Ceiling Fan
I love the beauty of a ceiling fan
when laying on the floor
looking up blankly
day dreaming about the future
crying about the past
meditating.
The shadow cast on the wall
so still and steady–ten
arms, legs strong while half
are dancing and
stretching into the world with
a constant, comforting hum.
When I was young I liked escaping.
I took up a pen and set out to discover what
I was so mad about and it worked in jumbled,
scribbled, and thankfully illegible pages of a journal.
To this day I write to discover and to chart my soul
and I think I’ve figured something out—although it is
a work in progress, as all things are and should always be.
You see, I think it is a human strength that we
cannot fully understand our own existence,
grasp our own motives, and know our own emotions.
It is our vast complexity and trek for discovery
that really keep us going.
It is our infinite weakness and confusion
that keep things interesting—a contradiction,
I know, but our obsession is with the quest
and not with the reward we claim to seek.
Knowledge is power, but wonder and intrigue
stem from its discovery and its journey.
Our lives would be empty if every map thought up—
the mountains of our inner thoughts, the plains
of a smile and a frown, the seas fraught with
kind eyes and cruel words churning erratically
because the tide is unknown…
When there remains nothing to chart,
every bookcase full, every
computer chip stored up with our so-called
omnipotence, we will slowly start to wilt
and fold in on ourselves; a flower quietly
closing it’s petals and saying goodbye to the day.
The swoop of a shut door and the silence behind it.
Once you believe you have all the answers
life ceases to interest you—time
becomes a constraint sent to bind you
in infinite boredom, but you are bored
not because you have all the answers,
but because you have ceased to look.
And to stop looking is to stop living
So do not allow the compass to stay
or your pen to still, because you,
You are the cartographer of your own life
and you have the tools to chart it,
Never stop charting your own soul
or trying to understand the souls of others.
Today is history
in the making, I saw
eons of hate and injustice and judgment
and pain wrapped in a cage–
still banging wildly on the bars
but locked and tightly knit
with hope.
Hanging on the words of a man
hoisted by desire for change
despite voices calling for a fall
and a nation holding its breath
in the storm of what is to come
and the wreckage of what has been
our story.
For so long–shrinking pockets
and a war waged from fear and
inequality for people like me and
people different from me but
in ways so slight and immeasurable
when it comes to life and
the news ringing with gunfire
every night at eight.
Today I teared up listening
as a nation came together
and whispered a prayer of hope.
Some days I feel lucky,
floating, almost, and I
forget to feel all those things
that plague me on the other days
When I feel lost, and I
turn to the thing–that person–
that makes me feel the luckiest
and all is confusion–blurred–
those days, lucky and lost,
lucky or lost, are the best
and make the most sense.
The other days are days of nothing
and nothing, as everyone knows,
or whoever has had love or loss
(as sayings wisely go)
is the worst feeling, or absence of
because there is no point to nothing.
No gain, no loss to be for
there is no be in nothing days
just the absenteeism of is
or there or were or was or here.
In nothing only blackness is found
maybe not even that for
nothing is simply nothing, and if
you’ve ever known it, you know
this to be true, no whole in hole.
Those are the days I live to avoid
and dodge if I can–for if I live
in days filled with anything but
nothing, then there is always something
something to be lucky or even to be lost.
*This poem is intended to have a different format, but for some reason unknown to me, wordpress refuses to allow me to indent lines.
I Live Life By the King of Words (Jorge Luis Borges Was Right)
I chose to see the world through my eyes
and through blank pages
letters scrawled across empty spaces
and connected by seas of ink.
I seek to go many places
see them, The Word, experience…
life sometimes forces it into dreams
and out onto the pages, my pages.
The pages of history & romance,
the pages of drama & violence,
Fables collected by time’s scribes
to be retold over and over
and find a resting place
in the ears of childhood
and in the dormant consciousness
of adulthood.
Sun blankets the midnight seas
of the penned words of lives
that glare in the peak of days
and dim in evening’s goodbyes.
There is one word I look for,
always, The Word,
that attatches to memory
vividly evading a lifespan.
(Can you guess it?)
Jolly Holiday
We rode our dreams
on a carousel
and let it carry us into dusk
where our eyes fluttered
with the blurring colours
of kaleidoscope horses
until dew tipped the panes
and pryed open our hearts
letting in the grey light
of dawn.
My mind goes to the darby though
with dusk’s spinning horses
across now distant thoughts
I close the shutters
and welcome the night’s races.
A first draft on the cup, so bare with me.
Before Madness Became a Poetic Gift to Women, A Letter
In every flower, every mundane twig
You saw what others only dreamed.
The entire life of women
The dark beneath their everyday
Her dreams hidden under her frock
And the love she contemplates
While knitting under a mans roof
You saw and you wrote
Her life
In a lighthouse, a window, a party
And in it, an eternity.
Their lives, hanging in mist bound trees,
You realized their despair
Ophelia drowning amongst the flowers.
And it came to life in signs and symbols
Printed on old, discolored pages.
Beauty becomes you, through the fog
That is what the world saw,
Peaceful, in the river’s heart.
Mrs. Ramsey, A Moment of Thought…
There it was before her–life
swelling in the tips of her fingers
and pouring out of her–
the essence of her being, rising
in a flame of exhalation.
Suddenly everything is reversed–life
a single eyelet of water
hanging–in this moment everything–
the instant held in a sunburst petal,
the whole of the world held in suspense.
There it was before her–life
dangling in the cracks and cobwebs
collecting dust in the corners,
my heart, lying, waiting for this
the sum of everything hanging on a moment.
Suddenly everything just is–life
the world in an instant, waiting
for this realisation and the essence,
the essence of my being swelling up
raising in a flush and suddenly this is it
I am whole.
Sorry to be such a downer to day, I try not to do it too often but sometimes thought rests on the unhappy.
Sleeping through Dinner
I know what it is to lose yourself
in sorrow.
The world is a small window, convex
and you’re on the wrong side,
peering out into the great expanse,
missing out,
it hurts.
Life is through there,
streaming by and you’re banging
trying to slow it down,
wedge yourself in between it
and time.
It gets you.
That is how I know I am lost.
Something in you goes mute,
a whistle escapes, but I miss it
and everything goes
crashing.
Time is carried without you, and
as you sit quietly peering out
and into that expanse, I see.
I see it in your heart,
and the world I see,
I see it means nothing.
Watching the Wind Through Glass
Twitching, the coral blossoms shake
in what seems to her an endless green expanse,
pierced only by the blue-grey horizon
that touches its blurred edges
all the while, twitching.
The cracked chestnut holds steady,
an anchor in a cloud of madness
its verdant-coral pulled away,
astray, confused in blue horizon,
the anchor holds with unwavering stability.
She watches the slight movements in the shades,
perceiving the quick shift in hues
as a life in seeds is carried away
deep red in safety’s bosom,
fading pink against that blue escape.
How unpredictable, how by chance,
she thinks, is the nature of leaves
only the etched trunks hold inflexible,
the trunks, an anchor
loosing children as if they were replaceable.
But isn’t that the way all things go?
Her life, a flower, left to chance
pulled into that expanse without notice.
But isn’t that the way all things go?
A waiting game, shifting slightly in place,
shuffling of feet, waiting, never knowing…
But isn’t that the way all things go?
An anchor, illusions of safety
stirring, always looking into the expanse ahead
and never knowing, never knowing…
Yes, she thinks, turning back to her knitting,
that seems the way all things go.
