a waking mind aware of being here nor there

(or, mental amusement before seeing the light of day)

I am older than the selves of life leap-frogging along the making of time and place.

I am before the restless generations of becoming and dying and becoming. Before the chaos, the watery womanly demos of unthinking flesh and bone generating the moon time. Before the history of fallings from the womb and returnings to its vaginal elections. Before the breeding laying beneath the seeing of me alone unpartnered, uncoupled from the frenzy of fucking before corpses of stone deadly silence.

No music without the drumming of knowing nothing, knowing everything in the dance. The eros of gorging, of nippled firming of magical wands, then seed spewing and lactation. Who understands the middle churning between the alpha and omega, the bearing of souls from wet wombs spasming the vibrating streaming of being in and out of touching the accordian stops and starts. The attuning done by ear, not seeing the measurement in darkness but in light.

What withstands the onslaught of viral memories of how to suck the energy out of nothing and be such being. Rosy redness sainted nick clauses of coded connection, spitting of flakes of blood frozen in falling from night sky of the womb, here and not here, there and not there. Which is it after all?

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hysterical mimicry

(written on Thursday, February 7, 2008, at 6:45 am)

Nature bundles its selves
and nests the faces of self
like reflections echoed
between two affronting mirrors,
a long tail of pseudonymous figures
one inside another without exemption
in what they seem to us to be.
The same brooch
countlessly glinting the same sunbeam
daggered into the same lapel
always below the same buttonless hole
regularly flattened against
the lengthy expansion of
gray suit jackets
whose pocket flaps crease
at the very upturned corner
none out of character
with exactly the same fold
telescoping to a sightless oblivion
without end at infinity
beyond seeing
the trickle of blood beading
from a razor’s errant cut
in morning tug across
the stubble of hair
intending to curl in beard
if not denied lengthening time
at feverish temperature
stubbed from bursting out of recognition
in facing itself again and again
across a mirrored emptiness
engorged with flying radiation
unseen without reflection
returned timelessly from faces
under suns slanting beams of light
through innumerable windows
whose panes quadruple an infinity,
the would-be hairs bending back and tickling
the seeming hot skin
like arcs of energy on solar surfaces
cooled into relative wisps of dead particles
who’ve lost the hotness of
follicled roots beneath
their rising (but how?)–
a trick of wonderment
at energy dancing on
tireless centipede feet
kicking ahead and dragging behind
a rhythmic traveling
for which none knows
where reflections end
their hysterical mimicry
at an edge of nowhere’s sphere
nor what their origin means.

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telling time

( written on Friday, January 25, 2008, early in the morning )
( extensive rewording done on August 14, 2008 )

Why ask me
what time it is when you wake up?
You know the only watch I had
I gave to some poor fellow
I didn’t know
who likely pawned it
for a few bucks’ worth of sour wine.

Does it matter much,
if I could tell you
the second it happened?
Aren’t dark and light
all we need to know
of when to dream
and when to pee?

Does “when” fall in pieces
like pistachios that spill out
of wet-bottomed pokes
we grip for dear life?
Do we line the scattered starts
one after another
and split them open hurriedly
to eat the meat darkening inside
before it shrivels to nothing?

I can’t tell the time
when you wake up,
but you’ll know
when light’s pried
open your eyes.

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just a momentary dream

(written on Sunday, July 8, 2007; immediately after “time plays no reverse”)

Where river cuts its bend,
through solid rock
lifted by land’s rise,
there is no turning back
to primal where or when.
Nature tells no tale of comfort
but harsh history of irrepressible
re-mattering after re-mattering.

We may stand near canyon’s edge
hand in hand for a time
full of promises we keep
when all seems still
beneath our feet
but the completion we feel
is just a momentary dream
in the time of rushing water
through rock.

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time plays no reverse

(written on Sunday, July 8, 2007, before dawn)

Sitting on a wall
before the fall,
they teetered on the tip
of who they’d been.

Cracking wide open
when they fell,
their spilt souls parched
under the sun.

Time plays no reverse.
Slinged shots cannot
fly back to pouches
as if outrageous killing
never happened.

Who keeps accounts
of wounded sparrows falling?
Who rehearses living before
it occurs to them life happened?

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somebodies’ fools

(extensively revised from an original written on Friday, August 4, 2006)

To the godliest of somebodies
the want of idle nobodies
results from what once was called
the sin of sloth by medieval churchmen.
The modern sunday somebodies
pronounce the favor of their gods
on those who get busyness and lucre.

We nobodies, Emily, are somebodies’ fools!
What gain in time spent listening?
What good hearing cathedral tunes
in panefuls of slanting light?

What gain in time spent watching?
What good seeing luminous humming
in floors of flattened stone?

What gain in time spent touching?
What good feeling comforting warmth
in shafts of solar light penetrating a dark walled-in air?

What gain in time spent smelling?
What good scenting colorful cells
conceiving origins from gray matter?

And what gain in time spent tasting?
What good savoring the fruit of loops
defying the minding of straight lines?

What foolishness to be nobodies, Emily!

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