Pillow of Darkness

 

I lay on a pillow of darkness

Pure black

Except for the tiny flecks of light

Moving in random patterns

I imagine intersecting lines

at 35-degree angles from each other.

they fade intermittently

and form other shapes

I cannot remember the shapes

I cannot describe them

 

xxx

 

I feel as if I disappear.

perhaps for a few moments

perhaps forever.

I become invisible

a thing that was

but is no more.

 

Xxx

 

I hate the graveyards

the long lines of tombstones

lawns overgrown with weeds

decaying presents for the dead,

weathered teddy bears and deflated balloons.

I hate the roses left to decompose in the sun,

To be later thrown in metal dumpsters

like forgotten dreams

unspoken conversations.

I hate all of it.

the sales people

the ground crew men in dirty pants

the people looking for solace amongst quiet bones.

 

xxx

 

i want freedom

water

waves

I want to slide into oblivion like the other nameless souls

come and now gone.

Will anyone find our music

our words

our small attempts at transformation?

 

xxx

 

I lay on a pillow of darkness

floating somewhere between ocean and desert

between hot and cold

between life and death

The desert now blooms with newfound moisture,

purple flowers and panting lizards,

mermaid clouds.

The oceans begin to sing,

singing of sun trees and orange fruit that drip with sugar,

forming puddles

lakes and creatures that would become myths

and great dreams and nightmares.

 

xxx

 

I will become nameless

i will descend into the chaos I came from.

Into the blood,

the dirt,

the blackness

the specks of light in strange patterns

the nothingness that somehow becomes something.

 

xxx

 

Out of the chaos I am whole

for a moment,

such a short moment.

I am a sentence,

a name,

two sentences and then another,

and then one year, and then another.

I emerge from rough ideas

and soft kisses

from pain and chaos

from dirt and blood

from stories that were lost by people I never met

from stories that may be told long after I’m gone

I am all the people that are now lost,

forgotten,

buried in the blackness

in the darkness

in the soil that made me,

the waves that quenched me

the sun which fed me,

the same sun which crushed and bruised

and landed on my lips

that touched my eyes

and made me whole,

the sun that pulled me out of the darkness

for a moment,

such a short moment.

 

Into The Nothingness

He disappeared, nearly naked,

Dressed only in a long white garment.

A white cloth

covered in numbers and geometric shapes.

He slipped into the nothingness,

into some place I will never know.

(If I were to follow him,

the me that can know would have left

and I would be left as naked as he was

unable to understand whatever I was seeing.)

He broke with the language of our world,

and left behind only scattered fragments –

A poetic line

A shopping list

An idea for a story

An argument not fully formed.

He left in a succession of slow breaths

Which carried the old melodies we once sang together,

our voices strong and cracking.

He took with him

A thousand stories we will never hear,

food we will never taste,

so many things I wish I learned,

but I didn't.

His face now appears on maps,

The kind I sometimes look at

but mostly I try to avoid them.

His face is quickly losing its shape

even though the map lines tend to converge.

The story ends

and I cannot contain my wailing.

I am left without numbers,

with only a drone of ongoing pink noise

and a few mechanical glitches

now and then

a kind of broken rhythm,

irregular pulsing.

Divide

The candlelight

was weak,

about to fade away.

The winter had laid us bare,

but the trees

encircled us,

made for us an

unassuming home.

In his arms

there was a tenderness

something unusual.

I sensed a seeker

that had dropped

old attachments

and penetrated the

thousand-year divide

between lives.

In his words

were ancient whispers,

an electric promise

radiating through the ocean

and flowing to the stars.

The journey

was about to begin

fresh and new

ancient and arcane

ageless and eternal.

Snake

The rope is knotted in the corner. Dust on the earthen floor. It’s been there since the beginning, since that first house was built, since the first man was made out of spit and semen.

The walls are crumbling around me now, the cracks are growing wider and deeper, dying so slowly. I’ll stay here forever before they turn to sand and memory.

My eyes play tricks on me as the candles dance back and forth.  Yellow and gold scenes emerge from the walls, heroes and monsters are born and fade on the flat surface as the wind bursts though the open windows. The night air smells of sweetness, of smoke and old knowledge.

That rope, I watch as it changes shape.  A snake moves towards me, ready to kiss or bite. I cannot tell.  It slides over my ankles, crawling slowly up my soot covered legs. I see it grow, I see it expand wider and wider, forming hips and breast, scales becoming dewy skin and fine hair.  She is silvery, iridescent like clouds below the moon. She moves. Her chest, feet, hands, all match the rhythm coming from outside.

They are chanting by the fire, around our old tree on the other side of the river.  I can hear them, I can imagine them in the shadow of the mountain as if I was there among them. But I am here, on this simple mattress, among epic battles that never end.

She moves her head towards me. She becomes something more than physical. More than the force of all men, all systems I’ve ever understood or heard of. She takes over my body. I search for descriptions, for the limit, the very edge. I follow, communicating only with my eyes. I watch her breasts rise and fall, then search her eyes for the center.

She will not let me return to the physical, not yet. Not while my body is free. I place my mind in her hands, let her wet hands dissolve my lies.  She takes me up the mountain, one single being in free eager flight.

Without Eyes or Force

my king, my god

barely recognizable in the wind

shining in the moonlight

my king, my god

its shape incomprehensible

in the swirling phenomena

of a myriad structures and forms

that surround it.

It devours all true memory

all sense of the past

is torn away

from underneath me

leaving me cold and alone

hesitant and uncertain.

Here, in this place,

I see

it is thinking that began time,

and language that gave it shape.

And now time stirs

revealing the hidden treasures

of entropy and death.

Certain questions will

forever remain

suspended in space

without answers

without conclusions

vibrant in their

refusal to fall.

Meanwhile

behind the black curtain

the night envelops me

and a body

without eyes or force

forever becomes

movement

a sound

vibrating air

somehow shining

in the moonlight.