080716A
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It is as if the dreams are always held
submerged under water,
unable to ever reach the surface.
I saw you in a dream,
which meant nothing much,
except that I would never see you again.
There is no standing still,
in this jitterbug dance
to the sound of rattling bones.
I dreamt those bones
that make up a dream,
as if we were in deep water together.
One of us drowned,
and I am not certain which it was,
but we both attended separate funerals.
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080716B
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The great trouble with leaving,
whatever pins me,
is the fear of falling further down.
A kind of empathetic gesture
to the insect displayed in a glass case,
in its reliance on being impaled.
So many people that I meet
are afraid to rise,
so they hold each other down.
Whether they do it in bedrooms,
or in various other types of combat,
makes very little real difference.
They always hold each other
only to hold each other down,
afraid one of them might rise.
I cannot quite imagine
what it feels like to rise,
in a world where it all goes down.
Everything falls in and down,
and there is always far too much
that pulls down into the grave.
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080716C
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Pen to paper,
gave an awareness,
that words can impress
meanings into surfaces,
that offer little resistance
inscribing,
or engraving,
and leaving lasting marks,
making deep impressions,
incisions,
that change some thing.
Difficult to undo,
as to leaving a mark,
filling up and using
an expanse of space,
with a sense of permanence
the way scars are permanent.
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080716D
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Art is the ghosts of the past.
There is always that sense
of what is gone
buried somewhere in it.
Something we cannot get back
that might haunt us,
perhaps as far as forever reaches
to anyone at all.
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080716E
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If you pursue beauty
they give you ugliness.
Even the beauty you knew
turns to ugliness,
as to how it divides
wanting from what it wants.
There will be no real peace
until the other world is defeated
and its angels driven out.
They never really worked for us,
as they stood in service
of those who took our hopes away.
It never matters what we wanted,
everything goes the other way,
turned around and shaken out.
Not any different from the rot
that infects a corpse
and consumes flesh from bones.
Something to keep reminding us,
how the beginning comes to an end,
and all we really have are monuments
which help assure more forgetting
of most of what chanced in between
the first and the last breath.
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080716F
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A lengthening list
of all those various desires
that one never really knew
any of the answers to.
The kind of purity that stains
with stains that do not come out,
no matter what you chance to do
or how you chance to do it.
Not so much real difference
between a rag that ends up soaked
with traces of courage or shame,
as to what goes on in public.
I have found only things that hurt me
when they are allowed to get close,
and one or two I might have enjoyed
but the others I want to keep away.
It becomes a surveyor’s report,
as to establishing various boundaries,
to make certain that fences are erected
along precisely proper lines.
Then the defending of borders,
and counting the piles of invitations
as to the many that declined,
and a few that accepted.
It is never the one that you wish for,
but that is the deeper problem
as to what it really means
when we make personal arrangements.
The hardest thing is to feel free,
when there are all those other obligations,
but no one else seems obliged
in the random shallows that remain.
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