Songbird

What is the measure of mortality

dangling on the end of a string

that hangs in the wind

against the weight of the sky’s

great nothing?

Is it listening for the sound of a songbird

echoing

in the dark and ever so faint?

Like a streak of light,

elusive, stranded

a lock of hair

standing out to show its age

a white bird buoyant

against the expanse of mountains

no longer caged by time.

You can imagine

spirits assembled around

the sunset statues of capital,

wings illuminated,

the waning light

unfurled like a cloth

coiling through banyans,

canopied in song

rooted, acoustic

this world a vibration

descending below

the horizon

like the moon and its ritual glow

I mistook for windows

when obscured by buildings.

I went to open the curtains

of my eyes

to let the sky in

to let a songbird fly out

before vanishing into thin air.

Everything fades

like a dream into the consciously aware,

these luminaries that pass before us,

the moon, the waiting clouds

what can be measured

by the light that is left behind?

Lodge Fires and Painted Asphalt

Duality.

Is it necessary

for struggle and ease

to mirror each other

to understand

that the boulevard and the river

are the same silence

broken by the next transition?

The presence of a hawk

registers on another frequency,

in the bowers of an old oak

in clock towers juxtaposed

to the winding hours

standing silent witness

to our movements below.

Through the hanging clouds that cloak this parallel,

the passing rain massaged a message

into painted asphalt.

It means nothing beyond

the soft sounds it creates

in neon fallout.

There were intervals of stoplight reds

along the blinding yellow’s edge,

verdant greens awash in

jungle scenes

where the city ends

a forest begins

to breathe again,

its lush mist

lifts curtains of

what remains uncertain.

Streaks and silhouettes

in the shades back lit

and on the larger canvass

the stars were puncture points,

sparkling eyes in the blackest

disguise over an abyss

that like an oil slick

caused them to slip from their space,

freeing a moment’s spark,

skiing the slopes of dark

with a sway and subtle shift in the flow,

it is the same momentum

beneath heaving banks and drunken boats.

There are moments of clarity

inherent in memory,

the glimmer of pebbles

beneath the spontaneity.

There is a unison to the lights

in apartments at night,

as they flicker on

one by one,

modern lodge fires

for the compartmentalized.

In vertical cities where

the glass divides the wild,

creating a void,

there is no matter only vanity,

each side spying the other.

Down below in the fallout and the forgotten,

tents spring to summer squalor,

flushed downstream, the ruin careens

with wretched pursuit and muddy water.

In the calm’s a parallel stream

to navigate the obstacles

to assist in the unknowing,

to accept what we resist in the aging.

It is the smooth

in well worn shoes of leather,

a whitened driftwood

tossed astray by storms,

in all its variation

there’s grace in surrender.

This rumination,

this duality in nature,

of what comes apart and what is binding,

the subtle gestures of the river.

Beyond the sky and the illusion of time

is an infinite ocean receiving

a mere fraction of illumination,

in its mirror our own motion

that goes on and honors the moment,

as insignificant as it may seem.

Rebirth

In this time of rebirth,

each moment holds

the unbroken cord of illumination.

The simultaneous urge

to fasten words to transformation,

appreciating the night blooming

supple shape of each stream

destined to wander

through a thread of moonlight

that dreams commit

silken to waters

rippling beneath the sylvan leaves

and the animated wind

that heaves through the elders.

It brings the scent of passing showers

tucked into recesses of stone,

this vague and sudden flowering alone

is a dappled light

arrested suddenly,

yet in essence, is forgotten immediately

in the mind that would tarnish perfection

with the rust of future burden,

revealing nothing of the unseen

and subtly binding connection

that comes before a moment’s dissipation.

The Sea Receives

1.

The sea receives

the masquerade of the leaves

the changing glow

of poems in embryo

born on the wind

at season’s end,

the trees are in flames.

Memories remain

the fallen effigies,

reflected on surfaces

Illumination

writes the verses downstream,

where veins and waterways

relieve their light,

filling cracks in the horizon,

like dreams guiding creativity.

2.

At a break in the coral reef

the sea of sound is a symphony,

a chorus of tiny pebbles

being ground into sand.

Calligraphy to the deepest sensitivity

of knowing nothing can withstand

Change.

The passing of time follows the sun.

Various grades of light and expanse,

you cast a line and offer no resistance

to the wind breathing life into the waves

breaking chandeliers,

those crystalized fears

amplified in the solitude

of the beach and the shoreline.

3.

Where the sea meets the sky

there is light and shadow.

A fixed gaze

mixed with sun and spray

plays tricks with the mind,

while the tide calls Aphrodite inside.

Out beyond the break,

my love is buoyant in her own stride,

those moments I agonized

over dreams lost at sea,

of last words and no goodbye.

What has yet to return,

eventually drips back to me.

Weeping behind shades,

tongue tied to eternity,

the waves will answer

in essence what the mind creates

out of turbulence,

how all that has been given

in a moment

can be taken away.

Such is life, love, loss,

scattered between the darkness of thoughts

and the light of letting them go.

The sea receives us

like leaves and tiny pebbles,

the secret source of infinite peaks

as it courses through valleys

in a suspension of belief

that becomes a point of departure.

From the cliff soars an Iwa,

that thief of time,

spreading black wings

it’s shadow and the sea in rhyme

opens a portal.

More spirit than mortal,

we journey to the western shore to find

a leaping stone

where hand in hand over the dark water,

we’ll guide each other into the unknown.

The Motion Beneath Confinement

The Potential of Travel:

The potential of travel when confined to islands becomes mental.

The strength of creativity, equilateral

to the flight of frigate birds

and the horizon that completes the triangle.

The shadow casts a wide net knowing not where it will land,

somewhere equatorial,  over vast tracts of luminous sand.

Sometimes it’s necessary to scan an entire ocean

before we can temper the distortion.

Can the mind’s eye touch the spirit?

Will the interplay of a thousand images get near it?

There comes a surge of words but you barely hear it

in the motion of a distant storm

and the supple blackness that gives form to the correspondence.

 

The Drifting Leaves no Footprints:

Lodged like a shell in this primitive expanse

your dreams of drifting leave no footprints.

You await the tide,  the next great swell

to bring you back out again.

Through the hypnotic reverie of the surf

the sound of whitewash dissolves

into ancient squares.

Surreal and composed

it proceeds over stone

breathing its soundtrack into the motion

of when it comes and it goes.

It rises and recedes

beneath the toes of a statue,

this patron saint of lonely virtue,

companion to the emptiness that time would accrue

over centuries of our movements and the residual echoes

are the only things left that pass through.

 

Fragments of the Imagination:

Fragments of the imagination gathered like debris,

it’s a war for control within the limits of any city.

In the contents of journals

In the semblance of journeys,

fragments of experience are closely cropped,

before spilling to your feet like errant teardrops,

turning the well worn passages into cascading streams

and through these gleaming mirrors all will be revealed.

 

Outside of Awareness:

On the outskirts of the glass city,

far from the sheltered harbor,

near to the pathways outside of awareness

there is a mystical sequence of moments

at the crossroads of consequence,

a series of propositions to remind us

that we’re merely riders on the wind,

passengers on the bridge

spanning the moment

between the past and the future,

suspended, nebulous as a rumor

afloat in the ether,

the faintest of bells

ringing out from towers and hills

and the freedom that follows

the silhouette of sweeping swallows.

 

 

The Back Valley Exhales:

You’ll descend like a strand of rain

loosened from a cloud,

a radiant bird

the illuminated shroud

of a monk at work with the sacred word

describing the light before it’s dispersed.

The knoll is aglow in resplendent intervals of flame

from out of the shade of the back valley

it is framed by the ridges, to hold in the essential energy.

Until exhaling with the strongest of wind,

it is a phoenix conjured again.

There’s an attempt to harness it,

to give names to the shrill songs

but wayward is my own breath,

destined to unravel before long.

Looking back on your travel like a colorful thread

lifted like wildflowers from the riverbed

unencumbered from moors

the moments of ascent

reaching towards the unbroken sky

when there is no breath to give

the memories die.

 

The Motion Beneath Confinement:

There’s a highway that follows the coast

and around every bend

recollections call out like restless ghosts.

A temporary retreat from quarantine

the city is shuttered, encased in concrete.

Here you evaporate instantly

into mist and sea salt,

leaving stains we’re urgently altered

by the whims of the water.

Waves breaking against the foundations,

no windows remain.

All the best laid plans,

wind blown and sacrificed to the rain,

to all the old gods in nature.

We’ll advance, hand in hand with the unknown.

All structure going up like matchsticks,

like retirement homes in the lava zone.

Against the hardened darkness

there are streaks of light,

in contrast we find the alignment.

So we lose ourselves for a time

peeling back layers of confinement,

seeking motion for guidance

to see through the blindness

and the sickness that knows no limits.

 

 

The Courtyard Hibiscus

While under the effects of treatment,

it may have been a hallucination.

The sudden visitation of wind to the courtyard,

with just a hint of ocean breeze

can be a reprieve

from the prison of blinking machines.

A transfixed gaze now shifts

to the lone Hibiscus flower

that draws him in

while the others droop and nod for the hour.

From its corner it opened like a portal,

a chamber, delicate, tropical,

the possibility of return unfolding

from out of the drab rock walls

that in this heightened state seem to fall away.

Recalling the stark black and sharp edged

volcanic stacks of heiau on Oahu,

he suddenly smells the bouquet of fallen fruit,

or perhaps their decay,

overwhelming the noxious odor

of burnt cafeteria food.

The sweat on his brow is transformed

to the gentle touch of a passing rain.

The kaleidoscope in his brain

that distorts vision,

becomes a back valley rainbow’s incision

of color through the clouds.

Thoughts that hover in the depths,

now lift to the peaks

light as feathers

luminous as the wings of swallows

dancing like transparent slippers across the sky.

Thoughts that endure winter,

just hang in there, freedom’s  at the end of its thaw.

In the rumor of water and evening tide,

you’ll drift on a stranded moon

into the shadow of a dead volcano,

with the specter of diagnosis,

a reverberating echo.

All these arteries lead to the sea.

On the arc of a wave somewhere

an endless moment appeals for integration,

a loosened response more dreamlike

than narcotic rumination,

for death is not the end of illumination,

though I have watched light leaving the face

of a darkened sea,

slipping towards the threshold

of the horizon’s furthest journey.

Awash in the current and gone,

he is wheeled away into the new dawn

fading into the intercom.

A not so subtle intrusion of reality,

becomes a reminder of one’s mortality.

Yet a lasting image remains in full array

through the mental hallways,

this brilliant flower of transformation,

ushering in the recognition that all living things

must open, for it is but a brief window of time,

before it closes once again.

A Voice No Longer Attached

From the last breath come ripples.

A sad death by one’s own desperate choice,

does nothing to silence the voice

still reverberating in waves

through the collective consciousness.

Its infinite octaves

are still peeling sound from space,

re-entering on a spinning plate

to be absorbed through every fibre.

It contains your own painful journey

and the light from its galaxy can guide

the thoughts that do not run aground

but drift through your mind

like ghost ships of sound.

It softened the night,

only a footnote for its continuation

that could not be measured.

All the change contained in one voice,

The obscure mist-like breath

that covers the moon,

the bells ringing in the day.

With a scale that makes oceans out of rain,

you drew light over silken surfaces,

searching for something in vain

through depths we could never quite fathom.

A voice no longer attached,

like a shattered glass that knows no ceiling

but stealing shards from the sky,

a divine ballroom

collapsed in liquid edges,

suggesting it is more fluid than material.

It returns to the elemental,

the crackling of fire

the far off laughter in a trickster wind

disappearing around a bend.

There was a submission,

after grappling so long with misery,

You slipped to the deep end.

Strung out like clouds along the ridge line,

it was the peaks that pierce you.

The slight crack in a soaring falsetto,

an uninterrupted echo

in the forest, accomplice to what’s hidden in dense brush.

Like the sudden illumination of a spider’s web,

delicate as a vision,

it’s the sudden realization

that we were attached to something fleeting.

How quickly it shifts,

like the switch of the rails.

Metal on metal

fingers across chalk

scraping at the spine

with tingling waves until silenced,

until resigned to the rafters of empty halls.

Now stripped of all pretense,

this tree of its leaves,

with notes falling brilliantly

like flickers of flame

on the surfaces of streams.

It remains vagrant in the subconscious,

like the purpose of dreams,

until at last you align

and drop needles

into the waiting grooves of dark circles

spinning, illuminating

a craft that was always at the point of collapse.

 

In Memory of Chris Cornell

 

Through the Dark Rooms of Renewal

What will come to be is still murky.

Where shadows drown, light surfaces.

In this developing dream, when the blackout shades are drawn,

the aperture is opened a fraction

and you slowly permeate the room

as through a lava cave.

At a loss and trapped, perhaps an unsolved disappearance,

the camera focuses on the cracks and seams in the mystery,

the lens examines the unseen, blends it with words.

You slip in another, leaf the river, bearing witness

you clasp clouds and soften the dissonance,

like the glow of early morning burning the fog away.

This hesitant unlocking, eyes no longer opaque

but clear and mirroring the skies,

like a celebration, an unveiling

from under hazy disguise.

This light is like a glittering shell in someone’s memory,

in the plucking of the seaweed’s strands,

it’s the underwater melody.

Pulling at a weight that trembles from beneath,

as on a fishing line,

you hope that more than just luminous,

it is sturdy enough to pull that image,

abstract and misshapen, to the surface.

You mold it in dark rooms

or let it slip back into the gloom,

more like a coin than an anchor in the grey,

to the darkest cormorant shade of forgetting.

Try as you may to trawl these depths,

getting caught in the psychic nets

spread over surfaces,

what’s left but to venerate and transform with purpose?

What’s caught, what’s lost in a moment’s remembrance?

If we can gain access to the hidden resources,

to a cache of images and associations

expressing themselves

through illuminated corridors and mines,

we initiate the infinite renewal,

see change as transcendence

the evolving acceptance that shines.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This Voice, Swallowed by the Sky

This voice, this half-formed entity,

a fractured alchemy

between what is let go

and the unknown it would follow

one voice, one horizon, not amplified

but swallowed by the sky.

Akin to water, it seeks fissures,

filling cracks where it empties rivers.

Where the wind meets the waves

there is no division.

Where precision meets what you change

there’s another revision.

The moon was the only light

in a sky of blindness,

there’s no direction given.

A lost cause to lingering questions,

this voice, a puncture point in the abyss,

swims in bliss, dreams it is borderless,

like a star trailing off and incoherent,

it is moving where you can no longer hear it.

This breath, tiny and drowned out

in auditorium vastness

in the ceilings of night

that capsize all ambition,

disappearing like coins

in the hands of the magician.

A disembodied voice rippling to the far shore,

another turn in Charon’s oar

reveals the gleaming obols

from the moon’s folklore.

Joining the masquerade of clouds,

this breath hung between lines

as if on a highwire

that is pulled across the sky

to soak up what is left of the light,

this voice that illuminates the night.

Mexico, 10 Hours from Anywhere (a Montage)

In the middle of nowhere,

a dusty taco stand.

The hush of high desert chaparral,

the silhouette of a field hand

near where Cassady walked his last tie,

in the place where American cars go to die.

Rusted sculptures in vast lots,

trash rot borders,

pristine expanses

vultures descend on dead dog carcasses,

pastoral expressions of the lurid and strange.

Low range storm clouds stacked against San Miguel,

10 hours from anywhere, it rests on an epicenter of quartz.

 

On a tin roof in a thunderstorm.

Modern signal fires in the distance of night sky,

vertical bolts and slanting rain.

Faces watch from under the arcaded frame.

Features illuminated in the interval of flashes,

police cars and further lightning.

Mariachi smoking in corners

with no one to play for,

moments congeal

like wax sculptures in cathedral candles

sealed under statuary.

The pews speak of vacancy,

while walls hold all the reverence and sorrow.

 

Through the highlands you follow

the satchel gathering,

wheels awash over roads,

between these arroyos

weave witness to a primitive sacrament.

Ramshackle transport to a tiny miracle,

the bus, like a slow procession.

Is it a funeral or a wedding?

All is seen in this setting,

hills green from seasonal rain,

the kind that sweeps tiny towns away,

leaving makeshift alters in their wake

like scars on the fertile landscape

carved into the curves of what nature misshapes.

The voluptuous land lay in waiting

for an azul sky to transform to an ancient lake,

for a barren land to become fields for maize.

 

Another morning disoriented.

It could be anywhere but it is Mexico.

See the dilapidated bell tower in the distance,

smell the fumes, hear exuberant tunes

from persistent stereos,

Mexico, a cheap hotel where anything goes.

Roaming the debauched streets

undistinguished from the other gringoes.

Going from town to town,

restaurant to bar, cab to club

to rub shoulders with your illusions.

Cash in a money belt, looking for a good deal.

What goes on here?

In this black market, meat market of the surreal?

Mexico, from the cracks in the wall of a dingy room,

you see whatever you choose,

a muddy river, Our Lady of Guadalupe.

One last impression

before your senses regroup.

Turning home, your mind muddled

but content, that is enough for now.