Mind Travels

 Part Four

Looking Into the Corners Where I Hid

When did we become

Lost among Mermaids?

How long will we aimlessly swim,

You and I and our culture?

And the songs

Fill our memories.

Birth those time folds

We never suspected we possessed.

Winter closes in

On black birds and bread crumbs,

With shorter day light,

In crackling snow.

So lost among Mermaids

We hold each other's thoughts.

Like strangers we embrace

Waiting for the next wave.

Reading Off My Invisible Wall

Why does creation always come like mice sounds

Commencing when doors are not opened,

When thinking cannot dissolve thoughts,

When assurances have been eaten by rats?

It accumulates like abandoned rain pools

As the natural orders are forgotten,

When hawks make you their target,

And hopelessness seems to be a harbor.

Then creation limps across the tops of stubble,

Lagging last among the flock,

Ignoring the shepherd's whistle,

Shredded by light morning mists.

But before the curtain or guillotine can drop,

Creation drags its crippled feet

Leaving its imprint forever.

Welcome To Brave New Whatever

In the darkness of this night

In its brilliance

Which none dare resist

Where all weapons are too heavy to lift

Where those who fear the dark

Sleep in the light

Where those who fear the light

Close their eyes forever

And rush to marry dullness and father more darkness.

We have made a contract with words.

If we do not read them

They will not hurt us.

We have made a treaty with ideas

If we do not think

They will allow us to sleep.

We have made a pact with love

If we keep to ourselves

It will ignore us.

Each of these thoughts

Re strung like a rosary

Without a cross and without a corpse

We confess forever.

To commit the sins we fear the most

We buried our honor among deserving offspring.

And offer odes to flowers

Which bloom forever.

In the darkness of this night

If the poets or the dogs are right

Who determines if a storm is approaching?

There are no warnings.

The animals have not gone to cover.

No signs the world will end or if God will come.

No signs the earth will be invaded or any of us will ever fly

Again.

Elegy For Hippies And Me

Since I have lived

Through the greatest failures

Man has ever known, an age when everything

Was possible

And nothing possible

I floated, flown, and floundered

Never part of the action and

Never a member of the crew.

It was an age when we could

Have turned away from needs

And sought goals.

It was an age when

We should have settled

For nothing less

Than 'No Preservatives Added'

Stamped on every day.

But in the fourth grade

There was always in the back

Where the big seats sat.

It was called Failure Row

(I never recall a girl

Sitting back there.)

Just guys who needed shaves

And aid to read Dick and Jane.

The guys who won

Every game at Big Recess.

One was named Harry.

God!! He was as giant!

Bigger than Mrs Vought

Taller than our janitor.

Harry sat enthroned.

Like the Sphinx.

It was Harry

And his gang's hands

Who made what we have today.

Ghosts and Moats

Contrary to everything you and I have been taught

Ghosts do get in the way.

What I have not been able to see

Are all the things I wish to remember.

What I have not been able to hear

Have become my musical scores.

What I never thought I would want

Are now all of my goals.

What is never knowable?

What is forever un-hearable?

What remains after God's curses?

What hides as the Devil directs rehearsals?

So between you and me and them

Surrounding it and me

Blocking off that from I

There are ghosts.

Laughing, smirking ghosts

Who do get in the way!

Counting

Each of us

Has but three

Billion seconds

My first one

Was wasted

Avoiding myself

The second was

Lavished on

War, Work, and worry

Three whores

Who never kiss back.

Even with the best of fortune

Even if there are gods and goddesses

Willing to hear my plight

In a billion more, or less

I will surely be dead!