I watch a frangipani blossom -- its elegant five twisted petals swept downstream, drifting toward the smooth laminar lip that rolls over the cascade. And I feel a teensy queasy, watching it be lifted and whipped over the edge. As if I were it, and it were me.
to be poured steaming tea from a dented kettle, in a wooden building, hanging at the mountain's edge, at the end of a long day's journey, has a special spirit-raising force
Maybe there’s no moving mountains,
but blow out the clouds and one may appear.
Out of the wall of white comes a rocky shoulder,
clad in spiky pines and stony protrusions.
Saffron-hued flowers huddle on a wind-whipped clifftop.
Sea breezes toss and twirl pollen,
eddies send some back down to the beach.
Land breezes feed pollen to the dark waters far below.
The flowers are ever-tousled by the wind’s rough hand.
What must they love, in their sightless stance,
that matches my sighted stare at sea and sky?
The little “e” epiphany
strikes me in
the middle of the night.
Enveloped in darkness, I lie,
contemplating
the bold stories the world has told.
I think upon slapped cheeks
and
grand strategy
and
the universe outside my door.
I wonder whether one can
be change
and
change one’s being,
or
whether there’s a choice to be made.
I feel at peace —
though not enough
to drift back to sleep.
The clouds are on the mountain.
The world feels faint and fading.
I look out in the distance,
but my eyes can’t focus.
I believe the world is out there,
but I can never say for sure.
What’s beyond the shape of
that distant line of trees, there?
Is it something good, or
nothing of the kind?
The seed of a scream sits somewhere behind my sternum.
It writhed, crawled, or (maybe) floated there with great stealth.
It’s the spark that fires the powder keg.
There’s no old-fashioned fuse,
slowly burning like a sparkler.
You never see the rippling shockwaves,
just the debris —
that detritus that begs,
“What happened here?”
Scream stifling
requires walking around with no air to gasp —
no air to scream.
blocks of knowledge
sit in rubble piles,
having been coveted, hunted, and horded,
they sit in rubble piles
the Epistemic Hungry Ghost
is too busy gathering blocks
to shove and nudge
them into load-bearing
structural integrity
that takes patience & a plan
&
there are too many blocks,
so many blocks —
ripe for the picking —
so many blocks
Who’d have thought learning could be a drug —
a crack-rock addition
with a prettier face
and prettier fidgets?
