rolling in darkness,
the hull rolling against bone,
insides rolling toward the outside
constant motion without visual reference
spurring other sensory experiences:
retching & wailing,
bile scent & bile taste,
organ churning
creaking,
dampness,
saltiness,
headache,
heartache,
lunacy,
&
oblivion
Don’t tell me stories about screaming trees.
I’ve heard them in the forest after dark.
Strange boats landed on the shore from vast seas,
carrying saws to make a proper park
of old growth lands that lay beyond the known
and sweep up the sun-dappled leaf litter,
sowing where they’d reaped & reaping what they’d sown,
silencing the chitter of bird and critter.
Rearranging, like bedroom furnishings,
the space of nature’s grand, endless chaos.
Building fences, trapping, and clipping wings.
They spay and spray and pray, and scrape the moss.
The boats, long since rotted, landed near here
between that Taco Bell and the concrete pier.
Some rage against the dying of the light.
Some rage at the neon glow through their window,
catching them in the eye after midnight,
slowing time’s movement to a viscous flow.
Some rage about the sassy, sloppy youth.
Others rage that the old can’t understand.
Some rage when strangers sit down in their booth.
Others rage when things don’t go as planned.
Some rage about how time moves too quickly.
Others rage that we’re all stuck in the past.
Some rage until they’re tired and sickly.
Some rage they missed out by saving best for last.
You wonder why the lack of deathbed rage?
Let’s call it the wisdom of the end-stage.
I had a patio into 4th dimensional space.
It was in a shape I couldn’t imagine,
&
I painted it a color that doesn’t exist.
Sometimes it warped into a torus,
&,
inconveniently,
it popped in & out of existence without warning
on more than one occasion.
But it was a fine place to watch the sun come in at the end of a long eternity.
“Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.” — G.K. Chesterton
Ah, Mister Chesterton, I must concur.
The Camembert love is lacking, Monsieur!
If there’s a way to make bacon better,
surely it’s smothering it in Cheddar.
On bread and water, prisoners endure,
but brie with bread is the height of grandeur.
What, say you, is more addictive than crack?
Just a cracker topped with Monterey Jack.
Yes, poets obsess on love and death,
but you can smell the Roquefort on their breath.
[OK, there’s no budget for Roquefort,
truth is, it’s a canned cheese of some sort.]
What bird or bat drives my fright?
I heard a bump just last night,
for the third night in a row.
Then a word, as from Poe’s crow,
&
the word I heard was evermore.
Yes, evermore. Not NEVERMORE!
Was this bird optimistic,
or eternally sadistic?
chirps & clicks,
throaty frog croaks
nightly nocturne
just past dusk
bats take to balconies
urban caves
mountain skies
glow of nebula
ghosts in color
northern summer
dawn colors ever on
the horizon
deep north winter
light a distant flare
in Stygian eons
vanished lands,
on a sandy sea floor sit stones —
once a city
who will find them?
what a pity,
someone dragged those stones into place,
nudging them into the shape of a temple,
a temple where fish now seek shade.
A man is of two minds.
One mind craves novelty.
The other seeks familiarity.
Woe the one who reserves the latter for reality,
letting the former fall only on virtual ground.
the carcass of an ancient inn
rests in a valley green
weary voyagers would long trudge
by the time it was seen
through a pass and round a bend
shaded by stark snow-caps
caravans moved by sight and coots
without a guide or maps
