Guiltless Age #4.

Things were so much easier back then,
before sunshine promised grief.
I did not know then that sun would eventually
force itself on the planet and engulf the matter
just as the memory of dad's cold dead hand
would encircle all other memories.
And there;
the water moving without strategy to surround the island.
Presently, the world is ending all the time
but we were never sure when it started.
Convince yourself:
it will be okay to be nothing one of these days,
that the universe has no ethics,
that is does not matter
whether we prevail
or whether we destroy ourselves.
Or maybe just deny the insects and their hunger,
with their faces upside down in guiltless pleasure.
I enjoy the fact of weight;
the mass of ants
teeming below us,
dwarfing us.
We are all very silent
compared to all of the movement around us.
We keep making noise about it,
our tongues moving around
inside our mouths.
And I keep learning
again and again
the reasons for the circle
I've drawn around myself.
The approximation of a life wound up
with emotion and meaning
like an orbiting body
surrounded by orbital bodies
that never touch one another.

Illusions Past #1.

All passwords fall out of my head
like the slips of paper after
the news of things passing
are torn up.
The newspaper tore apart.
Not that I would remember it.
The train car is sneaking by
with flesh stacked upon it's back.
Something about the way the sun rose today
made me feel a bit immortal.
It made me sick,
it made me hungry,
and I ate.
I ate heavy.
The people of the twenty first century
think of the late nineteenth century
and make amends with what I am.
Take this chic antiquity;
lose the phrenology and eugenics.
I know the liberal was libel
but I am filling up
even as I speak of equality.
The equation is not adding up
when I heft this ledger.
Held high above my head,
I'm lost in the economics.
My muscles atrophy
with the knowledge
of the world:
All of itself unjust.
Losing myself in the mirror,
a floating particle in the fluid of my eyeball.
All of the hunger,
all of the sickness.
Like all of it.

Snapped Shot #2.

The thin ice upon the water melts
even though no one watches it.
It happens.
Still, it happens,
moving still no less.
The happening belies the anticipation.
There was no need for the anxious structure
to grow around your limbs
as a crystalline facsimile of skeletal bearing.
The mind acts as a rubber band.
The action acting as a subtle brand;
contortions
mistreatment
made up story.
What it anticipates is more real
than what is real.
The miscreants purport of your house burning down.
Oh yes, that did not happen.
But you look down in a nightmare;
your hands all burnt up from the fire.
Wake up.
The house plant is no longer a skeleton of blades.
The shadow is no longer the man
doing things on Mulholland Drive.
I heard through the life I'm living
that water can have
any number of impurities in it:
some are good
some are bad.

real nightmare as a boy.

something like terror.
the force field useless
as the closet door creaks open.
remember how real that was.
keep a picture of yourself
holding a picture of yourself
inside you
so you retain authenticity.

it is one thing to see things.
it is another to feel them.
if things are to be real
we have to conceive of their duplicity.
the imitation can be real as the original
if you let your mind wander
out across that dead field
where some lonely man
thought of himself
when he caught a gust across the brow.
but that was so long ago.
and it is not remembered
the way he remembered it.
we'll all be remembered that way:
distinctly yet indiscriminately vague.
for our minds are not just
when taking note.

I think of you within my mind.
Walking circles, cutting grooves.
There is the deep indentation
of a genetic incantation,
or a selected interpretation,
of a life you allowed through insemination.
Let's not go there,
let's make a ghost.

Lay the Needle Down in the Groove.

It comforts me to listen to dead people.
With the ghosts whispering I hear,
their spirit talking with the still walking.
That record continues spinning
long after the button is pressed.
So death took them.
So the living still have them.

For years you lived as though
you'd just woken from a dream;
snapped to with a whole life
on the tip of your tongue.
Yet you could not recall the details.
The specifics eluded you.
You knew it was epic,
and it was long;
you knew the river was long.

You left gifts.
I got what you meant.
When you said,
your heart is living forever,
isn't it?
I said,
it seems that way, yes,
I agree it seems that way.

I don't know where things go when they leave
but when they do I go ahead and grieve.
The records all stacked up with notes to cry to,
the letters he wrote to live up to, at least try to.
I remember he said I would be successful
with whatever I used to make my head full.
He said I was a good travel companion.
I took the trip his head unraveling demanded,
and in the eventual I held his cold stiff hand.
I sat and wept with what was his end.
Though he passes far and away,
his world is just as mine and does not decay.

Do not misinterpret the signs.
What falls away is only the flesh.
Their are many kinds,
than just the bodily form of death.
We are not watching memory decay,
but witnessing legacy find it's way.
And so,
farewell father in body,
hello father immemorial.

Roots.

Booking flights to where I came from,
I am going to see who I came from
so as to see where I'll go some day.
The underneath from which we come,
and where we go to when we leave.
Complete circle.
He left a while ago,
on vacation, on leave, on business.
It was not by choice but it was natural.
His body of work kept being left
scattered about his body.
In the infancy of my adulthood,
there were fledgling thoughts
that forced themselves into questions.
If I left would I know where'd I'd left.
If I left how would I get back to what I'd left.
What's left when you lose it.
What's loose when the wind blows into the darkness.

Out there in the whispering
where the trees stand
the branches do not resist
the wind that pushes cold
across their sticky blood.
The tapping of their trunks,
the tapping of the needle spinning:
side A is over.
When we break fast and pour out their insides
the horizon cracks open with light.
And the b-side gets up as an anthem.
We can say it is cultural,
not to think too hard of where things came from.
We will reassure ourselves.
Where things come from are fully left behind.
There is no thing with nothing left behind.
There is no thing with nothing.
We assure ourselves.

Color Theory.

something like cowboy.
something like feeling.
unable to figure it out.
something like a horse.
a horse carved out of stone.
the myth shooting me right between the eyes,
and coming out of the television.
tumbleweeds and dust mustn't make me sneeze.
the desert is vast and symbolic
and the sickness never comes to light
because we are legends.
we won't experience death.
we pretend with the end.
we see beauty.
an exquisite corpse,
such an exquisitely dead body.
the wind discontinues its ebb.
it never stops pushing and pushing
so as to keep
the black horse
rushing further and further away
from this blank sphere
we all spin on.
when the lights turn on
there will not be white,
only shades and shades
of yellow.