interesting times

Would we know we have a problem
Despite what we are told
All is well
on its way,
Hell,
like the Universe
no place like
Home

when neighbors disappeared
and people en masse
abandoned former posts,
in hordes
Left
the right
to the pursuit of a
Life without fear
thy neighbor
of footsteps
of spies
and their subjects
and secrets and probing
We would notice,
wouldn't we?

When every person you see
is rich and powerful
who can afford not
to be infamous?

The poor
neighborhood turned over
and emptied
of change
never was
anymore

on any map
you see
there lies
Borders
between inside and out
them and us,
that and this
is not
Real
life...




Photo credit by Carol M. Highsmith [Public domain]. 
Photo description via Wikimedia:"An old jalopy outside an abandoned stone building in the "ghost town," some of which is still occupied and some of which consists of ruins of the Chisos quicksilver-mining company which operated from 1905 into the early 1940s, and the residences of those who worked there. Terlingua, Texas" 

Binding bed

Sought intimate spaces

for self-

lost private places

for nurturing health.

Grew weary with waning

insistence,

wilted and arid, the stem

aches with thirst

the worst exposure

to lunar light

this side of mourning

the death of circus dreams.

It seems the sun disperses

its golden dust

according to an architecture

of ideal.

Beholden to the barriers molded

by hand-

curses stand as they must, in spite of us

for a time.

As last

sunsets free

the stars, placing winking faces

astronomical units apart

and fixed on never being

yours or mine.

“Our tendency to build walls is useful only to provide a starting point for self-definition, walls that contain the bed in which we are born, in which we dream, we breed and we die; but outside the walls lies Siddhartha;s realization that all human beings grow old, all are prone to nightmare and disease, and all must ultimately come to the same implacable end. Books endlessly repeat that one same story.” (“The Library at Night” by Alberto Manguel p. 229)

Artwork by Evelyn De Morgan, 'The Prisoner' c. 1908 in [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Plea bargain

Their life’s journey is a treasure quest,

tough to solve for any X

with all the mortal obstacles.

They hunt for hints by feeling

for warmth on fingertips, and continents.

Not coming near a single solid clue

that was graspable within 

the fingered seams of coast.

Their tokens stacked tall,

They have amassed considerable ease

and yet

Nothing seemed more natural

Than making maps with more

movable lines, theoretical angles

and following the footsteps before

like ants

Inevitable colonizing, war was natural.

The wrong place at the right time.

Mountains make them move another way,

the learning left no trace

Of the gilt progress. 

Image credit(ed) By Jacob d'Angelo after Claudius Ptolemaeus[1] Nicolaus Germanus (www.polona.pl), Cosmographia , 1467 in [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

A crappy map is a happy map

A map is handy
for some...
Still-just rendering space
this here: that there
(imagining is not knowing beyond
what is not seen).

This world is flat,
trapped in a map,
cornered in labels and confined in lines,
open to borders-crossing...
Still-it plans
for speculation.

I drew a map,
of no place I know-
but discovered it anyway,
and I know
my way around this place
of space, like the back of my red hand

measured by my means, not in factors of feet
walking the picket. I had to draw it before I saw
it, a map of me in this place, no free-handed trace
left to write what else
could not fit-
why did I quit?

I'm at the edge of the world.
Peering over, dripping down,
chilling off,  the trail simply stopped
mid-sentence, where the directions
should have shown, I should have known
without                           trespassing past the limits of Doubt.



Image By http://www.geographicus.com/mm5/cartographers/schoolgirl.txt [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons, c. 1810 described as schoolgirl whimsical Hartshorn map of Newfoundland.