A calm water sits beneath the castovercast blanket,
moving but inaudible,
and my ears rang with a void they were virgin to.

Sweet pictures of long summer days floated to the earth beneath me.
Clips of the past yearnings seemed fulfilled,
all was content and hazy,
a world of kisses in the rain swept me away,
wonder,
whisper,
frost.

“Have I been here yet?”
“Have I slept into the future’s forget?”
“Have I grasped every grape I should and thrown away the raisins?”

A rush of water,
slow,
warm,
tugs me gently under,
and I the forgotten knapkin of slow wind float into slumber.
The volume of grateful assurances is whelming in my time,
that I have wandered home,
to a vague recollection of what it means to be,
and what to live without the ticking stop-clock.

For what time brings is stop,
not go,
and without it decay is lost.
I am found engulfed in what fortune I have foretold.
I am a wisp of vapors in your dream.

returned to see the beginning,

but not only to see,

I have run forward, ever forward, on the path I swore was linear, only to discover that I have traversed the circumference of a hidden dimension. I have been betrayed by dim headlights, they have led me nowhere.

So perhaps I have not come back, for I have never left. Now I acknowledge that I have traveled, miraculously, the event horizon’s perimeter. I must realize, too, that I can never escape.

It pulls me toward the center, never subsiding, never lamenting. I have a single source of comfort; there is a smokey image of a woman I seem to know, that I can barely see, but know is there somehow. She draws my thirst away from me.

Into the singularity.

Sometimes I feel like a rabbit in a cage, surrounded by remenants of other people’s bullshit shells, by forgotten paintchips that have weathered with a passing of meaning.

I am aware of my ongoing pride.

I feel as if my purpose here is greater than most others, that perhaps the existence I know is me-centric.

And I step into a new world,
my toes tingling, my chest buzzing,
fingertips sending me across ivory keys.

I am lost and limbless in an aroma of harmony.
I rise, higher, my eyes growing narrower,
my heart thudding galacticly in my throat,
wild blocks of shapes fit together and pass me by,
the black curtain to my back all-encompassing.

Then a silence, a forgotten peace to my soul, a stroke of remembering, then a touch of agony. I whirl in a gray fog of myself, changing dramatically, feeling all that is felt:

Dissonance, harmony, diminished, minor…
A love-long magic strikes me,
and I slowly sink off the stage in my ballet attire,
feeling all that is felt,

I spin slowly, gaining the audience’s hushed tears,

I kneel to the ground,
Drowned in a waterfall of romantic loss,

I throw my head back, shattering the black curtain, dramatically.

And I slump over the stage, summoning all the empathy of the world, and die.

Applause and heart-aware sobs and wails, shake the auditorium, celebrating the transcendence of a romantic heart.

II

The river now slow after the waterfall, I still on a log that floats only straight, I look around with virgin eyes, taking in green carpet and brown protrusion, my toes are still tingling.

A familiar, foreign, almost forgotten place settles inside me, where I see waves crashing into cliffs, silently, eerily, slowly.

I glide ontop the mirror until I have nearly stopped, the log seeming more buoyant as we slow.

I depart, bidding the log adieu.

I have been washed over and over by gentle waves of sun-sparkled water, time a stone sinking in a bottomless sea.
I am smooth, no surprises, no sharp edges to define me, I am uniform.
The jaggedness that once let me touch
is weathered away
slowly by droning dreams of submerged images,
distorted beneath ripples.
I look the same as my enemies and my friends, round and gray, dry and pale, in lieu of the washing of my origin.

Tell me what to feel.
Let me feel as they do.
I need to feel.

I have ascended, in a way, to join the billows of shade like me, of my own direction, of my own volition. I have been sold a system in which I can escape my form, and pretend to float above myself in foresight. I am young, fresh again, moist and senseless. But now I grow dark, pick up myself, and grind with the others. We grow electric in ourselves, and become loud with colossal motive.

Here I return, to the flat sands of my passive diagnosed condition. I am not my body or anything that I have thought; I am the walls around a person who I have learned to identify as myself: I am the condition; I am the virus. I am what has made me a hopeless hoper, a nomad in search of what cannot be found, I am the weight on a heart, I am the confusion of a mind, I am the trembling of a young hand, the butterfly that floats between stomachs, the salt that collects below eyes, the lilac that never swoons, that is never bought, that is never smelled. I wilt, the want, the need to be loved not fulfilled.

I watch as my friends in a strange white walled building, the world, mourn me.

I see my beloved, though she is unaware, mourn me. I see tears for me, I hear wails for me. I see coworkers gather around her to comfort.
I wander in and out of places, people seeing me but not. One woman sees me, but dismisses me as a figment of her head. My mother mourns, next to a body of water that seems out of place.

And slowly, I begin to become alive again, and I find my beloved. We embrace, longingly, and she fulfills my yearning with a kiss, unforced, according to her own decision.

I an instantly lost in a room of heart.

Even after I wake, I cannot leave the room of heart: It transcends my consciousness. I am in a room of heart, after a dream, after a feeling that has been touched ever so gently in a dream world. I yearn threefold now, tasting my reward, yet never having tasted it.

I know what it is to feel and have what I have never felt nor had.

I know longing bridges two realities.

Running from the kiln,

Smearing my expressions to suit the sale.

And the smiles of others become the fire downwind,

Keeping me aloof,

Pushing me in the direction of the clouds.

Green velvet slippers are beside my bed as I sleep,

Waiting for my soles.

But I cannot wake,

For my deformity, conformity, uniformity –

They do not fit into my slippers.

They are not my size.

I am the clay salesman.

I am the lost name,

Responding to all names,

Smudging the ink on the page beyond recognition.

And the clock passes me by on the freeway of being,

Holding me nameless,

Forcing me to buy the ideas of my nation.

A rubber hose swills my names,

Nurturing the barren seed once planted inside me.

But it will not grow,

For germination has long since failed.

I have neglected my own chance.

I am the lost name.

The moment walks into a room as another leaves. They wave to each other casually, like two people that have taken the same bus to work for years. The moment is alone as it closes the door behind it. It continues to walk in a straight like, its speed never fluctuating. Pictures on the walls of people talking, walking, waiting attract its attention. There are more pictures, of train tracks, of chicken eggs, of atoms, of planets, of galaxies, of the sun, of the ocean, of cigarettes dangling in mid air, of snow flakes, of rocks. The pictures cover the walls and floor and ceiling. The moment gazes at them as he passes by.

Nearing the centre of the room, it approaches a great light, a blinding light, and the moment squints and shields its eyes, but continues to step toward it. Once inside the source-less brilliance, the moment stops.

“I am.”

The words bring a smirk to the moment’s face. After a moment, it resumes its pace, stepping out of the centre of the room. Again it watches the pictures on the walls, but now they have a different theme: they are pictures of the moment, walking through the room.

The moment is amused briefly, by the paradox on the walls. Then it opens the door where moments ago it had waved to the moment before it. The moment looks back at the bright light, but it is gone, and instead it sees another moment entering the room. They wave to each other causally.

A quick breeze through the door,
The click of a knob,
And then,
Amid the dank pre-constructed notions,
The blue ink in straight lines on paper,
Outbursts of discontent,
Of whining children that want popcorn,
From the high-nosed whim of spoiled seeds,
They are distracted, retracted, attracted
To the track playing on black airwaves,
That sings,
“Satisfaction… Content… Pleasant… Comfort!”
And they howl along with it,
Wolves crying for the prey,
A prayer sent everywhere,
But a cost paid in blood.

II

The curtain opens slowly, a rift running down quickly as they retract from each other. But the heavy red velvet cloth shouts for a birth, a union or reunion between we and them. We are astonished, mouths gaping with surprise, for we expected the curtain to fall, then rise, or not to open at all. A play begins as the spot light fades in, an eerie balance between soft white light and sheer darkness waking our vision. But are we actors? Do we have parts to play? No, how can we be actors, for we have watched the curtains separate; The light is on stage, not on us. But the play does not start, for there are no men in costumes, no women dancing, no child singing. We grow uncomfortable, silence and darkness around us, hiding us from each other. The stage remains lit, and static, but we watch, for hours, as nothing ensues. Soon, the exit sign will ignite, and we will all leave this void, nothing gained.

III

I watched my son from the edge of the pool as he stood motionless, wet, shivering under dark summer clouds. He could not see me, and I watched as he stared out at the water before him. He looked tense, even frightened of what he might do. I wondered what could possibly be going through his head. I knew well his fear of diving, and it tore me to watch him try to overcome it. He stood, a tragic figure that was the joy of my life, and brought me sorrow.

I yearned to share with him the simplicity of his dilemma, to ease his fear with my knowledge, with my assurance, but I could not. I raged inside like roaring seas, ships sinking within me. If only he could know the utter relief that comes only after success, then he would commit, then he would place his trust in me, and in himself. But he just stood there, faithless, innocent, vulnerable, idle. I was pained by my son’s relentless fears of the world, and angered by their authority over him.

It continued to rain.

IV

A tree, budding yet
Bare,
Dead
Yet still struggling through the circles of nature,
And a figure there,
Sure but fearful,
Calm yet wired by betrayal,
Breaking fruit to feed a murder of crows,
Who draw blood from the open hands.

A face looks down
Through the web of branches,
For the fall is long,
And the ground beneath rigid.

Fingers gently stroke the branches of an ivy that grows alongside the tree,

Parts not forgotten,

Limbs reaching out into empty space,

If only to fill the air with their questions,

with their longing to search,

with their dream, of discovery.

Why don’t the leaves point inward?
Do they remember from whence they came?
They must, else they would look inward,
They would grow not away,
But everywhere.