First Fire-y 15 for Napowhinemore.

1,

Waiting for a package
celluloid spools
to remember for me.

All life balanced
on a spider-thread
and I find myself
wanting
to tell my story
to these random strangers
behind counters.

I'm on the road
without a map
and no map
is required.

These people
can't tell me
the way.

I question
what i'm doing
here
letting the rust and wreckage
fall away
to reveal brighter metal;
but still
metal
and no flesh.

I have more in common
with a flashlight
than these
human beings.




2.

Following the spring
this year
dancing the yellow line.

The Panamint daisies
bushed up and
showed their glory.

We witnessed birth
in the valley of Death
the sun beaming down
from a bright blue sky
and even Coyote
showed some respect.

Spring is a spirit of longing
this year.
Longing for an answer
to the great question.

Our brains flit and fly,
consciousness balloons
and snaps back;
everywhere a sadness,
everywhere an anxious
searching.

The sun rises
and sleeps
and rises again
over mountain
and plain
and ocean waves.

We strain
bicker
and scratch fear-y holes
in the fabric of dreams
waiting for
self-made deliverance.




3.

Years of frustration
trickle down
into the now.

Will I?
If...

Butcher of my own life
I select the veins to follow
and the bones to hack.

Blaming someone else
for these decisions
was far easier
than accepting the cleaver
in my own hand.

If we could see
each individuals'
self-vivisection
would it change anything?

Would we only find new
reasons
to go on cutting?




4.

Longing for the trance
that will lead me away from
all of
this.

Dreaming an endless
whiskey-soaked
desert-run
to finally remember how
to feel the wind
again.

In my mind there
were
moments of something
more
than platitude and argument.

To dream again
as though
you'd never felt the pain
to dream again
as tires cut the midnight
pavement and memories
eviscerate good feelings;
spilling their empty
out over everything
that could be.




5.

Gutted.
Peeled away and cleaned of
inside
anythings.

Each day
in the supermarkets
the traffic jams
the insane parking lots,
city to city across the continent
people are gutted
by themselves or
one another.

Gutted by
the 80 hour work week
butted by a payday which never
arrives,
gutted by parents
schools
governments
lovers.

They sleep against street lamps
or in banker's bedrooms;
the gutted.
The dead.
The blind and impossible
dragging their carcasses
between places to earn money
and places to spend it.

Their essence and flesh
gambled into paper
that speaks a lie of worth.

Gutted by children,
gutted by bills,
gutted by the thing that simply
will not
arrive,
or if it does arrive
it is always too late,
too late and too little.

Each day you must say:
I will look into their eyes,
I will not let them have
what is left of myself.

As the gutted ones come
with their demands
and their blameless
execution answers
you must say to them:
This is not it.
No, this is not it at all.




6.

Poems drip slow
where there used to be
waterfalls.

The drought seems to come
as I stand in a rain of experience
yet the stream
never swells.

Cactus and rock
and desert flat,
sun and frost
and rain, I
am submerged
and do not drown
am immersed and do not
accept,
preferring blank looks,
withering glances
and gravestones
for everything.




7.

Gray horizon.
Gray in my head.
I watch the tide rise up,
wondering about the ghosts
of places and
ancestors
long-dead
that may come forward
to aid me
or those newly passed
that arrive
like ravens in the dawn.




8.

Tonight
Orion peers down
from a blue-black sky
arm poised to strike
until he is covered
by clouds.

He's lead me
across so many skies.
Why is he upset tonight?




9.

Night.
The rain continues at 2 a.m.
with the sea growling
at the rocks
and the trees weeping
like I want to weep;
the sky doing it for us both,
you and me
separate
like this
or perhaps not so
as I recall the headaches
that were your barometer
on navy blue thundercloud evenings
in summer-thick Missouri air.

Do you hear the water
blasting in the crevices now?
Can you see the chalk
line of the waves with me?
Or are you flying with the night-birds
as the water tells me to
shush,
shush.




10.

The people are bent like wires
and the current hops
from one to the next.

Circuits of hate and frustration
arc and spray
fire
up the streets.

Do you know that your ideas
are droppered and spoon-fed into you
and catheter-ed and enema-ed
out of you
at a pace that keeps up
your entire life?

Your Ideas
are not
Your
Ideas.

Cities like circuits to the switch
and the people have stopped marching.

The people have stopped marching.
Trading their time away to
pretty lights and the message that
they'll tell us about
around the campfire of one million
i
phones.

The people have stopped marching
if for no other reason than
they've become terrified
of leaving the house
for fear they might miss
the next cat
photo.




11.

Who among you are the victims
of my kindness?

Who among you have visited
the sad nunnery of my soul?

Tear my doubts along this perforation.
Seal me with adhesive.

Does it scowl in you
like a rabid animal;
prone to bite,
or warm you
like a first spring sun?

Can your altruism
feed the hungry
or only Ego?

The green-bottle sea
and it's white breaks
handed me a highway vision.

What to do with it?
Would you?




12.

The waves gathered up
by the sky
while the gulls stop
in space
and a child leaps into the wind
atop a boulder;
flying, landing
flying again.




13.

Body, aged.
Mind, rapt.

As at twenty,
questing to become
healer
or fool.

Given coins,
I juggle them
and drop a few
here and there.

The gray sea
blowing in, now.

Haven't I meditated enough
on calamity?
I used to dream
of a life
this free.

Now that it has arrived,
I want to  box it up,
plane it flat
and make it something
other.

The dog of my head will not heel
to the whistle of the wind
this day.

The secrets are whispered
but I cannot understand the language.




14.

I have seen the crow
whiten
in the desert sun.
You were there with me,
though you did not know it.

How many others
travel with me,
catching the chatter of gulls,
the grit of the sand
and the solid crack of the surf?

I touch all my memories
and smile.




15.

I,
unmasked to myself,
a long train-whistle spout
of hot, humid air
into a dark, winter's night.

I,
unmasked as a thief of time
and the lament that washed
the shores of your yesterdays.

Unmasked
under the ancient forest walls
and blue ceilings.

I,
tearing pages and pages
from a book
I've not yet learned to read.