Category: poems

Black spots fly like tiny insects

Black lines appear like bits of thread

Sudden light flashes at the edges

Blurred grayness where once were words

So approaches this looming blindness

And yet

Now I see more clearly

A path never before discerned

My step seems to falter

Make no mistake

My eyes might be clouded

I know where I am and where I am going

I go quickly quickly

What’s past is past.

I disagree.

The past is as amorphous and fluid as the present.

Both change and flow,

Each influencing the other in a Heraclitean interplay.

An example:

As a child I was abandoned in a strange city,

Though I found my own way home.

This event left a mark,

Resulting in me feeling bewildered, unwanted, and forlorn.

Years later, a relative told me something

That transformed what I remembered.

Did that trip change down the years?

For me, yes.

Another example:

A dictator and tyrant acted in ways

We heretofore considered evil.

Today some leaders look back in admiration

Seemingly in order to emulate his results.

Have his actions changed in character?

For an unsettling minority, yes.

We find ourselves living in a strange loop,

Where parallels and paradoxes abound.

We cry sorrow; we cry good;

We fly to the light; we descend to the dark.

Inexorably we find these

To be one, different, and the same.

I drink a cup of tea and laugh at all.

But sometimes I cry.

Love and friendships are mysterious indeed.

I am walking in the dark and often fall over the gravestones

That are etched with the friends and relationships I’ve lost.

I’m no sage and possess not even the wisdom of a fool.

In these areas I am a child still, gazing in wonder

At the elaborate movements of the dancers around me.

They step and turn with practiced abandon but seldom do they stumble.

Yet sometimes one will stop and turn to me:

“I need your advice, please.”

Astonished and usually bewildered, I haltingly speak a few words.

Truly though, I prefer to say nothing. I’ve no idea how to caper so.

I’m doing well to walk.

When you have gone,

I shall drink only aged tea

Grown wild and crafted with careful intent.

I make my first cup but forget,

Lost in thoughts of you warm beside me.

The tea forgives my lapse of attention,

Made from leaves that hold the thread of time.

I cradle the warm cup in my hands along with my grief,

Each sip tasting of dark earth and rich love.

Do not go just yet.

Not yet. I am not ready.

Everyone was watching the fireworks.

Multicolored bursts that sparkled the sky.

I was watching the moon.

A reproachful orb burdened by eons of witness.

Our lives pass in an instant,

So we take such joys where we can.

A silvery road appeared before me.

I looked back at the gathering and listened,

The rockets booming over threads of conversation.

Silently I set my journey and stepped

Onto the shimmering invitation.

Would my heart follow?

Small matter. It was not ever mine,

But only borrowed.

I approach the door of the sky.

I knock but it does not open. It is closed.

Like your heart. Like my eyes. Like any sense of hope.

The clouds deny its existence, as I cry out for it to stay.

I fall and hit the ground, only to see the door above me, opened.

My bitter tears form a river

And all below is washed away.

Outside it is hot.

But not like the heat I remember

From childhood when I lived in another place.

There the air would hang still and expectant,

As if waiting for cooling winds which never arrived.

When you tried to breathe,

Each breath would coat your mouth with sticky warmth,

As if trying to inhale a sweltering blanket.

You would hear repeated as a mantra of protection

It’s not the heat but the humidity!

We all knew it to be a lie but said it nonetheless,

As though from our lips to some deity’s ears

Would cause pity to result in an icy breeze.

And after the temperature reached a certain point,

We would not care which deity answered.

I think if any passing demon had promised the equivalent of airy AC,

Everyone would have agreed and offered their souls on the spot.

But this is not that place, and I am not sorry.

I can still go outside in the late afternoon

Without soaking myself in my own sweat

Or worry about heatstroke from checking the mail.

I’ll stay in the mountains.

In futile effort, he bent his back into a rounded shape of a turtle,

Imagining it hard as that shell hiding all he loved.

But it was not, and he cried out in grief, collapsing under the weight of loss.

He realized at last that to hold back tears is to hold back time.

He could do neither, and it crushed him.