Milky Way Cove

If all light is born out of darkness

and the land returns to the sea

carving new dimensions

restructuring the boundaries

and the demarcations of time

that starve dreams of their totality.

To search for significance

in emptiness,

embracing the sun,

the unseen fires beneath

salty layers where creativity is born,

where the ancestors and their manifestations

are afloat over a sense of purpose.

Pulling islands out of nothingness,

these dark shapes

dimly aware of climbing

from the shade to another plane,

no longer steering

but yielding to the way the material mingles

with the concealed.

May the wind be guide

daybreak the first breath

to begin again,

transitioning with the tides.

Another wave of the hands and the lowering of oars.

A bend at the waist was the horizon,

the edge of the desk

permeable and stretched

over this limbo, waiting for signs,

for the stars to allign.

Drifting towards the

milky way cove in

an explosion of foam,

immutable forms

scattered in ink

disintegrating into

the awareness

of the furthest reaches of

a palpable silence.

Beneath everything

in a vast stream of consciousness,

you seek direction through undulation,

solitary passages from

a recurring dream.

Upon this craft of words

built for navigation,

you make circles in coastal fog,

piercing like beacons

these poems of the disappearing dark to light.

Each year feeling further from land,

from all the goals and plans.

The emotional resonance from

the past reveals

love and pain as two sides of the same

cloud shadow and raised coral,

seen from above

perceived through that mirror,

where is the boundary

between the light and the sea?

The immovable star?

The guide pulling me further from sleep?

Emptied of what is and isn’t necessary,

a blank sheet daily

for words and becoming complete

before night sweeps in

to begin it all again.

These Wayward Notes Roamed

Peering over the edge of the half opened drawer,

you’re afforded a glimpse

through the void

of a former life

whose mind structures and stacked spines

were wayward notes roaming

undefined decades ago

through the oldest quarters of Paris.

What was left unfinished, the letters like lamplight

on the avenues and the pinched parallels of Marais.

What do they say of mystery?

Of being buried alive?

One fist seizes the light

seeking breath to break free of binds,

experience in hindsight

relegated to a page in time,

to squeezing sentences of quintessences,

dissolving these contour lines.

Mystery,  in the wake of transport

what can it take of the forgotten?

That which is no longer mentioned of moments

overwhelming the air of another postponement.

The bell’s chorus wakes the wasted ideal,

an incarnation through atonement

beneath the shell of inaction

reverberation towards something whole.

Mystery, that melancholy departure

pressed into the fibre of indecipherable spaces,

twilighted in notebooks

that grid and translate the travel,

blurring the towns in-between.

Still it remains pliant,

rounding out reason’s edges.

Along the border of the Seign river

it is under a saintly finger

as it dabs the transparent clouds

shot through with light

and by dusk spewing blood.

Mystery is the host

holy enough to reveal no wounds

from the dogmatic wars,

it makes it through without scars

without cracks in wonder

it is a stained window in a cathedral,

a marble current in the Parisien sky.

There’s a subtle door in the repetition of poems

unlocking the divine,

a cadence recognized in dreams and visions

sinking softly into a receptive mind.

Mystery, pulled from the void like a rebirth,

sets a glow over the changes,

encouraging new curves in the regiment

of the sensitive imbued with luminous purpose,

to illustrate and turn further pages.

 

 

Sudden Glimpses

With sudden glimpses

into a mist that is memory,

there’s a prose that is barely visible,

like an innuendo,

suggestive of something grounded.

Lost thoughts preoccupied and entangled

in narrow alleys turned to mud,

lines become stories

sprouting from rooster seed,

free to roam without fences

lodged for awhile in the present,

though it could be long ago

that progress passed you. Tiny farms forgotten and absent of windows,

full of holes for the banished souls

living without Soles.

Truth be told, life is hard.

The daily routine only eclipsed

by the beauty of perseverance.

Strong are bond and family,

the sense of village, identity.

Things that are forgotten

when words do not move me

to appreciate the details of my luxury.

Given everything but a sustained purpose.

Happy to travel to find glimpses.

Purpose, a strange concept

to those who have never journeyed

beyond their fields and flimsy walls

but share what they have

as if their kindness

is all of the world

they need to be aware of.

 Moving along the sodden passageways

through the half-light.

Andean rain make the cobbles wet,

everything smells of earth and mule shit.

With every step your boots round up echoes,

like the tiny clamor of Quechua pots,

earthen ovens smoking behind Inca walls.

He'll remember the faces under the brim of their hats,

the loss that lives in wrinkle lines,

in the doorways of suppertime,

dirty-faced kids clutch woven skirts.

Perhaps they mutter to each other in a strange tongue

“Where is he going?"

Slouching towards darkness and ruin.

Under the graves in the cliff,

past the crossroads to drift through the country night,

along the swollen shoulders of the river,

brown with rain run-off and blood memory,

you write down some sense of the past.

How passing through here could stir up

what had long ago settled.

He was out there a while

under the twilight eucalyptus,

listening to the children's singing

die into the distance of hills and pastureland,

where the animals sleep where they stand,

with a shadow that crawls up from under their feet

when the tiny lights of the village

vacate the square

but will not extinguish the insistent glare,

the collaboration that a restless mind

and inspiration seem to share.