Watch the clockwork children play,
two pupiled place holder eyes
long for the path of the freeway
that their forefathers criticized.
At night, they sleep, without fear
of snakes and monsters under the bed.
Mom’s comforting prayer
“You can’t die if you’re already dead.”
Bravery is only a virtue if you have something to lose
but all that can be lost is the nothing they are
brains in computers, programmed to choose
between options too real and too far.
They are the new Achilles, born in the Styx,
walking zombies that death cannot fix.
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The unfurling sky known only as ‘Elle’ hung over the world of things briefly as her once vertical body had become a horizontal mirror to their reality. The hanging white sky had patch work clouds made of shadows mocking the objects around the room on her back. The distant and unknown mockeries of real things grew bigger and in so doing, marked the acceleration of a woman caught in gravity plummeting onto the world of things.
The desk was alive with passion and heat. What objects were lucky enough to roll of the edge could only imagine the reality of those left under the soft flesh of the fallen sky. The lamp tipped, landing on its switch, and turning on with a flash of brilliance. Meanwhile, the only thing standing on the desk was the globe who supported an upside down atlas on its brass top. The pages marked where some forgotten traveler once peered allowing the waters of the Mediterranean to become alive to his eyes, before turning them over and making them the sky atop the globe, whose base now found itself intimately close with the nape of the young woman’s neck.
Beneath a rolling white sky the spines of several books cracked. Sweat caused thin pages to stick to flesh – Shakespeare’s Tempest clinging to the posterior of the whispered ‘Elle’. Her head gently forced up by a thick anthology of Plato’s complete works. Her back arching over volumes of assorted poetry. The rest of her bed was too dense to be described here. The still erect bronze sun stood over her, reaching his fingers down to pluck a single page from a book, pinned while escaping, just out of reach of her left bosom.
He read aloud: “I have awakened from the death of absence, my Elle! my spirit arises, strengthened, as from sleep”. His other hand ran over soft stomach and rested on her hip. It was now, as she hanged limply over the antique desk like Dido, that she gained the strength of Antaeus. The leviathan’s again awoke and met the man’s eyes.
She whispered: “A sin so sweet, I think I shall indulge twice”. The two lay together. A day had passed, and now a night. The room had only one inhabitant again. On the second day the morning appeared in the window of the old study and the woman was alone. As if it had all been a dream, but it had not. She turned the paper in her hand over, and read aloud: “‘Silly! what is parting?’ she whispered mysteriously, with the smile of an immortal”. She allowed the paper to float to the ground. “Parting is such sweet sorrow.”
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Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale. In…
From underneath the horizon a hand latches onto the nape of her neck. Her breathing is cut short by the emergence of another body. The life giving in and out, the gentle airy wind, now filters through another mouth. Again silence lays heavily on the world of things below the spectacle. What splendor, what sorcery. From one body arises another as if called from within her.
She closes her eyes, and the world-gorgers disappear as if turned inward. They hide under the surface of eyelids and lashes. Who knows what other worlds they feast on. The hand around her neck slips off, allowing her to emerge over the leveled desk. Her once large proportions suddenly becoming titanic. Rising like a mighty tree whose canopy cannot be seen. Her once intimate details are no longer visible as endless curves flow toward the heavens.
The ivory landscape is uninterruptedly smooth save for a small divot whereupon hung a metal loop still within reach of the desktop world. The gemmed whole hung like the moon, a dark hole in a white sky which appeared to suck in the viewer as if by gravity or some other natural force. Yet its contents where obscure, forcing the untrained eye to dart about the fleshy horizon out of shame.
Her sunrise fingertips run along the desk, writing history in the dust. A single wave ending at a small ornate bookmark that bisects the plot of a hefty Russian novel, one typical to the snowy tundra – a handful of lovers, tormented by their own minds, and subject to a fate written out as history by the narrator. The bookmark would never know the end, probably for the better, it had been abandoned by the reader who got bored of reading about a hero confined to his couch.
Her right hand was not so worried about the world of things, it grasped for a companion still hidden from sight. She motioned, and a new horizon emerged. The landscape was rocky and tough. Compared to her, its ground seemed muddy, red, and infertile; but strong. He too had eyes – dark endless eyes that cast shadows over the world. They were deep like calculation. They moved back and forth with purpose and determination, leaving footprints wherever they trod. They were the eyes of naming.
He was a striding colossus beset on the world. He towered even over her as the night sky towers over the setting sun. His worked soil stretched a hand and covered the jeweled moon. The other works with the strands of hair that taunt the mighty leviathans by hanging out of reach. She turns to embrace him, separating the sky into two halves, as if a painter had created dusk by separating the best of night and day then resetting them next to each other.
He whispers “Elle” and for the first time, brings name into the world of things.
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In the still dark universe a single bass line rhythm emerges – a metronome keeping time without light – a stable beat from which existence draws its life without the presence of beings, a primal heart beat. What little light that exists is spun from the reflection of a red-dwarf silk worm billions of miles away, and it clings to the side of a crystal decanter whose amber contents puff concentric rings in tune to the primal drum beat.
Across the room, barely lit by the moon’s webbed light, the contents of a polished cherry wood desk jump slightly up and down. A half eaten apple gains life and rolls casually off the side of the desk. It joins a discarded pencil, made dull by endless notations which now scattered half-opened books. Having long been forgotten they remained half open impregnated with the cryptic half-hieroglyphs on the desk. They undoubtedly echoed some thought that was sparked in the mind, quickly jotted down; to be returned to after the smoke was completed.
Hovering over the slowly decomposing library of unfinished works a globe hangs like the moon. Its half lit Western Hemisphere is a world too far away for the works to ever reach. Darkness cuts from the Black Sea to the Red carving Asia in twain. What was hidden under the endless black was even less known to the abandoned works than the face that showed to them. Such was the condition of the room before that night, when the heart beat began.
The black, still, void waters had been infused with life because of the beat. Its measure gave it all a history, stability, tangibility. Before light even permeated the blinds, sound moved everything into rhythm, into being. Yet, once initiated, it had to grow. The once slow and methodical beat increased to a powerful writhing seizure – the birth pangs of a universe. Accompanying them was the rise of a violent quake that shook at increasing intensity. On the bookshelf the crystal palace was so shaken that it fell from its heights and shattered on the Persian rug – spilling its fine amber brandy.
“Oh God.” Through the silenced awe of inanimate objects a voice arises. It has a softness to it as it unfurls over the room. It is a whisper, a worried yet somehow preoccupied whisper. Immediately emotion is infused to a lifeless room. The voice hovers over the dark stillness like a face as soft as the voice’s tone. Another noise arises shhhh as if it pleaded with the first – urgent yet gentle like the wind.
Suddenly, without concern for the awe stricken inhabitants, a new thing emerged – life. A single porcelain hand with five pristine digits rise like the sun over the cherry wood desk. The finger tips spread a red painted dawn as the soft white skin gathered light previously invisible as its garment. Everything was about to change; it moved.
As quickly as the sun had risen it fell with an open palm. Life had arrived with a bang and trailing from it raised more life. In the wake of the sun was a pearl column that showed signs of tension. Inside life the gears of machinery coiled and twisted as if holding the weight of the world. Then came the origin of the voice being pulled up from under the desk by the fallen sun.
From behind cascading brown hair, two eyes pierce the darkness. Whatever it was, it saw. With the turn of her eyes she could swallow the entire desk. Two churning blue leviathans, both frightening yet alluring, sank into her face, as they concentrated on the darkness below the desk – as if calling something from the deep…
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I have an old sandbox
in my yard
Sometimes I sit, and wonder
how much my hand
can hold, it’s hard to imagine.
It is the ashes of a long dead man
The once living measures of an hourglass
The world from the distance of a poet’s eye
A painting brushed on my backyard.
It is countless and endless and flowing
though it is finite and measurable.
I sit and remember how I used to play
how I used to do something
In this sandbox
other than sit and marvel at how
there is someone somewhere who knows
how much sand is in my hand
and from whence it came.
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No one wants to listen anymore
the ear is the symbol of servitude.
Speech is freedom,
The mouth is the pinnacle of power.
Silence is humility, a rejection of information
but still listening is irrelevant
for he who wishes to eat the fresh fruit of knowledge
will not be sated by the weeds of opinion.
In the garden of tar and steel
there is a race of people
who live in a mile tall mirror
over grown with the sweetest smelling
Anagallis arvensis.
The two inside, the final pair in all the world
Have safe sex all day and smell the flowers
(they think they are roses).
Neither recall what civilization is,
and wear only history as virtue.
Then as smoldering dusk o’retakes the sky
They watch the sun in the mirrored sides
of the mile-tall uncoiled snake
Which had long devoured them.
Such a place the devil wouldn’t even call hell
if such a man, or such a place could exist,
His forked tongue would rather curse its human name
A curse which echoes from the heavens the same:
“Damn the son of Eve, who in his haste to disbelieve,
has sentenced himself twice, to an earthly paradise.”
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In the sky a new moon arises
Above the darkness it despises
Shinning light on what shadows take
Leaving silent answers in its wake
And all other sorts of surprises.
Gently tip toe down a moonlit pathway
Where darkness was now shadows lay
Rearing their ugly head from off the floor,
Staring at the moon which they adore
They hope it never goes away.
Ephemeral ghosts, bound to the pathway
Taking the shape of those who stay,
Jealously spy what moon light makes
Images dancing on the surface of lakes
While here on pavement the shadows lay.
Each shadow attached to the toe
Of a stranger it does not know
Sufferers of the moons hypnosis
Dying a determined symbiosis
Basking in the moon’s glow.
Orb of heaven floats in the sky
Graces all as it passes by
But at its tale the sun arises
Bringing a new day of surprises.
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When 2 words kiss
They lose themselves
So we can imagine this
Third thing
Rising like a phoenix
Or a sapling
Only to be dethroned
By a third word and a new thing
This is our grace
To make silence speak
Echoing over the surface
To create something that
Isn’t there
In union they destroy time and space
To hold eternal bliss
Is to read between the lies
And bathe in the light that refines
How much we are like this
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Of all the words that I have ever read
A single pair has taught me all I know.
Appearing only once, as a brailled set
that showed my fingers where they need to go.
Their meaning lingers, hidden in my hand
Mending the creation written on my palms
An exhale lends a warm demand;
her skin as ancient as the psalms.
The message repeats with each rise and fall.
She feels me reading her in the dark.
She meets me when her breathing stalls,
Her fingers following in an arc.
That night I found the truth in our bed
“I am, I am, I am” was all it said.
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Pride, not hate, was why the angels fell
Below the humans of the earth
The tower they build will be their cell.
The dead bodies are too useful to sell
Bone and flesh fuel the tower’s rebirth.
Pride, not hate, was why the angels fell.
The devil isn’t as far away as hell
his poetic eye sees their pain as mirth
The tower they build will be their cell.
It’s helixed staircase will fit to tell
the universe that their potential knows no dearth.
Pride, not hate, was why the angels fell.
Fueled by anger that mercy cannot quell
They have known only its spiral since birth.
The tower they build will be their cell.
It bares the name of the mother, Babel
Her sickness cured in their sick berth
Pride, not hate, was why the angels fell
The tower they build will be their cell.
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