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Friday, December 28, 2012
Monday, November 5, 2012
Tuesday, October 30, 2012
Synesthesia and chronology
The year is a ring of gold and shadow in my mind’s eye.
It circles my life like a wide band, and I live along it.
As I write now, autumn faces me, and I peer into a growing
darkness.
Over my shoulder, I see the bright days of summer, yellow
and white and hot.
The calendar where I stand is fading to reds and
browns.
November and December ahead are edging into blackness. Days
become faded blue and grey, murky, mellow, and encouraging sleep. Like suckerfish in the murk, January
and February follow, clinging. Always
darkest just before dawn, as the shortest days begin to lengthen, January and
February hold the deep night of the year under cold black glittering skies. Days are stark in black and white.
Peering around the corner of the year, I see the black fade
to grey as a pre-dawn sky. March is indistinct, muddy, brown and rain-streaked,
and only April begins to dry into a shiny, pretty year. May and June glint with new colors,
emerald and topaz in a gold setting as the longest days glow forever and each
one fades into a warm night of sparkling stars. The daytime sun and sky begin to blend together, soft baby
blue and yellow.
That yellow heats up and up and suddenly July and August are
hot gold, flaming with color, nearly too bright, like looking right at the sun. Finally, September, ah September, all
the colors have mellowed. The
greens are swaying, the golds have softened, and the rusts and browns are
edging in. The flower-colors begin
to fade but continue to detail the days.
October comes around again; the circle is complete, reds and browns
darkening, nights lengthening, skies gaining the steel blue edge that comes
with chill days.
The year is a ring of gold, set with emerald, topaz, copper
and bronze leaves, edged in steel, lit in relief by a summer spotlight, sparkling
with a nightly wintery blackness.
It circles my life like a wide band, and I live along it, married to the seasons year by year.
Thursday, October 25, 2012
Monday, October 8, 2012
Saturday, September 15, 2012
Thursday, September 13, 2012
Thursday, September 6, 2012
Wednesday, August 15, 2012
Tuesday, July 24, 2012
Sunday, July 22, 2012
Wednesday, July 18, 2012
Sunday, July 15, 2012
Monday, June 25, 2012
Rust
I've lain upon this bed of rusty nails
For these few hundred years.
I wonder
at the quickly passing snails,
While through my wondering heart
torment sears.
I watch
the truths of fairy tales,
But I know the silliness of
wishing upon my falling tears.
I lay on
these nails in mindless sorrow,
Thinking not of what I could do
today.
Instead I
ponder what will be tomorrow,
Or freeing myself the next day.
I want of
humanity on the morrow
What I already threw away.
Pent up
tears bruise my throat
As I lie here cursing the eternal.
I begin
to drown in my longing for heaven's hope,
And I would be content to quickly
burn in hell's inferno.
I rust
upon this rust, my body bloats,
Mind’s want upon want to be a
mortal.
There is
something that I am supposed to do.
Some way my body and soul to free.
Something
humanly, personally true,
But the essence, the what, escapes me.
(I wrote this as an angsty 15-year old. I like to think I've figured it out since then, at least that lying around doesn't resolve anything. But it may just take a whole life to answer the real question.)
Friday, June 22, 2012
Thursday, June 21, 2012
Grandpa Pond
A grey cloud drifts slowly overhead. It settles into a
comfortable position. The pond becomes quiet.
The pond is still and sad and dark: an old man’s eyes as he
is lost in silent reverie.
Underneath, even the fish lay dreaming in the depths.
A crane calls eerily overhead, again, again, and its ghost
flock answers, hidden in echoey woods.
A slight breeze causes old man to blink, but he does not
return from memory.
Lightly, a leaf falls here and a leaf falls there, brushing
his cheek.
Old man is remembering his wild and wandering youth, before
middle age came with accountability and things to keep. Middle age passed quickly enough while
he felt strong and righteous in his responsibilities. But, with time, middle age moved out and old age crept in,
and all those responsibilities and ownerships and caretakings left to live in
other places. Now, old man is tied
down by his surroundings. A home
he couldn’t leave. A season by
season, year by year loneliness. A
dam. Subdued into slowness and
stillness, old man’s spirit lives less and less in the present, and returns
often to recollection.
He longs for his youth as an unfettered stream. He played with the freewheeling salmon,
jumped rocks, walked fallen logs, traveled from the mountains to the sea, made
his way to the valley, where he met his only love and they formed the river.
A raindrop falls like a teardrop on old man’s face as he
recalls his lover and their valley rendezvous.
Another raindrop falls, accenting the loneliness.
The air is cooling.
A heavier breeze, and old man shivers back to reality,
ripples picking up across his skin.
The rain starts to dive from the heights in earnest, pulling wet
leaves off the trees, which groan, bullied by the growing wind.
Old man’s eyes are wide now, and he hunkers down to face
another in a lifetime of autumn storms.
He secretly smiles to the memory of his love; a thousand
times they danced through the rain and ran the river together. A thousand times the clouds crushed
down and the two streams sprung back, hand in hand!
The rain is flying down now! Thick as a thousand memories, and old man is finding himself
in two worlds: the feelings of the past seem to overtake his mind, but in the
present, he feels strong and deep and more alive than he has in years.
Even the dream-deluded fish are shocked awake by the influx
of cold rain-water.
The pond rises, rises, rises...
A wooden creak that is not from the trees cuts over the din
of the storm—a longer groan—and crash!
Water spills over the broken dam!
Fish run amok!
Trees and cranes and clouds cheer and shout and wave a
thunderous joyous goodbye!
Old man leaves for the last time, young at heart, venturing
out through the old creek way.
In an instant, memories are the moment, and the moment is anything
possible. Old man remembers a story of somebody seeing a long tunnel with a light at the end. He sees a dancing adventure of a creek bed with love at the end.
He is young again.
Moving again. Strong
again. Loving again. Alive again.
Wednesday, June 20, 2012
Solstice
Light is elastic / Time is plastic
Daylight has a way of getting shorter and then getting
longer again
But daytime has a way of shrinking until the most you can do
is the least you need to
Time makes for beautiful moments and frustrating math
But like a sweet balancing act, daylight follows a
sinusoidal path
Day by day, season by season.
In day time, the limit as days and years stretch to infinity
is zero.
It’s hard to fit something in a zero-hour schedule.
On the stress-strain curve,
Light always bounces back, physically reflecting and perceptually
becoming
Bright/dark, long/short
Never reaching a yield point
Time seems perfectly unbreakable, but when loaded, stretches
so thin and brittle after a while that it is nearly impossible to use it for
anything, and its yield strength can’t be returned.
If there wasn’t darkness there wouldn’t be light,
But time has no reflector and is infinitely finite.
Reworking the metal, rewriting the schedule, reducing the
load, recycling the old, is the only way to get it back.
Light is elastic.
Time is plastic.
A Day in Summer
I love summer days like these
Seventy degrees
A good breeze
Sweet memories
Blowing through my mind.
In the morning after it rains
The dew rolls off my window panes
And the weather starts to change
The world is strange
And looking new and fine.
After noon the sun drops
And time stops
I crack the top
On a soda pop
Or a new batch of berry wine.
As the summer dusk gets underway
You ask me to stay
Awhile and lay
Between yesterday
And tomorrow in our misty melting line.
Tuesday, June 19, 2012
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