Flawless

Flawless

The best of it was:
two cats,
each a semi-Nautilus,
one the yin,
the other yang on my lap,
snoozing
or
soaring on the sound
made by my own voice,
lungs open,
everything part of the one thing,
music, bird, man
or
mischievous breeze,
teasing at hide and seek,
one
summer afternoon,
while work wilted
or
that young lad,
when I was a young lad,
who,
lay near and next and kinda
liked it,
too.

That was the best of it.

Now?
full nights of easy
sleep are rare,
few and less
remain.
I prepare,
at God’s behest?
and won’t return again.

The Butterfly Migrations

The Butterfly Migrations

Imagine a place where sun shines,

exactly as is best for

you.

That is home.

There are more places

you must be, at times

and,

often, without perfect

weather to feel,

there can be what is

merely tolerable,

enough to fill a hungry day.

Sun arrives,

sun goes away.

I see you, today, at roadside,

overdressed for this

season, one better suited to others,

which

you have found yourself

standing in.

Out of your

one place,

the home, perhaps, that

turned inhospitable,

metamorphosis made you

a figure draped by shadow.

The chrysalis you crawled in

lies elsewhere, empty, hollow.

In a

real but magic-seeming place,

sturdy leaves and warm pods

swell,

promises for

for those who need

a drop of

what is wasted as surfeit

by someone

other.

There is a make-do balance made

when God seems not to bother.

You have fluttered,

other places, other times,

can describe

a different spot

with depth enough

as might be

done

by those who lived

but there,

alone.

Ten thousand years of from and back

we travellers have known.

What I See

On a cold day,

I sit comfortable,

surrounded and kept from what is real

by the steel

and glass of human pretension,

our magnificent folly.

Through a slanted window I watch

while squirrels busy themselves

at mundane procedures.

The mundane is necessary of us all,

ordered by God, if you will,

or by the inertia of life and spirit if you won’t.

A solitary black squirrel seems uncomfortable,

now the temperature has fallen some and

brought grey squirrels into HIS territory,

who chitter about with their own work.

Grumbling, he twitches,

keeps at his rapid chewing on a

found object…

someone’s dried, cast-off crust of sandwich…

while side-eyeing the nearest grey blur

of fur,

who wears

what appears

as a tiny, brown, winter-inspired

hat.

I think Mr. Black is entertaining such

greedy and isolationist thoughts as:

‘That fat, grey bastard had better

keep his damned distance’. Or,

‘Who the hell let lesser beasts

in?’

With one, split-second pounce

he dashes toward the closest grey,

who,

drawing from the well of trained-in reflex,

runs far enough away.

A Bad Dog, Barking

We are, I am

so full of

electronic living.

A Violet glow of

flimsy shadow

slides me down deeper

into button-tufted marshmallow –

the faux-leather quicksand

where thousands have

already died.

Oh!

the high fidelity screams!

Oh!

the colour-balanced terrors,

all fifty-five inches of them interlaced!

The worst of everything

smears our face.

Like Little Alex,

with his nose shoved in it,

we are a

Bad

Dog…

to be picked up

and dropped on fouled newspaper,

where such belong.

Over time,

we will get the hint.

On ‘Daylight’ Time

April 17, 2024

On ‘Daylight’ Time

I type and one word catches another’s tail as the other passes quickly,
underway to Wordsend.
Wordsend stands as a high cliff above,
watching the place that is no place,
found in every place…staring blunt into that place where all is bound.
That end place is one which words may not describe.
It is a blackness,
yes,
but to have blackness implies there is white.
If there is a thing,
a black hole,
a nothing,
there must also be a something,
a white fullness?

The black hole as described and known suffers no white.
I am thinking now of the giant whirlpool a black hole creates as it captures all creation,
the black hole allowing not a thing to escape.
Once inside the black hole,
we find no solitary confinement.
Each and all are swallowed with a full complement of brothers/sisters.
It seems,
in my mind,
that inside the black hole there can only be a terrific lightness?
A white to the hole?
All the light that ever was – shone in and could not shine out.
Interesting.
Also:
Light is a wave,
it has length,
it has time.
Were I to vibrate so fast,
I could brighten.
I vibrate slow.
I am dull.

Time is a vibration,
since vibration alone can record,
witness time.
Time becomes its own observer and does not exist separate from.
It takes time for a thing (wave?) to move from back to forth.
If vibration could not escape the black hole,
then time cannot.
So- time and light whirl in to the black-beyond-black but only cease to exist out here,
in space,
where there is still time,
still light.
It is still light at nine o’clock…

Elizabeth and the Witness

Elizabeth and The Witness

A tentative, “Hello?”
she heard.
Elizabeth looked up slow
at first repeat of the same word.

Knitting to pattern and
eager for five minutes break,
she rose with the help of one hand,
while another massaged a back-ache.

Above her head, she could discern
that through the transom came a glow
of something interesting to learn,
about which, she just had to know,

so,

she eased the wooden door a crack
and whispered a hushed “Hello?” back.

Standing tall, hair in careful array,
a booklet-bearing man, tanned,
cleared his throat as if to say
something he’d carefully planned.
Elizabeth’s first thought became,
“Okay…What is his game?
Great goodness and past experience knows,
where this scene probably goes..”

She spoke first,
as distraction method well-rehearsed,
“That forehead mark…do you know it can be seen?”
and hoped he might be given start
that someone noticed an unclean
part.
Instead,
“Do you know Jesus?” he said.
Our Beth mumbled,
“Yeah…wasn’t he one of The Grateful Dead?”
but the youth never stumbled
and took her snide
tone in his stride.

As if she had, perhaps, not heard,
he repeated every word,
“Do
you
know
Jesus?”

She pondered what card best
now to play.
Would the fellow up and go away
if she slammed the door, or
stunted his query with a hostile YES!
full of fury?
Maybe a bit of blunt, ” ‘biblically’ or otherwise,”
would send him off in a shocked surprise.

But no,
dear Liz could not be rude.
She’d every fibre of herself imbued
of well-chosen words from Emily Post
and assumed the role of gracious host.
With feigned curiosity,
not the tired animosity
that her neighbours might have shown,
she stifled a frown,
saying,
“Oh, goodness me, young man…
what is there more -sigh-
to be known?”

March Twenty-Third

While I sat, considering,
a one thousand-footer traversed
two-thirds my far horizon.
It is empty, up bound for
ore,
and birds hang about
again.

Can anyone say
what is heaven,
where is God, who
or what makes a miracle?

From Lords and leaders,
hear we
expectations of the end,
some write their salutations,
bend
any willing ear
to hear the guillotine hit,
as mask and wig tumble
toward the pit
and disappear.

I am not afraid, today.
I am the sea-bird,
the goose,
the grass.
My wings lift, knowing
there is air and
gravity,
water, ships and
sand,
all this was before –
all this comes again.

Squirrel On a Fence Post

I am that so grey squirrel,
paused on a fence post.

Rough dogs are busy
with carrion
of sorts,
which gives me time for
a warm ray,
and twitching.

Spring is not yet here
but will arrive,
in time,
by whatever egregious means
it must,
so,
too,
with armageddon.

I withdraw my sharpened
claws a moment,
wounding only
this leftover and dried doughnut,
from a grease-shack’s kitchen waste,
found,
down the street.

This,
is what it means to be
free.

Enough to Deal With

We have enough to deal with
don’t we?
cruel rain and cloud and knife and
bullet,
priest and politician.
Somewhat the same is
true for wolf and bear,
always
hungry and thirsty and
walking somewhere.

Fine castles built,
long summer’s gathering,
a saviour ark,
these may give the driest tinder heart
just a moment’s
flint-struck
spark.
We have enough to deal with,
don’t we?