A Light in the Haze

There are places that can only be found by invitation-Steven Erikson

The gradual realization of texture and position. The ancient desire to return. Nothing will change in an hour. In the next scripted seconds, the world might implode.

From where I sit, I see the lines not spreading infinitely outward, but as a barrier of wood and steel and stone and beyond it an abyss of cliff and the perpetual slither of the sea

But I will remember the fading, the way the light rose and fell in a silent swing. Can I remember any of what I saw? Such sights rearrange themselves.

I built on the sand

And it tumbled down,

I built on a rock

And it tumbled down.

Now when I build, I shall begin

With the smoke from the chimney

-Leopold Staff

Rain Whipping Against the Glass

And you? “You”? Waiting to experience a moment

That has no precedent. The wish to be a child,

Or the wish to be outside of time,

The craving, that is, for a kind of death

In which one stays somehow alert...

-Charles Baxter

the horizon disappears into the clouds

this old city is sleeping with a sickness

burning its veins, swelling boils on the streets

salt collecting between the stones

the sky is suffocating,

bone crunching

Assaulting

And there is not relief in the water breaking with contact

Like a virus it collects

in its truest form there is no light in liquid

Sounds so soothing,,,

cheap thrills of the most tame

the grit is shaping into something scary

Finality/ Peek into the Past

Then, from those cavernous eyes

Pale flashes seem to rise,

And when the Northern skies

Gleam in December;

And, like the waters flow

Under Decembers snow,

Came a dull voice of woe

from the heart's chamber

-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

My obsession with relevance has killed me

Keep it cliché friend,

You lose your innocence when you realize how dreadful you really are

And that’s the truth with everything

Good god this life sometimes spins the wrong direction

It makes me dizzy, all we can talk about is disorientation and the places we have invaded in the dead of night without as much as a light, good god I think these are my best memories good god I think they are all demonic

A perspective is all that separates this and that

Good god I was never in control

This Isnt What You Think It Is

Closed eyes against the t.v. screen

A flap of skin shielding the fervor of

Hard hitting dreams, something mean.

You retain what you don’t remember but still…

How much is missed in the rear view mirror?

For we have thought the longer thoughts
And gone the shorter way.
And we have danced to devils' tunes,
Shivering home to pray;
To serve one master in the night,
Another in the day
-Ernest Hemingway

Jackal Spitting at the Shadows

chop-block chatter in a swirl

of moments crowded with

reddened teeth slurring

guilt through a valve

something vague

You must always be high. Everything depends on it: it is the only question. So as not to feel the horrible burden of Time wrecking your back and bending you to the ground, you must get high without respite.
But on what? On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, whatever you like. But get high.
And if sometimes you wake up, on palace steps, on the green grass of the ditch, in your room's gloomy solitutde, your intoxication already waning or gone, ask everything that flees, everything that moans, everything that moves, everything that sings, everything that speaks, ask what time it is. And the wind, the waves, the stars, the birds, clocks, will answer, "It is time to get high! So as not to be the martyred slaves of Time, get high; get high constantly! On wine, on poetry, or on virtue as you wish."

-Baudelaire

Invaded by the Season

Keep moving until you can't stop

Happiness. It comes on 

unexpectedly. And goes beyond, really, 

any early morning talk about it.

-Raymond Carver 

Silver Chain and a Craze

At the precise moment of death
the pupil of the eye
opens its widest.

The white lights in ceilings,
the moon, sun
stars, comets, nebulae,
the great band of the Milky Way--
all fall into the brain.

There are no lights
too bright for the dying.
-Al Zylonas

At the precise moment

that the lamp-lights slip out

from over our heads

in a whirl of suspense

I doubt we will notice

how much more we can see

of the stars

Flowers from Purgatory

And everywhere within the light’s slow fall

Infinities of particles were falling

Into the flowerpot they’d never fill.

-Alan Shapiro

wonder is in the unknown

in the afternoon i looked out over my step-fathers balcony

at the crooked housetops and drooping telephone lines and the ocean

glowing beneath a sunset that was not quite worth pulling them away from the television for

i stood with a beer dangling between the crevasse

of my thumb and index-finger

i never planned on sitting

as the light was already dipping off the earths flat edge

and i was supposed to catch a drink with someone who

would laugh at the murky memories we shared and who

i probably would never see again

but i sat and watched our colossal globe of brazen boiling gas

extinguish without as much of a backwards sigh

i continued to search the horizon

long after it had passed beyond sight and

it was only the lifeless chill

that sent me back inside

for another beer and my keys

.....