Ignoring the Breeze of a Promise (1/21/06)

Ignoring the breeze of promise
I turn my face into the pillow
And shield your light
In it, tonight, I find only darkness

The phone rings,
And you seem only feet away
Oh if you were,
Only the thin skin of our lips
Would keep us apart

We are flightless in a gilded cage
The latch was forgotten
By the metal forge
A cruel unintentional mistake

Every once in a while
We share the cell
And a kiss teases us
With freedom

Children dance around us
In years not yet counted
They will forget today,
Today, when we parted
And they revved their toy cars
In a patch of sunlight on the carpet

And what was a lifetime to them
Was only moments ago for us
And in a moment, you were long gone
There is a brick office building abutting a lot
Where a barn once stood in the woods

We kissed there,
We defended there,
I will never forget the never-endedness
Of you.

I’ve seen memories come back to haunt me
I’ve aged and cried the same story
Again and again – nothing changes
Except the cast of characters
I am the longest running show
In the Little Theater of life

You will never come through that door
On your own accord
And throw your arms around me
And the seasons will come and go
As our spirits atrophy in the cast iron
Prison of “…love you a lot, but not enough…”

I would take a bullet for you
Even when you anger me.
I hope it only glances me
Because I want to live another day
To feel you, be it heart break or home.

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Poem fragment 2 (2/15/06)

If I could only look inside your heart
If these clouds would only clear
A tear
When loving you made no sense

An obsidian sky

Love comes in from horizon

In finding nothing

I love you, I love you, I love you
Why is it that we create,
There is a rhythm in life and we bend around the syncopation
The sunrises like a new promise,
Full of hope
A melody and we pick the sequence of notes
Love doesn’t fail
It always leads us by the hand
Faster and faster into the night
And we let it slip through our fingers
And watch it run ahead, disappearing in the darkness,
Leaving us itinerant under an obsidian sky

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poem fragment 1

I stood gazing in the darkness
Against a slope before the rivers
And you came to me
In fragments of mist
Dew arriving for an evening sit

And as you landed gently
On my eyes,
The light shimmered
Collecting

on a hill
In the mist
As an orb gently landed.

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My Brown Eyed Girl

Looking up through matted locks
I scan the storm clouds from the dock
While you sail the surly sea
Is there time to think of me?
Waiting in the winds and rain
Enduring time and wincing pain

Enter Poet

The paint is worn, the iron rusts
The planks are laden with salt
The barnacles burry the pitted wood
Still my love exalts

And I wonder who your captain is
Who steers the ship for you
Who navigates the stars
And who will see you through

Our love is like the waves
Always heaping upon the sands
Thrashing, churning, and sifting
Time hewn by loves strong hands

And in those brown eyes the sun breaks through
And illuminates your route
Is your ship coming home
Or have you just journeyed out?

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JUNE 3, 2005 Balcony Musings

And the thing that really makes it ironic, is that it isn’t.

And so the bottle opener from the Bahamas easily opened the bottle of Red Stripe from Jamaica. There begins the longest 50 minutes in history. The bright star or planet, whatever the fuck I’m told it could be, just edged past the corner of the building into my view. Twenty thousand lightening bugs and one BP gas station parking lot away was the only single flashing piece of modern technology in the town of Jefferson. The brights from that car, even that far away, actually allowed me to read on my beer bottle, “For over 75 years Red Stripe has embodied the spirit, rhythm and pulse of Jamaica and its people.” Only now do I read by lamp light, that it was imported by Guinness USA in Stamford, CT. Jamaican beer, imported by an Irish brewing company with an office in Connecticut. But see, there is no irony in that. Not a slippin drop.

I honestly had no frigging idea why I was out on the deck tonight. In fact, I don’t know how I even got into this walk out level basement rental on 25 elevated acres over the Potomac. Oh, well it wasn’t my deck, it was that of one of the other wayward souls on Marl Lu ridge. I was just enjoying the weather from a venue 50 feet higher. Two divorces, four pregnancies, a half a dozen graduations, and 3 Red Stripes down the dusty road of “halfway their,” and I’m figuring, who in the hell owns this computer I’m typing own. Like a wriggley’s spearmint gum wrapper, or one of those aluminum beer tabs later, I’m trying to figure since when is Bill Gates solely the reason for my ability to put ridiculous fucking thoughts down into binary coding. And why are plastic beer bottles available to m? And I’m not talking about the now, hell if YOU are reading this, I’m making money – nothing ridiculous about that. Or I’m dead.

Hm, it’s just odd how it all comes together into a thousand pieces. The guy who invented number 2 pencil lead is mindlessly poking at his mashed potatoes with his chin resigned into the palm of his hand. What did I do wrong? Nobody carries a pencil anymore.

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Note to Self: Rose Petal Rejects

A squirrel clings to a tree trunk, teasing and taunting a large tiger striped cat slumbering on the path. I run by, but pirouette for a second glance. Assortments of humans in the lakeside plaza eat alfresco. The tree’s around Lake Anne undressed a couple weeks ago and right on time, but not on queue. See, Autumn weather has been stubborn and it’s December – the leaves should have paid attention to the weather before leaping. Perhaps this is the dawning of the fifth season – and what we might call Fall’s failure to launch.Our heart rates slow and some of us want to disappear into the woodlands for a spell – where we can write or paint or compose a masterpiece without the interruptions of so many pragmatic options. But a long spell turns out to be only a punctuated series of moments – minutes and hours where we create our masterpieces. I would love to just hide out for a month and write.

Rose Petal Rejects

Constrained by modesty, you resist too much fascination with your own observations…that is the impetus for the ionic bond of human nature – it is this gentle downplay of ego, that enables us to discover within another that which fascinates us about ourselves. Self love, projected outward holistically and purely toward others is just love. And in the musical cross-stitches of projected love, two chords will find harmony in the fabric of life.

You let go a myriad qualities in whatever your medium of choice…in numbers inversely proportional to the odds that each will meet and intertwine with those of another. Being ALL of you is far more important than being only those parts that mirror the important parts of another. People will fail to see you as a composite and will focus in on small arcs of light, and not the illumination. But soon, in this new found proximity, the truth of ALL of you is revealed. And the other admits, “I didn’t expect this when I saw your beacon in the dark…I didn’t sign up for ALL of you…” and they draw up their anchors and drift on…

You quietly relinquish to being alone (you’ve failed at doing this at least a hundred times). You realize that being alone is ideal to being an attentive witness to the marvels of nature and mankind and yet it brings this uncontrollable desire to share it with someone. In the desperation of sharing, you’ve missed many a sunsets moments, looking through the lens of a camera rather than your own eyes. You’re learning to record beauty in your mind and be happy with that. Yet as much as you fail to accept being alone, you also fail to find that someone with whom to share in the mutual aloneness of experiencing the magic. Okay, that’s confusing. Frustrating.

Your companions have little tolerance and patience for your proclivity to stop and spend 15 minutes staring silently at a lit up water fountain springing up from a lake at night or slide away into the soliloquy of sunset. But you love to capture it and spin it with belletristic prose and dose it back to them in writing…and some people are happy reading your accounts more than they are to join you in the appreciation.

The ad reads, “person seeking alter ego embodied in another.” Relationship objective: stop the writing and solitary art and just experience… would the discovery of your alter ego make each of you superfluous? Don’t think so. No, you think, strangely enough, that each of you would seek the gentle deviations within the other and aspire to understand those. This is the alter ego seeking to free itself, of itself. Hm, perhaps the ultimate romance may be the separation of the self from seeking itself – romance of this kind engages the discovery of new paths within the strikingly similar world of another.

A “recluse,” a shut in. This doesn’t prevent you from being discovered – in fact, it’s those perfect imperfections of being a recluse that seep through the cracks in the foundation to find another. An objective is to pay attention to detail…look for the glowing fissures within nature and mankind, for there awaits your companion. Serendipity is a fortune we create for ourselves…God leaves us with just enough latitude to discover miracles. But calls us in to be sure we give thanks and the most thankful find the most unexpected fortune.

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Coming Home

Interrupted life.
Having you, protects me from my own web.
Return to me, as you thaw,
Weathering away to smooth edges.

We are at the center, of this expansive disk,
Glimmering prism,
And the line we follow is just a circle
Contained at some distance from the edge.

Stop, wait for me,
let’s turn and head for the horizon of
Incorporated memories…
That’s what coming home to you is like.

Pale ashes accumulated behind the magnesium smoke,
of discarded memories bending in relinquishment,
Behind the afterglow of the spark,
as it burns down the shaft of time.

Of talus and terminus.
When the last ember sleeps, the stars are free at last
To provide all the light, engulfing the past
That is what coming home to you is like.

Traveling anywhere,
Is just a fancy of the earth below my feet.
Go back and be the mystery you were.
Where your chrome softens into pastel.

I’ve seen the reasons I miss you.
A broken moment collapses into eternity.
The world is peering over my shoulders and it makes me nervous.
As I trace a line along the coast from here to anywhere.

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I am

I may chase my losses around with a magnifying lens
Trying to figure out what went wrong.
I wonder what went right,
I’m sure it was nothing that I had anything to do with.
I thank god for the tenacity to create
It is not a process, it is the result.
People, get up and face the light
Feel the warmth, let yourself go and bless me, bless us
Who you are is who is truly loved, what is truth?
What is truth?
It is the highlights at the end of the suns ray before it touches the ocean.

I’d rather be lost in your heart then
Discovered in the sureness of wealth.

I need peace.

“You’ll never stop me,” he screamed as he ran into the night,
Faster than the darkness could take.
The silly envelope that cannot close down the acceleration of me toward you
Let me love you to the point of being unreasonable
Do not question.

In a tender yet torrid way
I’ve seen love creep like some shadow
Running from the sun
And overtaking each and every being.
Scanning eyes – moving over the world
They talked and I watched their eyes.
I’m supposed to be with you
As sure as I’m recognized by a stranger
Befriended by an acquaintance
And betrayed by a friend.
Betrothed by a soulmate.

I will be the one – the candle flame,
The world, the cabin walls.
Golden glow, shadowy glower
Scuffling feet over the wooden floor
At some chalet in a wanna be alp.

I’m a ….hm.

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The Fall

Discordant leaf chatter
argues over the path,
dispersed by a nettled wind
This is the Fall of my life.
Every breath shivered
and twirled on the air,
Fogging a glass piece
Through which I stare.
At lions at play
in the depths of my soul,
fierce and gentle
On ethereal fields.
Moon rays softened
on the curves of your hair.
now stars on their nightly procession
clatter like ignited leaves
Across my path,
where all will join the Fall.

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A godawful astronomy lesson

How many times have I looked up in the sky
To feel a tear roll back

I never saw you, but I knew you were there
Obscured by the fog of a bad day,
Engulfed by the sun
A sailors moon
Hearing nothing, never sounded so bad.
Darkness, giving up, are you there?
If so, leave me alone…
I’ll find you later, it’s better that way.

Falling star, beautiful as it burns up in the atmosphere,
maybe making it to earth, or just becoming ether.
That last falling light, disappeared, plummeting into the ocean of your soul.
And exactly how many stars fill your heart?
Was it gravity, Failure to fly that put them there?
Or a homecoming for the those that have never been home?
Arranged, placed gently in the heavens by the angels
Shuffling with the music of God’s solar winds

The waters rippled
Thrown silken blanket
Catching the stars
Reflecting in dew drops.

(Poem goes no where, I need an extension, I have anthrax—-)

Suspended in their infinite depth
The light reaches us lots of years after the flame ignites
And we smile and muse at these tardy dispatches.
Odd, that only long after we are gone from this world
Is the moment of our acknowledgement reciprocated,
reaching the void where the since-extinguished star once was.
So this comedy of mistimed love affair continues with the heavens
We, exchanging smiles with a face we know is gone from existence
The conundrum of returning to a sender who is no longer there.

And here by the fire
In this sandy pit
I listen to the waves run to the shore
Tattling tales from far out on the ocean
Who’s great arc bends the seawater over the distance
Around the horizon
Where whispers from distant shores are heard in our imagination
Lost at a sea,
The Transcontinental chasm of misshapen, asynchronous anecdotes.

And you and I are mired in this mud ball
A human conglomerate
Spinning around one star
while so many others beckon from beyond
And out of nowhere, I love you
Illuminates, the rise and fall and rise and fall
of the sun light
Like the end of an intermission.

The sun sets, as the encore begins
The audience of stars rise, clapping not loudly
Yet their applause flickers in the distance
As my light plummets into the western ocean of you soul
Yours rises majestic in the east
And for a brief moment,
The runner from the dusk sun is connected
To the glow of dawn
The gap lessens and we don smiles
Not for the fathomless distances of interstellar space
But for our closest star,
a mere 93 million miles
We are as close as close can be

Like the bespeckled heavens
We make patterns, we forget them in the day,
until the darkness comes

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