The Wind at the end

There was a wind

that begins with suspicion

and by the end

turns a whole valley black .

It passes through the realm of sleep

whispering through

the grasses of a past

that couldn’t be kept underneath.

Like a subtle stirring

in the sea before

the approaching

hurricane turns

the peace and sanctity

to waves of heat

breathing deeply through the trees.

Before there was fire there was fear

and it seared itself into consciousness,

it was insatiable, inescapable.

Dry tinder cracks the hills

and exposed cinder

scratched an inferno

from the billowing smoke

blackening the skies.

It reached the fear lines

on the edges of community,

a vestige of safety

if there was only time.

This wind that sets the blaze,

that uncaged the phoenix

to fly unobstructed

torching everything in its wake.

Tongues of fire

speak through a riot of color,

exploding from under

the once coastal quiet

that becomes unnaturally vacant.

In a swarth of red dirt and anger

that grasps and spreads like a fever,

confusion reigned

and in the calamity

comes the realization that all is gone

as if wiped from memory.

We’re caught in cycles

of endless media scrutiny,

a cacophony of lies where

the opportunistic, disguised as relief,

know the future is malleable and undefined.

Once the dust settles

and the millions of eyes

now fixed on the wildfire

inevitably look away,

the pressure is applied.

2.

I’m wrested awake

as the wind grows in intensity.

The kakea of Manoa,

born out of craters,

let loose from fissures

and overflowing borders.

It runs through the chimes

making curtains into tides,

great gusts of violence

pressed against the silence

prying all sound not held in place.

The scattering of leaves joins

the vagrant scraping of pavement.

Like a deranged rainbow

that flashed across the valley,

this arc diving into the sea,

only to come back around relentlessly.

I wasn’t aware

that this shared wind between islands

carried death on its other end.

Its howling a hallmark

of the recent insomnia,

where the jarring of sirens

brought luminous reflections

to the kitchen windows

like a colorful portal

into the collective pain,

a historic pattern of

old wounds opening

a sleepless suspicion

that it will take everything in the end.

This wind is no longer

in the hands of those

who were born here,

who know the scent as

it runs through the grasses

like an incense in the sacred places.

Now there is only mourning

and burnt out endings,

everything swept into the aftermath

of questionable decisions.

Is there disaster capital

in the passage of wind that

erases everything ?

From where will come the revision?

The old banyan, deeply rooted ,

smolders in ash at its base,

yet still shows glimmers of life,

still holds tightly a community’s dreams.

In the deep reaches of its branches,

in the gentle sway

and rhythmic dances

with the trades the

leaves are no longer blackened

you imagine

once the waking nightmare ends

no longer shriveled by death

and the fate of this place

can be determined again by

those within the reach

of her familiar breath.

It is this wind

that will pick everything up again.

Dusk, A Farewell

At dusk we bid farewell.

Restlessly stirring the days inside sounds,

making deranged concoctions in the clouds.

In subterranean wells, sirens are drowned by rain,

wind is amplified in the brain, sailing through sleepless nights.

Expelled into the horse latitudes of idle hours,

if only they could be painted like brilliant flowers,

a motley of colors to distinguish golden horizons

from the sea at large.

A farewell to your craft, adrift in ideas.

Eyes of red navigation,

the body a black expanse, to submerge, trawling deeply

for the coins of sunken ships and elusive silver fish.

Beneath these surfaces

the mystical coincidences are accumulated in song.

You’ve dreamt underbelly,

words radiating starboard from the hull.

From the bridge a farewell.

A hawk leaves the inlet

with talons clutching the metallic scales of an alewife.

With a glint in the sun, the imprint is seared into memory,

like a piercing cry

we’ll recall later from a different frequency.

The antennae of rooftops witness

many farewells of undetermined suffering,

almost human, the sound of the sun falling.

A bird of unknown origin,

leaving no wake as it plunges into the ocean.

The trajectory of its body, a descending shade,

with each moment the shadow increases

further into the loneliness of De Chirico courtyards.

 

Dusk, a farewell.  The world spinning out of control.

Grinding to dust all the ambition that burned cities bright,

pressed into a daily toll, a number that will always grow.

It was through creativity that we learned of community.

These gatherings are not forgotten,

nor can they be swept into isolated piles

of suspicious eyes with no smiles.

Vulnerable, the tiny flames with no kindling.

Blow on the ends of our hope

before extinguished candles become smoke

and the landscape grows cold with sorrow.

A farewell to plans, time lapsed lives

that no longer strive but are slowed, compartmentalized.

Twilight is no longer spent applauding fireworks.

The future is no longer a bright sparkler

reflected in everyone’s eyes.

The gaze has been averted to a decapitated flower

that appears so much smaller as it sits on the water

before  being taken under.

A farewell, the illusion of distance in beacon light.

A sweeping seascape of change with no compass,

the coming of an age born out of chaos without counsel,

save all those books and albums.

We’ll witness the weight of industry overwhelming humanity.

In shrinking spaces the imbalance is amplified,

navigating the collapse, like one of the damned,

with sanitized hands and covered faces,

peering into a void with no features,

like empty theaters.

It’s a tragic scene, is there any room left for heroism?

A silver lining in defeat?

Intrigue for imagined patrons

watching from empty seats?

Run the credits, words engraved in stone.

Save the last gasp for the projector,

exhausting its last reel of film alone.

 

Dusk, a farewell. Trains departing depots.

Wheels screetch, no one speaks,

voices swallowed in tunnels of what’s to come.

No parting kisses from the distance

or faces stuck to windows

like in old black and white photos,

waving handkerchiefs of goodbye.

The darkening of eyes adjust

to the damp unfamiliarity

we’re meant to breathe in.

Breathe again, the end comes to everything.

Yet, fear of the eventual end

is inherent in the fear that this may never end.

Is there light at the end of this tunnel?

Will the sun rise tomorrow over the ocean?

Will rain fill rivers to maneuver these bends

without our mouths consuming the land?

Without these thoughts can the bird songs

still hold sway in the chaos that canopies them?

Will they find the sky ceilingless,

or a desperate color

in the flutter of wings?

Will they glide on the wind

and the infinite it brings?

Time will tell, for now farewell.

Thief in the Night

Inspiration comes to the thief in the night,

sneaking slow, dripping down the stairs.

When he no longer sleeps but stares

to the blank spaces where no moon feeds light

the mind receives,

domed and amplified,

canopies now quiet.

No bird enlivened bowers

in these lonely hours

when everything is still,

awaiting the next interval of heavy showers.

A tiny light hangs over the desk of the writer,

restless on elbows

words parched and thoughts that require

a personal drought

to become another bout

with its ticking clock counting down

in pendulous distraction,

hiding substance within a capricious attraction.

Lucidity, before the birthright resents me

for a wavering fascination,

a minute turns to an eternity,

searching out the mundane for that elusive quality.

An El Dorado somewhere in this jungle

tempting explorers to go half mad and in circles

through territory oppressed by heavy shadow.

Here, even an enlightened thought can be sentenced

to the darkest hole without a candle to offer repentance.

Through the shades and the cracks,

where the imagination receives the information it lacks

to keep the mind gathering the early hour patter

in trees that form a clearing,

renewing the ideas that scatter

like leaves in the breeze,

scraping the sheath

so that the gleam can emerge slowly,

deciphering the real from the concrete

where nothing is absorbed

of the rain’s rhythmic drumbeat.

It blows towards me suddenly,

with the orphaned scent of forest moss

something that is shared by all those who are lost.

The mountains, garbed and veiled

crisscross the valley

to ensnare, momentarily,

all the stolen bounty the sea receives

and in that liminal time I am lulled to sleep,

albeit briefly, nodding off, a welcome reprieve,

for the words sometimes come through in dreams,

transcribed from some other hand,

that means to become my own,

grasping at inner sources,

I’m tossed another bone.

 

(Image by Dominick Takis Sr. Acrylic, Oil, Cutout Media, Organic Matter on and behind MRI Film)

http://dominicktakis.com/

 

 

A Message. A Mirage.

We met at the crossroads,

a desert wayside

windswept and in-between

nondescript mountains

marred by cold fronts

leaving marks on the high peaks

just to disintegrate

into the fallacy of black heat.

Hugging your festival fabric,

no more than a discarded heap,

it was singed with music.

Anticipating travel,

you pull out maps in motels

liminal cells to author the unlimited

to commence from nowhere towns

halting the empty space with solitary stoplights.

A brief respite against the all-encompassing night

descending in shadows across our fields of sight.

Soon there will be galaxies over our shoulders,

stars streaming into Cretaceous insects

feeding on the scraps of confinement we lay before them.

The next day the highway was a straight line

for hundreds of miles of mesas and heat mirages

spray painting the desert with abandoned messages,

searching for the remains of an icon,

we come across a cap over the blaze

in the place his spirit went out.

Blackened initials scrawled in stone,

forever scorched in memory.

Dead flowers left in this valley of dry bone,

blues that do not bloom on their own

but bear fruit from within you,

a lonesome tune

that by night floats to the moon

bejeweled in cloud fabric.

Pens become the only friends

that will populate this thoughtful insomnia.

Pulling words from this drawer

the hour would not keep confined

to its dusty enclosure.

Eyes follow the asphalt blur,

writing you choose to destroy by re-writing,

words wet and regenerative in this parched land,

soon tendril out of the sand,

harvested as art,

carefully withdrawn

from the prickly confines of its skin.

Jagged art, shattered from within.

Sharp fragments of explanation

others may gaze into

and find their own skewed reflections.

 

Loose Bindings

At the end of the line

the last bus dies hard into the distance.

Unkempt pencil shaded features

obscured by smoke,

ushered in by taillights that

soon broke an impenetrable border

of silence in the cricket’s song.

Before you the way is paved,

languid and long,

through a tunnel of trees.

Perspectives like these never seem to end.

Drawn around an infamous horseshoe bend,

blacker than black would render,

so you surrender within.

What preserves these yarns?

Fragile webs spun years before,

now barely glistening.

Left as landmarks

and if you were listening

to the warnings, you’d find them

camoflaged to the texture of a whisper,

cathedraled in a prayer of mourning,

like a memento or an offering

to those that are suspended under the invasive ceiling

of your mind’s canopy.

Darkness, when the mind is hung up in the penultimate hour.

You linger there alone by lamplight,

in an exile’s outpost,

the writer makes his choice of word

akin to a wolf whose voice unheard

calls to an invisible host.

It’s the last grip before you nod off,

the final drip of moonlight

lost in the reams

condemned to the pages

drowning in someone else’s dreams.

Loose are these bindings,

like the last gasp of night,

horrible you’re finding,

when Dawn is struggling into sight.

Time covers all trace

in the deepening enigma of this place.

With a momentous wrestling with roots

you’ve had these moments of disappearance,

adhering to solitude,

where nothing is completed.

Belief is loose ground under the obscured ridgeline.

The half-formed picture of the Pali,

where words won’t go easily

to describe its beauty,

trace trail wounds in a slow procession.

The magma of your impression

will manipulate the land,

that trembles where you stand

before ultimately going over.

 

If Only in Words

Where to go when the words hold no refuge?

What will be sent to take their place?

Dedicated to the transient forms

that shape the time elapsing.

The ink runs to get ahead of itself,

passing outside of bus windows,

leaving you like a widow holding mementos,

lingering inanimate, like dreams

but bound by desire,

put out like smoldering ash.

It glows for a time

before it goes cold as a concrete floor.

The concrete was no longer necessary,

now awash with shadows of selves and no more.

All these shades in the life of a candle,

its gradual disintegration,

eventual integration with the whole,

again it goes dark

until I receive another spark of insight.

Pushed to the edge of here or there,

into the tight chair of words.

All the solitude I can bear,

all the encouragement I will hear

goes unspoken in silent symphony.

This impulse to record resumes eternally,

with the curves of your words reflected in mirrors.

The eyes that read them growing wider,

distorted, out of proportion,

blurring into the next page.

Keep turning

this toiled land.

Something to plant seeds in,

until it has grown deformed,

like a kicked in pumpkin

unrecognizable to itself

and from where it began,

invoking a response to begin again,

from where it flaunts a collective pain.

The mind holds no silence.

Hunched over paper,

eyes dropping from frustration,

thoughts like a vapor.

I’m weary and unaware

of day or night,

all is amorphous and white

as this barely caressed skin

no longer draped with letters,

like walls, all is stone-still.

Even the crickets behind it are silent.

The palms barely sway,

only to clutch at desperate pens,

here for hours and then days,
perhaps eternity is a passenger

in a sedentary vehicle.

Longing for Lozzi’s Monte Carlo

or trains that pierce Sicily,

anything that will not adhere

to this empty time-table,

this sibling to despair,

Cain slaying Abel.

Does the line still survive?

The pen no longer moves,

with a passing wind.

It used to leave fragments,

the charred remains of flames,

it was there and unnamed,

the unseen taking me in,

pushing to reveal something beyond expectation,

 if only in words,

taking curves,

running on their own tracks

with the sound of needles that scratch

a finished record,

it seems there are no more revolutions.

With Nightly Emergence

Words wander in sync with churchbells in Bologna.

Under the shadow of its narrows,

light filters through breaks in the buildings,

through tables populated by candlelight,

conversations, from unknown lips

would converge with nightly emergence.

Words, dream initiated thoughtful insomnia,

turn corners in the narrow quarters,

casting lamplight on the rain-wet familiarity

of past lives and old journals.

I fish your form out of the moving masses

that make up the internal rhythm of the city.

The main drag, the ongoing strip

shows one curve at a time.

Each choice, each rhyme,

cast in fascination’s design,

you familiarize and then rationalize

that you have claimed some of it as your own.

Heading for the exits,

through the archways,

into the stream of intermingling strangers,

words, delicately dance

on transient departures towards

shuttered windows in the glittering night.

We live out these sentences.

Share this common tension.

The outline of rooms,

the lack of attention.

Silence, like auditory acid,

eats straight to but not through

the mood chains I succumbed to.

The darkest shades from the smallest brush strokes

cast shadows as if caught in the gaze

of a probing searchlight.

The most distorted images regurgitated,

the words you write

projected on blank walls,

larger than the letters would allow.

Another pendulous moment

perched over the present,

punctuated by suspicious sidelong glances,

distracted and separated

by the thick sheen of magazines.

On this overlapping stitch

we’ve weaved this one life.

I know better

than to hope for brighter fabrics of weather.

Whether or not we’re together,

I look for beacons in the future’s fog,

for exclamations in the tired log

of plateaued feelings.

Mounting indifference, climbing to the ceiling,

gilded, guided by light

glimmering off of some discarded metal fender

from a vehicle that brought us closer

to whatever it was we were never

going to be able to hold on to.