That night

Moonlit midnight

Weeping willows whip with winds

Roses rock

thrashing thorns thrust

trash tumbles through the

sin slick stained street...

Suburbia stirs under sleepless sheets.

Chimes clang cacophony choirs

cats cry 

Porch lights pulse on the pale pavement

a piano plays...

Otherwise

Only one oppressed

Woman worries and wonders what will withstand

sirens, storms, shattering and shearing souls,

now and never

Survival so still

Havoc hath had

Infinite intention 

Itself.

Painting by George Bellows, 'Summer Night' c. 1909 in Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Time drop

This morning

behind charred clouds

the moon sank 

as if weighted by 

its alabaster center

yet holding

light,

becoming full

bodied between

plumes of thick night.

Time brings on vertigo.

The past smells of soot,

the smoke dissipates 

as soon as it appears

now 

the ashes of what was once

solid

touch smears what has 

dis-appeared.

Imagining the days to come

are dreams,

the haze and glow of a child 

in wonder,

hoping for a pony

afraid of the horse

it will be-come. 

Now, like water the falls

in sprinkles

touching my cheeks,

the temperature adjusts

to the soul, a heart

that is cold can hold

now,

clinging to ice

that melts into the ever

present stream

of being 

here. 

Painting by Wilhelm Ferdinand Xylander, c. 1884 in Skagens Museum, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

King of Sandcastles

All the little boys begin
by feeling the power
of costume and cape

learning man versus
nature-
good guys and bad guys

until one day
the costume
becomes a uniform,
clean lines
disappear and
superheroes
become firemen

capable of brazen acts
of valor.

Before the selflessness,
all the little princes
are pranksters,
putting a single grain of sand
inside the oyster shell,
into the monks shoe,

and these became pearls,
of course
time
refined
things.

Little girl, I was called
Firestarter,
and practiced the title
often on bridges.

I have never seen the Sandman
in my sleep,
but in my wake
I feel the sand
filling me in-
side.

Apropos of the ritual 
I chose
to be buried alive
after I say
I do
wish
to be cut by pearls
into innumerable
and indistinguishable
pieces of myself

made up
of ashes and rust
as it must be
my nature.

I must confess,
the arsonist
admired his work
while I wed

the King of Sandcastles
before the tide rushed in.



Photo credit: Galveston Island Sandcastle, Texas, taken July 2011 in Public Domain.

Wait lifter

Where I have sometimes
pled with pronounced pain,
head nestled in a pillow,

I find myself
Now
heaving
and overcome-
weeping with joy
at the alignment,

at how far
these things travel
and come back around.

And I levitate
the world-

at least it feels this way

in the middle.



Image of art installation Title: Levitated Mass by artist Michael Heizer at Los Angeles County Museum of Art in California [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Mann kind

“The diaries of opium-eaters record how, during the brief period of ecstasy, the drugged person’s dreams have a temporal scope of ten, thirty, sometimes sixty years or even surpass all limits of man’s ability to experience time-dreams, that is, with images thronging past so swiftly that, as one hashish-smoker puts it, the intoxicated user’s brain seems “to have had something removed, like the mainspring from a watch.”

-Thomas Mann (The Magic Mountain)

Should I have sweat through those provocative dreams

Since time is running out

And shall I have watched, disturbed and overcome with infatuation,

Pleasure, intent on the scene, all its folded lines hung out,

The mosaic scene, the spackled tiles of moments to keep

Float over the surface of settled matters.

Transience penetrates us to move on and on.

This minuscule thought that writhes its way under

Eyelids-between us, selves. We are

Something small, private, intrusive, edgy and loose.

The Splinter severed from the smooth grain

Pierces its way deeper into our softness, 
past the seventh gate, writhing in quicksand

Only to break off the relationship,

Leaving a white fleshy hole with dead skin
light floods inside singing delicate motors

Before it can draw an arc, or a

furrow atop the brow with vapor and sweat
and feel the tickle from

blood running down wrists and pouring out nostrils.

Resilience needs rest and a sense, a little air and darkness,
solitude in a moment to hold on despite the vertiginous spin
We are in this together, that you remember 

That this horrific nightmare

Has occurred to me before, many times, before

I woke. 



Painting by Ivan Aivazovsky, 'Pushkin at Ai-Petri during sunrise' 1899 in [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

lying in the grass

It was just a dream, but I woke up wondering
if I will ever again meet the dapper demon...

who offers a choice to become blind forever
or deaf to only my own voice-

much like the migrating fish in the Lethe...

up or downstream doesn’t change the course.
I remembered saying that I’d rather never
see brand new green or the sad sky again-

I would just try to feel them touching me

from now on, without sight
I might believe in conductivity 
through contact,
life, this body... 

And assuredly, others will certainly appear
more clearly to me.

But the handsome hellion in the dream
misheard the choice, 

or chose otherwise on my behalf,

and my kaleidoscope eyes kept confusing 
up and down, 

feeling my feet in the bluegrass, 

facing the limelight. 

Painting by Albert Joseph Moore [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Rapid eye movement

It was important to him that he remembered his dream 
so he could tell me-
He remembered his ‘idols’ there, men he looked up to 
from down in the trenches of the real world, 
They were all there,  welcoming, 
they treated him as one of the ‘boys’.

And one of the boys 
gave him a box, a puzzle box which he shook
And some pieces fell out, he felt terrible about it, 
He may have been apologizing to me.

He told me 
how frantically he scoured the floor
So he could solve the puzzle completely 
and please them greatly.

And he did but the pieces came out again and again and I was 
Certain the picture was starting to develop- 
he was dreaming of us.

His father and step-mother while visiting us once, told me about his 
childhood propensity to steal two jigsaw puzzle peices so 
at the end of the day, he could be the One
who finishes.

In the next scene, he was sitting in a room with a low table, 
on a shaggy rug, the puzzle in the box sat atop,
but  he was certain there were still pieces missing 

so he was hesitant to try to put it together
knowing it couldn't be completed.

I asked him if he wasn’t curious to know what the puzzle pictured,
He said it was just a silly dream,

And the missing pieces weren’t the thing about the dream,
it was the idols, he said.

I found it puzzling and pinched myself.  

Image credit By Mennonite Church USA Archives [No restrictions], via Wikimedia Commons.

A big mouth is needed to swallow the multiverse

Is the multiverse unlikely, meaning unlikable to us,
because liking multiples of the same things 

seems all too impersonal?

Do you ever get the impression that we all concoct alter egos 

because these creative blends of us, 

seem more colorful, more pleasing as when we put on airs or

our Sunday best?

In the spirit of good versus evil, 

it is in the realm of dreams that that wishy-washy haze happens
to occur to us naturally, like swirls, repetitively, relevant, fractal and

speaking to us in a language we have forgotten
but makes perfect sense.

While conversely, 

the domain of fright lurks in the mulberry shade, 

she had red nectar dripping from yellow teeth,
thick with motive 

and a mare, a black unicorn
rides across the endocarpous venom of night.

Aha! By chance

what ever shape it was, a light shone on Idea, 

inhabitants of both Inverses,
yet you are the only connection
to Brilliance.

Fear- as in pure concentration on failure,

shall break focus of the glass eyed many, 

the multitudes, multitudinous, 

appear as a collective blur, 

there must be just one
that blinks...

Inside,  

i seek connection and likeness in this

one way reflection. From inside mind shells,

these walking souls on water wheels,
were still

spinning too fast
and wet behind the ears.

Painting By Alice Bailly (self-portrait, 1917) in [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Counting Sleeps: A Bah-lid

Don't I dream anymore?
How to say,
I mean the real you

pixel on a big picture,
just too much macro-clysm
to mouth out, I conceive.

Mostly,
breathing through it, as I
must.

Wanting not of mine,
not that I would
disagree in contentment.

And all of those steps made today,
left right traces
blown away...

Somewhere may we-
someplace, let us-want to
make some thing interesting
since I cannot sleep
under such a new moon.

For now,
I would join you since you too
are going my way...


Painting by Władysław Ślewiński (1896) in [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

tiny affirmations

Yes
I said, opening the door.
In he came with a crooked smile
his eyes down cast-
my feet-
bare
and stood
there-
I facing him.

with first blinks and a rub of my eyes-
Don't-said he-quickly-his hand
fingering the silky nude rose
pink petals, curled tips and
composed in the tiny crystal vase.

Get up-See-'Tis better to Dream-Always.
Says he, with a warm flannel smile
(around me).

Yes,
I slept a while-
yes, it felt so good.
I don't know if I dreamt
or what it meant that my
pillow smelt so sweet and pink
like tiny crystals, maybe leaves...

Yes,
was the first word
awake.
And It was good.




Image of painting by Frederic Leighton [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons, Flaming June (1895).

Thus Spake a Prince of Prussia

Has there ever been a person who lived between

then and now, not now and then?

Dreams do this to us.

Details and physics, waves and sand, 

snow and rainbows, 

the observable highs and the lows,

It was as though fine tuning each note

explains why we dance to the song.

Transportation becomes the Philosophers Steam,

traing thoughts by voice and vapors,

and such as smoking papers

and burnt nerves 

on track. 

There is a picture of Nietzsche,

reclined with his feet on an ottoman,

his hands clutch the lapel of his wool coat

sheepishly his lower lip grazes out in view.

The smile lines say libertine and it is sad,

not needing, for want thereof

last laugh and half mast and full bore.

Mercurial man with his playmates, pretty

little penultimate Plutonians 

falling in and out of love like Spring.

He and she circumvent any obstacles 

and asteroids 

some times in line. 

Delirium, therein they concluded,

the horse, of course, and inherent

potency of white Prague.

What does not kill you did not care 

deeply enough to listen to the voices

and translate gagged passions

into fetters.

With a little apathy,

all complaints have been quelled.

This leaves room to travel.

Ape & essence, Super man, good beyond evil,

the power to will, the tragedy of birth, 

where peacocks, buffaloes and Ecce Homos roam,

these were titles of poems

I believe in ideas and insomnia never sounded

more prophetic.

The past princes would say, we continue to be

pathetic plebes

living now and then, dwelling in then and

now manual means melancholy,

machines write programs in prose

and sign 

every thing, Eternally,

Dionysus. 

Image credit:

en: Friedrich Nietzsche. Photograph from the series „Der kranke Nietzsche“ ("The ill Nietzsche") by Hans Olde, between June and August 1899. Original at Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv Weimar, signature GSA 101/37.

Scan of a reprint in Benders/Oettermann (ed.): Friedrich Nietzsche - Chronik in Bildern und Texten, Hanser / dtv 2000, p. 806/7

Sleepy head, dream your own dream

Something said Sleep, and she did.
Someone said she should Wake-Up, she did not hear.
Some people thought she should give up, quit it-she didn't...
Somebody believed her dream, somebody didn't believe in her, she didn't know whom to believe.
Some thought she could choose, some thought Bad Choices, she dared to try, to lose-she must.
So few knew-
she woke up.


Painting by Johannes Vermeer, A Woman asleep at table (1657) in [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Back-up luck

Writers are superstitious-so are baseball players and tight rope walkers-
I'm not sure about astronauts or politicians...
Dreams are more important to writers than waiters-who are waiting to live their dream.
In reality most dreams are forgotten upon waking.
In the wake of a bad dream, I had a premonition all my poems
were gone, like eggs-hatchlings left in one coop
and really-this has happened to me twice before yet this dream disturbed me more.
I said something about it aloud-if you are superstitious you know this is not allowed.
Forced to act, I reacted in duplicate, making copies, I saved, re-visited and barely recognized
them as all mine.
When I had the thousand stacked up by grandiose
subject and sorted by type-
humanity looms tall over the rest,
space, time, love, humor, in proper tributary, in reaction and reflection-
the poets of yesteryears would have stacked up much differently.
Most poets, historically consumed by cult are exhumed for love and above all
to reclimb the Fall over towering babble
and the wild will of the west, toppled progress and drowning in duties.
This humanity trods heavily, the paper rises, trees topple
and as if in a dream the poems scream of dying desire,
the death of discovery, the final resource, of course a corpse of work, ashes to dust, toil and rubble without troubling to wake for the passing of people that speak in poetry, or the writers that were right all along these same lines.




Image By Henning Söderhjelm [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons. Photograph of the Finnish writer Lenning Söderhjelm (1888–1967).

Luc(in)da

You again, I say
As though I dreamt
We had never met.









Image by Evelyn De Morgan [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons, Night and Sleep (c. 1878).

Little big things add up

You count the ants,
I will count the stars
The sheeple will graze in between.

The sun will highlight
optical illusions,
as color-wheel real.
The moon casts shadows
on our little delusions,
fear reigns supreme
in dream.

Our being
Here
while pointing to a view
too minute to see audibly
too vast for me
to grasp without the imaginary,
makes dreams with my reality.




Image credit Popular Science Monthly V. 29 (1886), thru telescope image via Wikimedia Commons.

Pequeño Sueño

Like waking...
When the material world
flashes its things, solid as snapshots;
clock, window, truck, cat, plumbing,
stretch toes, sigh deeply, lay, sheets,
sweat, stir. It comes. Solid. Heavy and Material.
You've fallen awake. In the thick of It.
Exit bed, feet float, glide along, smooth tile
and enter your dream…world.
The motions-you move through-
seeking any signs of a new day.
Yes, this is all too familiar.
Here you are again.
And then you realize, rationalize;
a dream is to pretend. I pretend
Practicing the motions
with a lingering notion
nothing you do is new.
All that you think and say
was there before you.
This is no nightmare, but awakening
is scary. It is your secret
when you weep-while you smile.
Playing your part, stage set,
cast into type, lost into words
you've memorized
but have no idea
how they got there
and seem suddenly, today

something new,
or just acted out

by the other 

dreaming You...

Composed 12/3/15
Image of painting by József Borsos, The Artists Dream (The Little Painter), 1851 [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Lucid Lines (Tanka)

soft edges dream state

pretending you are the star

behind the curtains

your understudies perform

the lead in reality

Image of painting by Edgar Degas, Four Ballerinas on stage (c.1885-90) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Counting Elephant Leap Years

That elephant over there,
kneels on the keystone,
reciting a thousand names
that run together.
Vedic sounds coated red,
through lucid mists
he said he stands
for love-
in thirty-two ways,
in twenty-nine days.

As it is customary
for February,
to drop in on dreams
and sow fertile desire
where wild light will
cast an epic tragedy.

When love grows,
that one over there named
Ganesha, strokes his rats hair
and dances on the tips
of his round toes,
spinning his chakras
and juggling icy hearts
he freezes a moment
with potential, spouting 

prisms of inertia

retracting all the
matterless time

resting on balance.

Strands of helmikuu,
pearly wisdom hung
around your neck,
possess and strangle
with the charm of love.
Toxic lust set in an 

amulet of broken trust.

Ganesha says Love 

cannot survive the possibility 

of a  moonless month.
He comes to say,
only February has space
and time to give and gets
to jump all over juxtapositions

of weight and gravitate in

centripetal passion.

Crucified by greed, 

immaterial layers; 

the rose, crystallized rocks.
His trunk is too full
to maintain refrain or 

balance on shaky propositions
only to land on sharp ultimatums.
Peircing reality, I fell hard.

I was left alone with red.
Ganesha left the room.
It was all a dream,
I saw upon waking
my blue body still aching.

I kept the pretty pearls.

Image painted by elephant in Thailand, uploaded By Deror Avi (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Feature image (top) By Udunuwara at English Wikipedia (Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons.) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Sad today, more sorrow tomorrow

Squeezed my eyes so tight

I crimped my nose

trying to seal the heavy drapes

eyelids

the event horizon

line of eyelash hairs

black holes that hope

when

I open-

s  l  o  w  l  y  

to rearrange the world

around me

or just wishing to warp

and disintegrate my reality

I wish to be taken

hostage for a dream

it would seem most simply

escape is what I mean

I find myself thinking

of my keys

prism pavement

welcoming

the open road

to just go

a  w  a  y  

get lost

which I've found

you cannot do 

accidentally

to night 

I fight

gravity

pinned in place

notching another

non event rising day.

Image by Chameleon, via Wikimedia (Public Domain).

We Will Wake

Maybe the rain will wash away the blood...
Maybe the wind will clear the singed air...
Maybe the ice will freeze the last time...
Maybe less(ons) does not mean mor(ality)...
Maybe our voices are all different...
Maybe we are all saying the same thing...
Maybe everyone speaking leaves no one left to listen...
Maybe our fingertips don't feel the same...
Maybe our Beliefs are all temporary...
Maybe I'm wrong...
It may just be
nightmares
are as important as dreams
at reminding us daily of real possibility.



Image of painting by Raimundo de Madrazo y Garreta (1841-1920), [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons. Coming out of Church.