Waiting for Reality

What had ended as a game
had began as a puzzle
with grand trappings
of sharp angles
soft fabrics
and applause.

The difference was the patience
involved in gift giving.
One can wait so very long for their gift
unless others have it.
Snow fell on every one of my birthdays.

My mother ran out of things to teach me
while the oven baked our secret recipe.
500 million grains of sand having
filled my body at that point
and so much silence left
on the beach we shared.

I made short friends.
Of number height and magnitude.
Things you can’t say
because your mouth
is stuck in a smile. I long for the cool
numbness of the corners
when I can relax.

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Spacetime

Fold
after being cleaned.
Stacks of rising color
then kneel at the
babbling brook of fabric.

Add one there
in the morning
near the eye,
a crease to mark
her –
to remind her.

Emerge as the product
of teaching children art
their crumpled ancestors
hiding finished products
curved, arced, and tucked
in at night.

A pocket.
The paper in the pocket.
The hand around the paper.
The man growing from the hand.
Everything bent to meet
their own end.
Waiting to be opened
to show us inside.

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Alchemy

The antiquated machine
seemed to choke
on the burden of change
caught in gravity.
The familiar sound
of the coin return
converting the aborted
long distance call
into profit.
I have been conditioned to salivate
at the ancient art
of turning lead into gold.

I grip the coin tightly
because the magicians
are trying to make it disappear.
They grin slightly
as they instruct me on all the ways
to keep my fearful fingers
around them.
I never let them go
and run home never allowing
the coins to leave my eyes.

But upon returning,
with my coins in hand,
everything else is gone.
My beer stained couch,
the empty fridge,
and every book or passage
I’ve written or read.
Everything is gone, from
every room, and everything
from inside my head.

The coins roll across the empty
floors of a slightly tilted apartment
and lodge themselves under the heater.

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On the History of Madness

That summer my beliefs
so consumed me
that
I created reality
rather than experience it.

Fury. Nothing significant.
A beating fist pounding
between heart and God.
Iambic confessions
first inward, then skyward.

My foot alternated the breaks
until warning lights
and break pads wore to nothing.
I drove that leprous scrap yard
into every summer night.

The shadow always chased
the car. My car couldn’t grasp
its impending death and so
worked harder the more it failed.
The rosary swayed with every hard start.

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It’s a Pain

It’s a pain.
Decidedly,
decisively
a pain.
Forced upon me
by my eyes,
No. What they see.
Yes. No still.
Pain isn’t in sight;
it isn’t hiding
in the light that folds
into darkness.
It is in the stomach,
that irritable sack.
Acidic
as it is hungry.
Except now it is pained.
Queasy.
The in is trying to come out
and that is the pain.
No, yet again.
Confusing causes
will not solve this pain.
Solve? It is not that kind of pain.
A kind pain.
A desired pain. Yes.
Indubitable. Like a tickle
that you shirk from
but then want in its
absence.
How you shirk when
I call it a pain,
yet no denial
follows, just insult.
Muscles grow in pain.
Head’s ache from
too much learning.
Yet the soul must grow.
The soul must learn.
Such is pain.
No. Yes?

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Storyteller’s Lament: Instead of The Poem I Almost Wrote

Stop lights on downtown main street,
over-turned farm equipment,
a gun, a tear in her eyes;
who hasn’t written about these?
The epitomes of everyday life
have bereft us of the mystery
of the meaning in naturally occurring
objects. Even when upsidedown.

So solid that I hold onto them
when the earth quakes.

What about the butterfly coaster
to protect her desk from spills,
the overturned sea shell to hold change
and remind her of the beach at work,
what of the hand sanitizer she applies
after shaking hands with folks? These symbols
are unused, and too particular to be meaningful.

So elusive is their power that I can do naught
but mention them in passing.

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The Speaking Space

We
Talk over dinner
over and over
like the river
or an ocean sound.
shhhhhh.

We
Missed out,
Nobody is around
under, under
the skin

We begin
to speak in spaces
sounding places
silent faces
beside and besides
ourselves.

Silence
is a collection
stolen. We find ways
to steal each other’s time
in the speaking space
within me, within
you.

Eating
only to be empty.
Something is lost
between us. Between us
Age clings like frost.
On and on
goes infinity.

Time
the agent of change
puts me above you
and now the spaces
without you
can’t speak.
They can’t speak
without you.

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The author writes to a girl

He is an author writing a poem
in a room where the image of a monitor
reflects off the pupils
containing the universe of the author.
In the poem, the author describes
such conditions in such a way
So that the reader can surmise
a message? Perhaps not so fast
Because so too does the author read
every word, from first to last,
and never does he recognize
the same word.

He sees his face in the digital mirror
A forlorn brow,
a set of limp fingers, bearers
of a message, to himself, to others?
The coffee goes cold from being overlooked
Various books, with permanently bent spines,
are never understood, only elucidated.

He is an author writing a poem
about nothing except,
an author writing a poem
and deciding whose ears he speaks to,
whose eyes he writes for,
whose lips will follow along his path.
He pictures the tiny fingers
of a young girl who should be studying math,
but instead, for only a second,
decides to linger,
Her digits gliding underneath each word of
her favorite poem, his poem.

One day she will find a better poem,
a classic, or a confessional,
but she will always owe him, the author,
for, in his own simple way, he brings
her into a world,
Where a mirror can look into a mirror,
and see infinity.
But not be afraid.

The author smiles at a perfectly white
Sheet of paper, having been dirtied
just so one girl, he’ll never know,
Can find some strange and perfect delight
In the malformed words that grow
From a malformed head,
with malformed eyes,
that gaze at the size
of his head in the haze
of a malformed mirror.

 “She’ll never know my name.”
said the author with some pride.
“But she’ll never be the same.”
Thus being said, he pushed the poem aside.

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