I delay and obfuscate and deny.
Time is a healer,
and I cry into Her bosom,
waiting for healing,
waithing for health.

Peace

There in the swirling torrent,

at the eye of the rage and chaos,

in the core there is a stillness,

an unremembrance of the gnats and knives

carried in the wind.

Round and round and round,

flashing lights illuminate white-capped crests

as the very surface bends to that calm,

to that void wherein there is no whirl,

no time,

no thing.

Implosion of sound as forward becomes down becomes around again,

the distance from peace ages and lengthens

as the sea is wrapped and twisted further around the eye.

Above, the clouds lurch,

drunken spirals they vomit the cold, biting rain,

spew hail,

belch thunder.

There is no sun beyond the cloud,

no night sky reigned with star,

there is nothing but the maelstrom,

crashing and gnawing at that silent core,

drawing everything down to the silent end.

Digir An

I chose an eternity of this.  I chose an eternity of the velvety, silky darkness that now surrounds me. Sometimes there is a tiny flicker of light, that pinpoint in the blackness around me.  Vast eons of time are birthed and die like great mountains of being between their appearance, but sometimes there is somthing.  I can look at the light, and touch it.  It is like a small grain of light, a tight dot of cold energy frozen into a speck.  I always look for the light to shine on my hands, to highlight the ridges of the prints on my palm, and to give the sharp contrast of shadow to the folds.  But, I never see my hands.  I never see anything of myself.  I’m not sure if the light is frozen, or if I no longer have hands upon which it might shine.

 

Now I push those thoughts out of my head as soon as they start to form.  I used to dwell on the ideas, probe what I knew and try to determine Truth.  But that takes forever.  Literally forever.  Truth is as Truth is, and it fills the horizon of infinity.  If I try to comprehend it all, the light goes out.  There is a slight inhalation almost, as the light grows imperceptibly brighter, then a soft sigh, and the light is no more.

 

When I am waiting for the lights, I am convinced that this is all that I am.  I have become waiting – the impatient longing of desire personified.  I am a hopeless emotion that is self-aware, breathing and seething, and waiting for something.  For anything.  There, I am truly outside of time, as I chose.  Time is as a vast night sea, churning invisibly outside of the little boat of my consciousness.  I cannot  touch it, nor interact with it, but I know of it.  I know that it is, and that things are contained within it.  But I am separated from those things by a chasm that can I cannot cross at will.

 

In those rare occasions when eternity pauses, when a wave breaks with a special urgency, the gap is bridged.  Once again I know time.  Once again I can taste causality.  Those sharp angles of law, those brittle edges of the jewel of time press against what should be my hand, and the little light rests before me.  At first, I saw nothing in the brief span of life of the light.  I knew only the soft, cold glow before me – pure white and unblemished until it evaporated. But now, now I can see the light as it grows.  I am still on the far side of time, and it is as the strange echoes of a language that I no longer speak.   But the memory of it tugs at me.

 

I know the light is within time.  The thought of it makes me smile.  And here, in this place, that smile runs eternal and infinite.  When I again become aware of the light, i feel that I am myself radiant, and that all that is contained within that glowing speck is aware of my brightness, even a I watch its luster.  I cradle this morsel of existence, and pour into it all that I am become, and we are together as one for an age.  For me, this is eternal, my choice.  Inside that grain, time unfolds and grows and flutters.  Inside, one event brings about another from beginning to end.  But there is a beginning and an end.  Perhaps it is circular, on the inside.  It is a question that has no real meaning in the timeless dark.  I understand of their beginning, and their end, just as I understand that for me, there is no beginning, and no end.

 

I chose an eternity of this, an eternity of eternities – each completely defined by emotion.  Eternity of solitude, communion of the selfless-self, outside and apart completely, forever.  And, eternity within time – eternity swallowed by the soft glow of self-awareness of infinite, insignificant selves.  An eternity of inclusion of those selves within my own, a broken mirror reflection of time-bound consciousness, and timelessness unending.

 

There was never really a choice.

angry tie

I thread my body in hot dissonance –

the angry pinks leap out from an ecru field,

lashing out to assault the eye,

to offend the inferred harmonies

swelling in a sea of pretense

around my open scowl.

 

It is my mood,

fey and callous

that accents the palate –

a dark stain on the white fabric,

a sore-thumb crack in an over-sized button.

I lick my lips to whet the daggers of my eyes,

lit with smoldering rage,

the tiny figure hurling insults as monolithic giants,

futility in a storm,

eroded in a blink.

 

all that I see is frustration,

consumption,

and waste.

 

all that I know is disgust.

 

11/6/14

Lament for something that never was.

Despair.

I am become now despair,

as time gnaws at the raw edge of betrayal,

of self-directed anger.

.

I am become despair in the light of Reality,

Reality – that cruel bitch,

antithesis of karma-loving mediocrity.

I am lost to this isolation,

realization that I am insignificance,

infinitesimal mass

in the vastness of infinite time,

infinite space.

.

Who was I pretending to be?

What seed bore the fruit of that presumption?

How did I…?

.

I  must go now.

Reality has come,

and she has brought her lady-

and Duty is a mistress most harsh.

I return now to the task-

Sisyphus thinks only of the stone,

and leaves introspection to the philosopher.

 

5/22/14

an in between place

I wait in this in between place,

this place that is nowhere.

I wait alone with myself,

with our many selves,

hesitant to commit.

.

Through this mist,

this pervasive sadness that coats my bones,

a lilt of an accent,

bright memories of yesterday –

of dragonflies and of stairways,

we wonder which of us is real,

which of us is to be real.

.

Do I decide?

Is the decision mine

to collapse these infinite possibilities

into a single,

crystalline

reality?

Is the true self decided by fate

by God,

or a foolish boy’s choice?

.

I watch the alternatives crumple

into the hungering fog of impossibility.

.

I stand and wait,

postponing,

in this place of infinite loss.

I cannot reach out,

will not reach out,

for I have lost the desire for direction,

for life or for death.

.

So I stand within this self,

in the midst of this host of possible selves –

the dwindling remains of who we could have been,

would have been,

if not for…

.

There is no collapse,

no singular focus.

We are all illusion,

misperception,

visions to blind children.

.

I am truly thankful for these thoughts,

these inwardly directed thoughts from outside,

these shining lines of hope,

memories,

love.

.

But yet I wait here,

unsure,

and anything but alone.

 

4.24.14

Lament

I can see it.

Can you  not?

This brightness and white-hot light?

Can you not smell

the fire-scent of rebirth?

.

Darkness follows,

cool, soothing darkness,

a balm to all of my wounds.

.

You can just barely sense the arrival of the new self,

the air tingling with discovery.

.

My back rests on cold, polished stone

as I reach my hands to part the velvet,

but nothing,

thick and musty nothingness

meets my arms and face.

.

In the distance I hear music;

soft, slow music.

Words of twisted lament

speak of ultimate sadnesses.

But I am new and have not yet been filled,

so I drink the emotion and revel in feeling anew,

.

All that I know is of sadness.

It is filling and complete.

My eyes see dancing,

the music leaps in the darkness.

.

I awake to vague impressions,

a desire for sadness.

Apr 5, 1996