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?

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.

Confessions Without Borders

Midnight descends in a common darkness

of heavy emptiness.

The building’s a vacant gaze,

skull sockets for a windowless place

with no retention.

Thoughts simply pass through

this dimension into forgetting.

Soon silence transforms itself

into a multitude of birds

begetting the sun.

They call out in unison,

beak by beak

octave by octave,

voices rise from the grave

to the swaying nave

of a great cathedral.

They begin to break up the night,

to cave in that ceiling of dreaming,

revealing we’re alive for another day.

 

Pull this moment over you,

like a cap that casts shade

on the glare of all other

goals to pursue

perpetual platforms,

to pass through

circles receding

into a sanctuary of shadows.

The cool safety of shade baits

half-opened shutters of whispers,

to your closest friends

you’re a good listener.

The stillness you entertain

for scraps of thought,

 a fresh catch thrown

from languid skiffs in the sun.

A feeling of mist and abandon.

Voices hanging

like an aged and translucent skin.

Truths and prejudices

perhaps are no consolation

for a questionable worth

to wrap ourselves in.

Where does the inside end

and the outside begin?

The capacity to determine

the dimensions of an ancient foundation.

There are no borders only confessions

laying in ruin.

The boundaries are absorbed

into the coals of a dying fire.

Surface shreds of lives left forgotten,

mandala funnel void of countless impressions,

sudden shifts in the symmetrical spin,

the rhythms of experience chiming in,

resplendent, golden

moments like companions fading away

until new ones are born

out of the foam and clay.

Warmed by the building flames

of what became boundless

flashes of color

unearthed on a beach of lambent shades.

They’ll coalesce on edges

where all the driftwood merge

to go up again.

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.