Walking again in the familiar skin
Of my own isolation.
I commence lobbing Hail Marys over the fence
Against my own common sense.
I can’t be sure what crosses over, or
What falls to the floor.
I’ve tried to resist, but I subsist
On this persistence.
Maybe I was never meant to oppose this
Maybe this silence composes
Some clarity of purpose.
When the fog was lightly lifting,
And the sun came stretching through,
Like some ancient seed of hope
Breaking ground and blooming new,
The fresh life in my arms
Brought back forgotten days with you
I yearned to answer light with light,
To lift the mist atop your years
Returning kindness, even joy,
As the confident victor over fear
And in the silence of my words,
I reached to pull you near.
Three days past:
Remembrances of why we sever ties.
Three days past,
You sent the threats and lies
The creeping fog
Which has capsized us.
How can any sunrise break
Into the fog that takes you?
It isn’t fair of frame.
There must have been a day
You wiped drool from my face
And I’m not there to do the same.
It isn’t sound.
You must have stooped to ground
When I toddled down
Below the crowds.
It stands askew.
Before I ate solid foods,
I subsisted off you
And who leads you through?
It’s enough cost:
The years we’ve lost
After the bottles were tossed
And before your vigor exhausted.
It totters in the wind.
Inequalities sting like sin-
Yours or mine, I can’t defend-
But I see all that’s bent
And bowed low.
These small things
Do not dissolve
In Your Great Hands.
I’m commissioned to sing
All I’ve seen,
All I can understand
An open witness- this I am.
Sharing where I’ve been:
My mistakes, my sins,
My redemption
My emotion-
And there are a million facets to what I feel,
Every surface is real
And solid.
Because we’re giants, we see
Only two sides to the coin,
But the smaller we can be
How much more
Spreads like a galaxy
In every direction.
Oh, the worlds which in
I’ve dwelled, passing again
Through mist by mist
Faces erupting, faces dim
I must, I muster, I am
Fumbling graceless
On some twist of sin
And tasteless chaos
Where I’ve been reduced
Now incoherent echoes
Of meaningless words
Lost consonants
And low vows.
I wait for the rain
Which falls in me
To soak the solid
Am I insane?
Is insanity
The absence of hollow
Or the ability to see?
Can life possess
Or in truth be
An isolation tank?
I sank into sensory deprivation-
It sank back into me,
And still I’m tumbling
In the great descent.
An unexcavated strength,
Veins extracting their toll,
Forms in the deepest, darkest holes,
The abandoned mines of broken-down souls
Possessed by the weakest parts of the whole-
Strength that screams
With foamy lips never dry
At unseen ghosts in black skies,
Weeping for the strangers hobbling by,
Dreaming of consciousness as a closing eye-
Strength still, that looks,
And in looking, sees
All that is and should not be,
The kind of madness compelling, “Flee!”
And all perceived chants agreement-
And in the sweat, the sorrow, and the mud,
The hunger, the loss, the burn of chains,
In thirst, in isolation, in condemnation
The strength tarries-
The soul remains.
I’ve walked these streets
Since my bare childlike feet
Stumbled unknowingly
Over glass and stone
So desperately alone
In my blood and my bones
Within throngs of hardened faces.
I still remember these spaces,
Hungry and graceless,
Exploring, hoping to discover-
To unearth, to expose, or uncover
Some version of safe, or love, or
Home.
Home- that secret fantasy repeating
In all the orphans’ tiny beating
Hearts- ever keeping
The fire kindled, the native
But long forgotten language
Like the memory of a pledge
Not yet redeemed,
But always blooming unseen
In the hidden depths of dreams,
And hopes fallen as wilted petals,
Blackened by the cold metals
Of bustling souls and pedestals
And ashes.
I looked up but once, I know,
There in the window, a glow
Of candles, and smoldering souls
Sharing some spark of smile,
Of tender warmth, and I, beguiled,
Lost the hard miles,
The frostbite, the feet that bled,
The serpentine paths that led
Through frigid humanity- instead
I fell in love with all I saw through the glass
A world unknown, unsurpassed,
Beyond my grasp,
But the only thing I’ve ever seen.
Passing time
Like the proverbial buck,
Down in the mouth,
Down on my luck,
And checked out.
Passing time
Onto someone else’s shoulders,
Easier still than making the most
Of growing older,
And numbering my days.
Passing time
Like a passerby,
Wasting smiles, wasting miles,
Wasting the days until I die
Working so hard to pass the time
As though it exists in endless supply.
These nights, these dreams
Pull poetry
Kicking and screaming
From some instinctual,
Guttural place inside of me
Wherein I must hide
All the wonder and dread
Once interpreting the world
Spread out before my eyes
Of flesh.
I treat it as a child’s toy,
Faded, torn, missing pieces,
Carried past the age of reason
A thumb in the mouth,
Plumbing the depths,
And four fingers cemented around
Some leg of its being.
If I leave it wherever I go,
I come home to find it
Laying just so in my bed.
And so it is
What it will be-
I take the moment in stride,
But what it means,
What it changes in me,
Are collisions that can’t be denied.
I see the forked future-
Two twisted tunnels
Diverging into darkness,
And I must ride the beast of time
Into the unknown pummels
Of Decision & Destiny’s markets.
Who am I to choose? I’m a poor wayfarer-
And both tracks are wrong,
And both are right.
Perhaps if I saw farther, clearer,
But alas, my fear of the dark prolongs
The ever enveloping night.
viewingcamelot 