I know these thoughts that wander dark .
While traveling we coalesced briefly,
as strangers when neither offered shelter,
out beyond the city lights,lying in forests
almost too quiet to be pacified.
Back East, where the Atlantic is brewing storms,
darkened they would form from the subconscious,
until breaking over Montauk,
memory grows full of the sound
of wave grain scraping pebbles,
descending, with salty skin,
smooth as seal wash,
like shipwrecks to subterranean sand,
it is never solid ground on which we stand.
A weeping, for all of us sinking.
Thoughts going abruptly dark, drowning
like sailors with no one’s mourning to lift them,
only loosened garments , black and torn,
strewn across the sky like an aborted skin.
It takes the form of storm clouds and bellowing wind
to shake widow’s peaks and usher in
a spray of gulls, deranged and white,
with cries like a piercing reprise.
In the dunes a string of flowers endures,
while burning forests of evergreen
cast down the safety screen,
thrusting us once more into tenuous positioning.
The horror inherent in a charred landscape,
the specter of cancer haunting our mutated shapes,
we’re absorbing the next tragedy through the TV,
breathing deeply the Autumn scent of gunpowder and spotfire.
Out beyond the reflection of light on the surface of the sea,
gasoline ignites from underneath,
so you get to know the inverse as well,
for the source of words can transform wounds to beauty,
like streaks of light that adorn the sky,
a holiday to the eye though it temporarily blinds
into forgetting that we all must one day die.
The body cannot sustain this creativity.
At it’s peak, it used these techniques
to attempt immortality.
High upon the mountain, it gains traction on the stars.
Till far below it sings odes to the river that washes out to sea.
Down the road you migrate through the mirage in a distant bend,
calling to the future like an estranged friend,
shaking the hand of what comes to meet you,
once again putting aside the folly
of aimlessly grasping at the illusion of permanence
amidst the totality of an eventual end.
yakskinpocketnotes 