Firewalker

No static
contemplation.
Movement is the key;
Direction, any direction...
inaction
brings destruction.

Turn around,
darkness and glowing
embers
behind and about,
active thought
yields nothing,
remember
shadow, remember
doubt.
This step?
This one,
or that?
Step back
and feet fling
cinders
which splinter
and illuminate
a path.
This-
this vanished
past.
Ashes cloud
around feet
and murky memory
diminishes
until another
footfall
scatters
the dimming dust
and shatters
coals
to tiny sparks
dancing,
cooling,
to quickly fade.

It's time to
move,
sensation swells
to searing scream,
sulfur smells
are obscured
by burning flesh reek,
blood boils
and evaporates
to steam.
It's time
to move, plod on,
stagger,
do not fall,
do not fail.
Failure means
annihilation;
not mere death,
but painful
disintegration-
molecule by
molecule
exploding,
dessicating,
dissolving.

Flailing now,
the fear
provoking flight,
blind stumbling,
shaking
sweating
slipping...

Within my mind
I'm wading;
water,
glacier-fed,
cascading
snow-cold
around my ankles.
Prisimatic droplets
sparkle in sunlight
and splash
against my
skin- my
thighs, my chest.
The breeze
stirs
through the trees
carrying
the scent of
spring-
flowers
and earth,
a world born anew
from ice
and darkness.

My toes
slip
and struggle
for purchase
on stones
smoothed
from eons
of river's
caress.
The pool
expands before
me,
it's surface
the dancing
glow of sunshine
reflected,
and
I
plunge...

#64

A sky, tonight,
heavy with the weight
of stars, crushing
down and each breath
is agony,
is terror.
No doubt there are
others out,
staring at these
remote impassive suns,
alone in the night,
united by isolation.
But we are each
absorbed into the darkness,
breifly absolved
of essence
and existence,
aswim in a sea of stars.

St. Pete Airport Blues

The world is not as simple
as some may glibly say.
Things do not divide so well
from weak or strong
or predator or prey;
for all that conquers also falls
as sure as night turns day
and all that falter sometimes fly
when fate turns again their way.
Light or dark, fit or fool,
beautiful or fey-
remember tides both rise and fall
and mountains, too, decay.

A Fragment of My Imagination

No intellect is needed to see those figures who wait beyond the void of death- every child is aware of them, blazing with glories dark or bright, wrapped in authority older than the universe. They are the stuff of our earliest dreams, as of our dying visions. Rightly we feel our lives guided by them, and rightly too we feel how little we matter to them, the builders of the unimaginable, the fighters of wars beyond the totality of existence.
The difficulty lies in learning that we ourselves encompass forces equally great. We say "I will," and "I will not," and imagine ourselves (though we obey the orders of some prosaic person) our own masters, when the truth is that our masters are sleeping. One wakes within us and we are ridden like beasts, though the rider is but some hitherto unguessed part of ourselves.

Two Poems

I
Eyes fierce and flashing,
she laughs, and her
smile is like the sunlight
reflected from winter ice...
her laughter is the sound of spring,
of trees and birds and growing things.
She turns,
arms out askew,
and it is the dance of a sultry summer solstice,
sweaty and humid and seething.
And her hair whirls about her
like the leaves of autumn
aswirl in the maelstorm
of fading light then falling to her shoulders.

II
Forget what might have been,
what comes and what may...
Right now is what there is,
all there ever is,
and all that will be
springs from today.
This moment, this choice,
is the moment,
the choice and
everything past has passed
in preparation, precipitating
the possible
and potential-
passing with procrastination,
with hesitation,
or trepidation.
With each reluctant respiration
a moment fades
into possibility unfulfilled.

Wasteland Paragraphs 1-4

Behind this leaden sky, the sun is but a dim glow. No warmth penetrates this dull, damp veil. Each sodden breath tastes of ashes and smoke as each footstep slips in the mud and filth and loose stones. This world has moved on. Entropy has at last torn apart all vestige of "civilization" and we are left with ineffable decay; the slow wasting away of love and life and thought. I've no heart left for emotiion, my eyes see only a bleary graying smear. No reason remains for existence and all are lost to attrition.

Something moves nearby, a deeper shadow in the horizonless gloom. I hear the scuflle of its passing and smell the sharp stench of the thing. Yet it remains only a murky outline as the sky continues to rain ash like a heavy winter snow. I freeze lest a footfall give me away and let this phantom pass. These days there are no friends, only competitors or foes.

This earth is cursed and we weary travellers are a curse upon it. Like termites we have devoured the very heart of it and made of it nothing more than tinder fed to ravenous flame. All our technology, our dreams and aspirations, our feeble plays at love are only smoke and ashes, the refuse of a world.

Whatever was out there has moved on, oblivious. We all stumble on in a world obliviated. Dreams are green and deepest blue, the colors of stars and growing things. Those colors are gone, all is awash with soot. Each cough drags a gray cloud from within, further tainting a poisoned atmosphere.

Dream #63

Your bones have been
my bedframe
and your soft skin
my pillow,
the murmur of your breath-
the soundtrack of my dreams.
The silence that you left
is the absence
of your heartbeat
and the emptiness
beside me
in the place you
used to be
is a hollow in my spirit,
a cavity in my chest
where my heart should pump,
a vacuum in the air I breathe.

Now my voice whispers and
the sound escapes as
a creaking moan.
My quiet footfalls
reverberate,
building into a crescendo
of nothing,
an echo in an empty room.

Dream #65

I dream
a song of you.
My ear
against your breast
hearing your heart's
rythym,
the melody of your
breath,
and the harmony
of our caress,
my skin on your
soft skin
like silken bow
across string.

I dream
a song
in the chorus of
a smile,
the libretto
of open eyes,
the crescendo
of your laughter
echoes
in my ears.
Your sighs
diminuendo
as you slip into sleep
and the allegro
of my heart
while I hold you,
pounding like a timpani
prestissimo.

This is a symphony
of us,
the dischord of
our disparate lives,
the dissonance of
our ideals,
the cacophony
of our conversation
converging and coalescing
into the consonance
of unison.

Eulogy

Do you remember?
Did you see
anything I tried
to do or anyone
I tried to be?
This smile, this tear,
this furrowed brow or
the shaking fear
are momentary matters,
meaningless
unless
they mattered
to you or to me
or to anyone who would
look or see.
Forgotten is all
they will ever be.
Not steel, nor stone,
no edifice, or rhyme
will endure beyond a moment
or thought,
all fade or rot
with time.
But if you know,
or if I,
if, for a moment,
we dare to meet
eye to eye,
or heart to heart,
or hand in hand,
then waning will not
matter
and other instants
need not stand.

All I need
can be captured
in your glance,
a hearbeat's thought
and heart
to take the chance
that once will last,
that this will be.
Though fear holds fast,
love makes free.

I am trying out this blogsite. Maybe it can replace my MySpace blog which I seldom use and my notes on Facebook which I cannot control the rights to. Lets see what happens. Now I'm just like every other self-involved douchebag on the web, blogging my heart out to no-one.