Where are you going with this?

 Sometimes it's poverty
destitute cut off from the sources
Abundance once conjured now a dry creek bed
stained mud yellow

You plan yourself, who you are going to be
weak at the knees, arms drooping
attempting to retrieve that vital energy
Where is that inspiration, creativity that kick that super hot fuel?

Is it just cheap external recognition
is that all it boils down to
Where are you carrying yourself to
What kind of being are you?

Are you a trier an attempter
How's the water, hows the weather
What's it like being just a trier among all of this
just a mission planner and failer ensconced?

where can you go with your ideas
can you desperately achieve something
Are you panicking right now
Can you create another world to run to?

Move people with words
Is this all just a game
Is that how you've framed it
Just an illusion, just an excursion...

Just one big fat nice try!
One nice big patt on the back
By those who've acquired it all already
"You did a good job, but better luck next time."

struggling through like a giraffe
Two minutes after being born
No one to guide you out on the savannah
just afterbirth slippery on the hooves

The unprotected skull

 On a hard rocky earth
God has given these creatures soft skulls
under Hail and meteors
So vulnerable

Our congnitive senses
Focused inside our heads
Such a violent world
Couldn't we be made like steel

accidents and aggression
storms and earthquakes
A poweful sun shining down
Our soft vulnerable heads exposed

We are lifelong babies 
searching for safespaces
when there are none
trying to avoid brain damage

putting on protection and helmets
Building nukes and shelters
singing nursery rhymes 
telling comforting white lies

In small letters

It was a huge warehouse market that connected to a subterranean chamber. Hundreds of stalls selling food drinks and coffee.
I walked to the coffee stall counter with my son. We ordered a coffee and a hot chocolate, except the teenage girl taking our order didn't speak english. Neither my son nor I could find hot chocolate on the menu. We found coffee on the menu. She understood when we said coffee and pointed to it on the menu to confirm for us.
 We could see over the bench what looked to be ingredients for a hot chocolate. But we didn't know the translation for it.
So I just asked her for two coffees. I took my son's hand and we searched among the packaged products infront of the stall for hot chocolate. A line of impatient people was quickly forming.
There were several packaged products in five hundred gram bags that looked like hot chocolate, but I couldn't read the writing and neither could my son.
An older woman from the line was looking over, before she abruptly turned away I saw a glint as if she knew both what we were looking for and how to speak the local language.
The two men working with the girl, one her father, one her uncle were laughing. They understood less english than the girl, but they understood the situation we were in, finding us the most amusing thing that day no doubt. I looked at the two of them, big men far too big to be making coffee in a small stall. Thick stubble that probably formed two minutes after their shave.
One of the men, the girl's dad I assumed, walked over to us and handed us our coffees. I said thank you and the man nodded as if he understood. The coffee smelled incredible and I could see two very clean stools and a bench, a few meters away.
Then I heard an excited "ha" from my son who was still scanning through the hundreds of packaged products on waist high shelves.
I turned to him, he was holding up a bag with steaming mug on it. The brand and description were indecipherable. But in tiny letters under the image of the mug were the words "Hot chocolate".
I took a sip of the aromatic coffee and looked at the line, by now it had tripled.
The place was empty when we had arrived, now there was barely space to move.
I sipped my coffee and said to him we should sit down and wait for the line to shrink. He grabbed the small sack in his hand. He looked up at me and told me he had never liked coffee and that he had reminded me of the fact. I nodded and told him I was sorry.
We sat on the stools I enjoyed the best coffee I had ever had in my life, while my son stared resentfully at the line. No matter how much I tried to comfort him, the contempt wouldn't leave his face.
Instead of line shrinking it just extended as more and more people arrived.
I tried to tell my son I felt his frustration and in actual fact I had been through many little situations just like this one. He just folded his arms and frowned.
But actually I did know exactly what he was feeling if only he knew. There were many such instances I could recall without effort from my own past.
In my son's case, when you are young caffeine has little effect as kids are usually bursting with energy. Infact it's sometimes just comfort and sweetness a child seeks, like in a hot chocolate for example.
Sometimes parents don't read the fine print.


 

Hidden in plain sight

 Who is that standing over near the garden bar
Pretending to ignore us
Hidden in plain sight not close but not far
performing before us

wherever she is she burns
That is how our eyes decipher her
We attempt to look away and turn
To break eyecontact seems to hurt

walk into the bar avoiding lust and scorn
Shelter from this silent storm
It feels so safe but I know there's danger
That existential beautiful stranger

She hides in the clearing

 Wild animal not a roar, camouflaged, obscured
Sometime of the day, furious there in the clearing
Another animal caught unaware is lured
It's sure time of death nearing

Other animals can smell and hear the ambush
A secret audience from behind the brush
Graceful feminine predator ground blood damp
Fangs drip while applying final throat clamp

No fuss just taking enough to sustain herself
Galaxy of less stealthy creatures move into carcass
Hot and rapacious after the prey's last groan
Polishing it all down to pale bone

Between the palms of the afterlife

 Royal palms and neon signs. Huge acrylic facades for overdecorated restaurants.
Ice cream parlours and donut cafes with outdoor gardens and seating.
Three friends raised their hands in confusion.

Walking in the middle of the carless boulevard. But where were they? The last thing they remembered was buying tickets. This place was sinister you could smell the recent crowds, yet everywhere was absolutely empty.

The friends walked down the boulevard uncertain almost on the verge of panic. Right down the middle of the road trying to stay aligned with each other. Not trusting the shopfronts.
Long paces like desperate hitchikers

They peered through windows from a distance. Tried listening for any sound of civilization. Screaming until their heads vibrated and their own ears numbed. This was not earth.
This was the periphery of heaven. They just didn't know it.
The three friends had died on a faulty rollercoaster. This heavenly place, this colorful promise of abundance they didn't offer an entrance anywhere.

Generational house

 Locked myself upstairs on the third story
My mind crawling as I'm scrawling
My second mother came to check on me
Her daughter calling calling

The floor creaked from outside in the hallway
She knocked softly and her voice clanked out
I put down my writing and traversed the study
Opened the door to her smile, taunt and flout 

Down I went the hundred stairs toward wife
each one echoing a passage from the past
each one a conversation with my life
Her daughter looked at me

Her silent glee, atleast one I haven´t heard
I had pulled myself away from these words
words that I swim deep inside of
way up in my study

where a part of me hibernates over long winters
where I go to forrage secrets of myself and the universe
My silent glee in seeing her catch the glint
My gratitude at being pulled away from my verse