The day severs dreams from my waking reality
memory unwilling to grant me their secrets
The strange craftiness of their nature
The sweet depth of their journeys
Cut off from the mellow warmth
The colors and emotions that blend into one
The secrets and epiphanies
That noone believes
My heart and brain both long to experience them
But the mundane wall of the expedient has risen and dried
Blocking those secret worlds
Only bowing for the new day's sun
Clapping hands
The wish for new things to step inside of life
The unwillingness to make them happen
Beautiful fantasies leading somewhere incredible apparently
The future you desire
Is found in flat routine
Days that trace the same deep lines
made from the tyre tracks of yesterday
Such big things suddenly happening except not
overwhelming events come up except don't
The oracle is cardboard
The soothsayer a tarot hack
Don't answer the question
Take the worm off the hook
the life line is going deeper
dragged down by the sinker
Carp perches on the rock bottom
Above oily black seabirds get snagged
On old fishing nets
The past such a web
your personal racket
Volume and mafia
Scratching backs
and pro quos
Body bag
Concrete weights
Boat all blood stained
slumber in the deep
Carpe diems
Flock conformity
left feeling like idiot beggers
Hats in hands hoping for quarters
Never coming up for air
Afraid to give away too much
Thinking the secret is safe
Alas its all out in the open
Never answering the questions
And up the sleeve just enough ammunition
So if cornered
you can tommy gun around the magazine
A story re-enacting itself
inside of the head
A bubble of pride
formed from years of pretend
The young man looked offended
He gazed amazed at his interlocutor
Eyes almost watering
Hint of outrage visiting his brow
Surprise and visible transition into mutual unease
Then he states the obvious, articulating his displeasure
He corrects each part of the interaction as if such an act was necessary
Perceived faux pas that don't measure against his cultural conditioning
Through the possible reasons this interaction was wrong in nature
Strategically he gives concessions
Tells the interlocutor to go on with his day
And that he genuinely wishes him well
Which carries no value whatsoever
flooding the situation with another layer of surreality
The imposing farewell is a pair of scissors severing a string
Ive seen the face poking out of them clouds up there yonder
You say there are too many words
But there are not enough to describe that face
It imposes hollow eyes like something tribal
It tells me to question my whole life
friend and rival
It beams out from between thick crusts of abandoned cloud
It begs no pathetic collective it is whole except for a nose that doesn't fit
It promises rain and truth and strife and peace and god and then maybe some death
It promises those deep greys that scream flood flood from the bewitched sky face
It grusses the mountain and lets loose on the lowland
That face all pale and wiggly unapologetic fully fully that deiety
Some nestle in their coziest corners blanketed and deafened
Others seek the beginning of those inevitable thunder like drums
The ones the boom and hug the soul
The ones that emit fortune and wrath simultaneously
uncanny gloom building itself and the face still smirks
My spirit dances up there in the chaos
let me have mine these thoughts quasi furled dream unfolding
Hands go up and down with the deluge the face looms again
The smile and eyes wash the tarmac rearrange these streets
Torrential relentless, dragging what doesnt belong
Robbing its essence, as that thing did the city when the city was dry
The swing attached to the apple tree
The sandpit not too far off
Places so inviting where cheerful children play
The sun declared yellow
Hovers aloofly in autumn
A far off beach north winds cool
Freedom cruises downward through
Eliminating the summer heat for my writing partner
The pen in reach the next line hers
The grass remembers her footsteps
Apples fall where beaks and worms meet
A page left open, a poem for a shortening day
The kind of world busy with children's chatter
Leaves accumulating in patterns on the ground
Like a red carpet to the night deer or racoon
A small bird busy with it's own language
Jenny watches the morning give itself to the afternoon
Arctic winds steal parts of the summer
The rest of it retreats southwards
We are lost
I see the remains of us
You all staring
wanting some sort of instruction now
I say these are the best of us
We are organized by region
we might as well be a religion
we don't seek the truth we believe we know it
But we are lost
Desperation in the eyes of our soldiers
Day is churning dusk
men are dizzied by their apathy
Make a little speech
stirr those last little sparks
Send them off on their last suicide missions
While I retire somewhere out of bomb blast range
And so it was
Later that night after fighting died down
I armed and returned to the spot
Sirens of their ambulances and security forces
I loomed in the shadows and listened to their voices
Then vanished
as if I had never existed
