Pools

At night my infant son sleeps in a pool
of dim light (like the human race)
which keeps the terror of the dark
theoretically at bay.

After all, night-lights (and suns) do not
truly remove the inky dead black of space:
illumination is only done to other things.
Not Space-night itself:

it is forever invisible, clear, is blank-black;
is the absence of seeing, is null data; but
as adults and extinct species learn,
null data can be wrong.

(The asteroid, or alien, or thief, may not
distinguish itself from the dark null
outside our small dim pool of light until
they are upon us.)

In the vast expanse of our small house
my son is lost without his light, and cries
for me, for safety and comfort; but even I
cannot save him from the dark.




Jan 2017

Dishes

If you happen to find yourself breaking and entering into someone's house, and you suddenly realize they are home, they are armed, and they are probably going to come kill you, one good idea is to head toward the kitchen and start doing the dishes.


They might still decide to kill you, but no sane homeowner would ever kill someone doing the dishes. And while they wait for you to finish up, you have a few minutes to either figure a way out of the situation or put your spiritual house in order.


Just a thought.

The common cold

"Poor guy," I said, regarding
his crusty nostrils, and
she said he's doing much
better today, he slept a lot--
but when I heard him coughing
late in our darkened house
my mind became a slave
to how sometimes children die
in the night, for no good reason!;
and like a spy I slipped away
with grim urgency, determination,
only once betrayed by a creaking
step while creeping to his door
and listened to his breathing,
head inclined, un-moving until
several minutes in I realized
my heart was pounding
like a marathon, like war,
like shooters in the street
see the child in my arms.




jan 2017

in a little while, i think
i won't be able to even taste:
--or back a step, even to smell--
victory or failure or defeat.
the end of sleep is the end
of color, flavor, sound;
everything fades off-white
to an ignoble gray, more
washout than stormcloud.

then, sleep.

and in the morning we find
the smell of coffee reminds us
of the rich velvet browns in dirt,
the red piece of ribbon
on a package of something
in the pantry; our feet make
soft padding noises, bare on
the tile, the wood, the carpet.

unless--

i have friends, perpetually, who
cannot sleep, to whom the
harsh-washed gray is all life,
the self-specific silence and
muted Everything of Unsleep is the
only Thing there is. unlike me, who
stays awake to play, and read,
they bolt upright with a scream
part way through and
never finish.

nightmares.

for my son, at acorn-bud youth, it
was rain: thunder and light flashes
against the window in his dark room;
for one friend, a battlefield
he'd long survived, but never left;
for another, a horror memory
that worsened with each retelling.
"where am i, in that dream?" i once
so arrogantly asked--insert the god-like
dream-sequence Self descending here,
rolling back the rain cloud, calming all
bullets and bloodshed and child-borne horrors.
i replace the sound and smell of war
with the quiet of a forest in the morning
on an expectant, pleasant summer day.

but does it fade?

like my conscious body slipping away
from sensory perception, does Time
in all her majesty remove these scars and
mend the wound?  will the war or childhood
be further behind next year, or the next,
or have these memories and fears slipped in,
like splinters in a young, uncalloused hand:
too near the heart to be let go,
too rehearsed to ever leave the stage?
dream-sequence giant though i am, my power
cannot overcome its source; the mind has cut
its channels deep, and seldom leaves a bed
to dry.




december '16

Elections

How do we dream
of fair leaders wise and kind,
strong and gentle, balancing law with grace?
All we've ever seen are human creatures:
ourselves:
weak and petty, stroked wide
with meanness and anger,
only flecked with patience or beauty
as if on accident; love, as if spattered
from another painting somewhere nearby.
How then do we dream of what's never seen?
--Unless there is a Truth
running as a river underneath this crusted world,
whose pure currents we sometimes hear,
filling us with longing--;








November 2016