They weep with a collective moan

For humanity taking possession

Of blessings granted in freedom 

For the thunder will begin to strike

At half past the new moon 

As the wrath of disappointment reigns

Awakening truth is those sleeping

But except for those deceased

Growing weary in their pain 

For the forgotten is the beginning 

An ever-being returning again

Until the fires erupt hellaciously 

And the barren will sprout again

A new life found in the garden

"Oh, I see. You're like a social justice person, right?"

"Alcohol is carbs. It doesn't matter if it is beer, wine, or vodka: it is nothing but carbs."

"At 10 o'clock, the sun goes away."

"I mean, I'm not an attorney, but --"

"There is (sic) a lot of reasons why I don't call him my boyfriend."

"He had weed, but his tags were expired. That's the real reason. My tags were expired once."

"He is so the opposite of that holy crap. But he's spiritual, ya know?!"

"There are only a few artists in the United States."

"Baseball brought them together. It's America's sport."

"I don't want to get political."

"I'm not saying the weed was okay, but his tags were expired."

"Well, I-- I like to hike. I mean, mountain biking is cool, too."

"I would get angry. And I didn't want to take it out on other people, so I'd take it out on myself."

"For me, it was a mental thing."

"How old are you?"

"The thing is, I can tell you exactly what your boyfriend is doing right now."

"No, it takes place in the frontal cortex. I mean, yeah-- The front part, or whatever."

"My partner is in the hospital right now...and it doesn't matter because it's the chemicals. You can tell someone to get better, but--"

"It's an expedited solution for a long term problem."

"Do you need help?"

"I'm sorry."

"I realize that life is not about what happens, but--"

"Ready to cash out?"

"I'm in my early 30's, what are you talking about? I don't want to say that I'm 29."

"Daaaammnn. She's got life experience."

"Boyfriend. I don't like anything about the word. I mean, Boy. Nope, I just don't like it."

"He's Jamaican and I'm Welsh."

"He's 41...no. I'm 44, and he's 40."

"He was on dialysis for 17 years."

"Can you change the channel?"

"You can hold it in your palm, an entire novel. It's fascinating, really."

"Why did you wait so long to be put on a transplant list?"

"I'm sorry, I'm crying."

"It's a social group."

"I always had to take the offense."

"He was a Justice person who drinks. I liked him."

"Without having to impose--"

"This is the Sir definition. This is it."

"It's legal in Colorado. And I think it should be."

"I've been here, but that's not my fault."

"He takes what's made available to him."

"It's a metaphysically demanding job."

"I smoke cigarettes."

"I don't caption well. I'm too verbose."

"Are you okay?"

"Cajun pasta."

"None of that is any of my business, but it seems like it should be."

"My job sucks."

"Everybody on that floor hates me now."

"What was the twilight thing?"

"Going with the consequences...that would be a very big thing."

"It's a decision."

"Big C-list, yeah."

"I'm here. Where're you?"

"You're a lawyer, so you can make up an excuse."

"I am lucky."

"I need to see you again, and more often"

"He told me to put it in, but I never do."

"She said he's doing better."

"We're going to Broadway."

"I've never been--"

She battered with rectitude

Giving slack to its rope

Swaying continuum playfully

Against duality choked

From the limbs of humanity

Where fruit ripened until sour

And the pitch of a nightingale

Went mute and consigned

***

Introduction

Imagine mapping your consciousness on an untouched palate strewn across a landscape devoid of all sight and sound where a natural human is afforded the freedom to intuit true reality. You are deaf to the voice of authority, and blind to the manufactured lessons of good and bad. And you navigate your environment sans the concept of linear time.

My thoughts unfold onto paper, as I transcribe the shared frequency of existence. Broken apart from the true essence of nature interrelated is the human condition, and its struggle is self-perpetuating.

I share compassion for the birds with my brother wind, respect for the towering grandfather oak trees that provide the deer with shade, the sun and I have come to a familial understanding, and my sister flowers curtesy with empathy for an oncoming angry storm.

These are not metaphors, but understand that my interpretation is limited in its articulated form due to the words provided by the human language. The truth is, everything is multidimensional.

Words house the literal, but they are both fact and fiction. They are metaphors and analogies, and they overlap repeating because the frequency of life is everlasting.

And therein exists no death, just motion absorbed elsewhere. And, as such, my use of words speak to the dead and living alike. Because what we have been enlisted to accept, is not actually what we are seeing.

Recognizing the shared frequency gives new meaning to our manmade fabrication of linear time. The truth does not begin and end, rather, it is a tapestry ad infinitum, and, at times, it rolls-over onto itself to remind us of our roots.

The following essays are what I have seen in this new sight.

Essays

"the rambling echo of a bubble skipped at a 90 degree angle across a meadow of tree bark half-peeling"

Tomorrow plays in retrospect before the habituating verbs reenact their preconceived actions, once-removed. Their faces reflect blurry (but with pristine clarity) against the fogged bottom of glasslike spring water. Before the present happened, it moved in past tense where happenstance reinforced destiny: the moments-in-time grew weary and still against the tango foxtrot tactics dancing upon a shattered floor.

For a heart to break in expectation of a lover (never met), life will unravel in reverse until circling-back again and over its predestined memories.

They swapped vows with the cavemen, but the intent of their dialect was lost in due manufacturing. They could feel with their intuition but the exchanging nouns were not yet conceived, and so they walked away. Backwards.

Melancholy dreams strike a bass chord, but are nonetheless fleeting in tenor stone.

They fainted rapidly, and in a slow-motion succession, into the dark clouds that hung heavy in an everlasting blue sky.

To mock yielding before judgment is better than not, but the illusion grows great against a roulette game of forethought and scattered intellect.

If the date of death is catalogued as next year, but today is trapped in the veil of yesterday's pale widow, will tomorrow's willed mistress stand ready to defend? It has become impossible to decipher the inverse of falsely not false; is that not true?

They say a time capsule of prophecy was buried above the surface of the ocean floor, but its contents were flooded in the tidal wave of droughtful afterbirth spooned from the excavation of thieves in this nation.

Ill-defined free will

Burns contemporaneously as

The hiss of their resistance resigns

Dissipating until surrendered and

Traveling through a social hourglass

Of time and their projected reality

Where linearity is ignited and

Humanity--as a whole--will revolt

Until evolved.

***

"coffee break"

He scored the magnitude of her enthusiasm, but it barely registered. Judging the worth behind her silence, often he found more sentiment in her noise. And walking alongside him on reversed perpendicular bridges, she almost stumbled into the reflected sky. But instead of falling, she was swaddled. Stabilized by the serenity of the clouds passing below, she was able to continue on the path to its end.

"That bird over there --

The one with a red chest:

Listen."

The bird is sitting in the tree behind us, and its chattering prosody is noticeably familiar. Chords of melancholy are released on its song, and I am moved to transcribe the notes that are played.

It is like the twice-removed cousin you saw once at a funeral: nature is drawn to identify through instinctual recognition, but with the frequency remaining just foreign enough, we choose to disclaim it.

But all I can do now is watch you roll your cigarette. Your intention is careful. And it is mindful. It is as though you are handling the delicacy of a Lotus. [Like the time we discussed the segments of an orange, and how they echo what is sacred.]

And as I watch, I consider how many more cigarettes you could have eventually rolled if you had just preserved all of the scraps you have dropped over time.

It feels like an angel is eavesdropping on us. Or maybe it is the sun. Hidden, its warmth is shy today, and I can relate.

There are too many scratchy fibers encasing my coconut skull to effectuate any thoughts with real meaning. I hear the fragments splash in its crowded vacancy, but the nonsensical order sounds like the white noise in a warehouse.

She loved to witness his intelligence. His transcendency was palpable, and she prayed it was contagious.

She moved closer to him on the bench because his mind was peyote and it felt good to get high.

Suddenly, I am flooded with curiosity about a stranger I sat next-to on the bus yesterday. Her ivory skin and red hair reminded me of spoken word. As we shuttled darkly beneath the retiring city, I stared at her feet which were crossed uncomfortably against her weight. She had a bumblebee tattoo on the top of her right foot. I wanted to ask her if she had a reason for choosing the right foot over the left. And I wanted to tell her that it seemed she was subconsciously crossing her right over left in an attempt to avoid smashing her bug. In my opinion, of course.

But I decided to goof-off on my phone instead.

Time is a wave: God jumping into the ocean as we assign linear meaning to its slow-motion burst, but, really, it is all just one Pollock mark on the surface of Earth.

And then it is over.

I want you to write a poem about me. I want to see myself emerge from your flesh, and through your eyes. The thought of it excites and frightens me, all at once. I can't help but wonder if the bad will marble the good, or if the good will marble the bad. It really doesn't matter, either way. And it doesn't even matter how the verses unfold or what metaphors are applied, because:

I know that you love me.

And you --

Love me

In a way that

One-dimensional words

Could never describe.

***

"the day the pods opened and society emerged on the winds of stifled anger"

Lucidity, here and there: 


My stomach rises to my throat as I

brace myself for my imminent death

But fate cast its schedule without notice,

and so I evaporate into limbo and wait


I don't think I have been conscious for days, but I could be wrong. Tangibility is an abstraction now, and its negotiability is debatable.  And truth was cremated.  Its boney fragments were grated into dust: Truth is an illusion and it is forever trapped in an urn hourglass of time.  


Begotten is Existence for 

She folded prematurely

And into herself

Her magnetic fields

Were opposites sparking

Negative dormance birthing discord

And War erupted

From the fire in her gut 


And, as for me, I am lost in a nightmare for which bread crumbs are frowned upon.  


The weathered hands of my ancestors reach for me, but they are limbless and dry.  

And I cannot find my way back now.  Because back to tomorrow means retracing yesterday, but yesterday is today, and today would have been tomorrow. But we died too soon, and we are left with nothing but words.

No one exists because nothing is real.

What is and

What isn't

Is a projection of

My created reality.


Everything is blurry, but, when I try to explain it, my voice slurs with the same slant as the definitions. 


And You are my Comfort. But Comfort is created in the bowels of Fear and it exists only for its Creator (ultimately evaporating in the Light).

But tell me:  Can you see what I see?  Lie to me.

I am confused by your Mirage because it resembles shades of Reason. If I pinch you, will you flinch?


If passion is a serpent then shoot me up with its venom.  Humanity is extinct, and all hope is lost.


The world hangs heavy, burdened with loss:

    Bland food keeps the gluttons busy; and,

    The deviants are occupied searching for love in a dry well of promiscuity. 


I am surrounded by strangers clothed in the familiar, but Deceit waits around the corner with a knife.  


I don't remember my birth; I was raised by a faceless mother and my father's voice belonged to the wind.  My own children were placed in my open arms, but my womb has been forever barren.  

Streets lined with faces gone mad are laced with delirium and they spit their anger at my feet.  Their cavernous mouths hold ghosts with a dying sense of Awareness, but they are gagged and drowning in their own saliva.  I offer my tongue as a tightrope to clarity, but they cut it out and serve it with gravy.

I awoke in a stadium 

It was lined with broken bleachers

The spectators heckled me

Like caged beasts craving blood

And the racquetball machine shoots yellow darts at my palms, and my hands burst into flames with each insatiable epiphany.  


I tell them that empathy doesn't exist, and they grin with delight—as they watch me skate barefoot on the thin ice entombing Humanity.  And as I lose my balance, they wager their bets.

Is the blood smeared on the underbelly of disillusionment mine or theirs? 

The clarity of our existence triggered my coma, and I want to wake up. But my subconscious rhetoric saturates my wit and I am drunk with confusion: I can't escape this new hell. 


Here we are  

Amongst the cannibals

Awakened with horns

Under Victory crowned

We are alone

In the lustful crowd and

Their hologram of power

Where they trample love

And I reach for you

  But you are asleep


The windows are fogged with an ominous sadness.  It distorts the faces of those on the other side. Despair perches on my back like a scoliosis hump, and my nightmare is the new reality: A festering infection for which I am immune.

***

"calm"

Today the sun is pulsing with heated knowledge. Its radiating beams are caught in limbo, and they hover anxiously in despair.

The unspeakable urgency of this day triggers me, and a familiar tune begins to play on my turntable. But the record skips.

Perched to my back, my monkey clings. He speaks in his native tongue, but, with overemphasized syllables, his words blur together.

There is a breeze today. It whispers to me in the same collective voice of a child's choir. Unearthed memories disburse, but they are lost before they are found.

And as I sit here, hunched below a crooked oak branch, my gut festers with my melancholy nerves. Why does one long to return to a place that never existed?

The humble clouds are finally forming and they pass between me and the sun. With deep relief I nod with appreciation, for now I can take solace in the stillness of the shade.

***

I am lost within

Dreaming lucidity 

Imagining you as

Your words dance wildly

Between the lines of

Aboriginal dialogue

Adapted from

Stage and projected

Onto screen to mimic

As the curtain falls--

But I still hear your voice 

You are reciting a monologue 

While facing the wall.  

The sands of this hour

Sweep across her flesh

Carrying her

Upon barren roads

Without solace but

Her resilience ascends

Fighting against the tides

To nurse the hunger

Of her offspring swaddled

To the breast of her soul and

Giving back to the Earth

The foliage of tomorrow

Fruit so ripe

The hydration rains and

The breeze of tranquility

Settles dust upon dust

In the moment of

New beginnings

Where endings commence

And satiating the turbulence

Due time ensues

The city must have burned

Under last night's waning moon

Leaving the sky as its widow

Mourning grey with brown swirls

There lingering in-kind

With its orphaned gypsy smoke

Rising above the extinguished

Damp remains of mildew

Their body parts were scorched

By a cremation stopped short

As the generator failed

To the sound of far cries

Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.

Today I will make an effort

To speak out loud because

Dialogue calms the patrons of

This gaping space in humanity

And my words will wear top hats

A formal cane and white gloves

Conducting with the hand of

An Italian girl's gesture

Dance with me.

Do you know Fred Astaire?

Gene tapped in his puddles

And I was inspired.

I arrived early today with

Time to inhale the river's mist

And as the shuttle journeyed across

Its tongue exhaling between mortar

Below heaven, we tickled

The scalp of hell with

The wheels of our monotony

It is Wednesday and

I feel asleep

I am wearing blue in my dream

I don't know if

The sun will burn away

This overcast haze of

Consciousness scorned

But its heat appears

Glad today

Invited

And it reminds me that

Nothing is ever exactly

As it appears

It is embarrassing to be assigned to this table again. But thank goodness, really, I don't want to sit with them. And I guess those are the only options: to be included or ignored.

Because kids should be seen, not heard.

I think that they pity me. The grow ups, that is. Well, some do, for sure. But the others don't seem to like me. At that's fine, if you ask me.

I'm not really a kid anymore, yet here I am at the kid table. I feel disproportionate, and oversized. I am grotesquely super-sized, compared to their perception of me.

And my knees hit the underbelly --

I wonder if this is her poker table. That's what we use ours for at home. But ours has a small tear, and I always poke my fingers into it. Its stuffing feels manufactured, just like me. And I always think about the things that I could hide inside its lining, but it'd have to be something small like an Ace rolled into a straw.

They still tease my sister for cheating at blackjack. She kept an Ace tucked under her leg, and she used it to win a couple hands before they noticed. My sister is smart, especially for an eight year old. And everyone finds her endearing, but mostly because she has dimples.

I love these glasses. The gold paint on the rim is chipping, but it seems right. I'm sipping a Roy Rogers, but pretending it's alcohol. And every mint that I eat, I swallow whole like a pill they are forcing me to take.

I wonder what these mints are called. I love the way they dissolve before you finish chewing. They remind me of Nona. I wish I could disappear before anyone noticed... just like a mint.

My mom keeps looking over. She nods like, although she is pleased, for now, she's not taking our goodness for granted. I think she'd rather be sitting with us, though. She escaped this town young, rebelling against its generations of full bred roots.

Okay. I think I've arranged my food enough to pass for "I'm full." A real lady never finishes her plate, after all. Gluttons are sinners and big-eaters aren't feminine.

As soon as my sister is done, I'll ask if we can be excused. If we walk past their table together, she'll grab their attention and I can evaporate.

I hate big holidays. I want to go home.

He calls me darlin. And angel, and pumpkin.

He calls everyone darlin, but his tongue snaps the roof of his mouth a little differently, when he says it to me.

We met in a bar. It's where I've met most of my men. But the night I met him, my past evaporated. The bar was empty. It was a grand opening, unadvertised and failed.

But not for us.

That night, I wore a typical first date getup. Something grown up. With a veil of confidence, stating "I know what I want," laced with some, "Don't worry, I'm a sure thing."

I ordered a manhattan, extra sweet. A splash of maraschino cherry juice, to remind me of my childhood.

He doesn't drink much, he has an ulcer. But that night he ordered scotch on the rocks. I guess he too was playing a part.

I've worn nothing but torn flannel and heavy eyeliner since that first night. And I almost always start with draft beer now.

He did get lucky that night, but that "luck" has since unfolded into a friendship birthed outside of time. His soul welcomed mine back from before time. Before creation. Where it belongs.

And, darlin, he is now and always will be my angel--guarding and walking with me--into the end of time and beyond.