Empty Pillow

Every so often, the thought of her passes
Through my mind, and I am there with her
Under that quilted belly of gray sky,
The soft crunch of cold faded earth,
And in between… us, dissecting the plane,
Lingering in the perpetual dusk of autumn
Where memory with its visceral decay
Can no longer hold, like winter branches,
Truth, that awoke from that moment,
But now only sleeps atop the empty pillow
Beside me that no longer
Holds her scent.

Transcendence

A humpback cloud, solitary, floated
As a silhouette through the twilight.
Beneath, slumbering sailboats in the still
Lake which reflects the quiet of the sky.
I become quiet.
The pendulous chiming of the masts, hypnotic,
Sway my mind like water.

The Darkness is radiant and revealing.

I am that cloud, looking down
On those boats that see only
The shadow of my belly.
I look down at the water to see
the stars above me.
The stars gaze at the water
to see the undersurface of things below them.

For a moment, we are all connected through reflection,
Until I pass onto solid ground and feel my feet again.

Despair

I have lived my life in clouds, without wings,
unable to see the ground. I am too
heavy for air and my dreams are the
substance of concrete. I move in the
direction of memories that are not
mine and sleep for dreams, jagged
visions that fracture with waking, but
leave something indelible that moves
like mist, musing alternative endings,
visions in sepia of child fantasies.

We do not see clouds move through night
unless they block the moon. I want to be
a night cloud, but I am too heavy.
I am too heavy, living the moment
for memory so there is always
some place to retreat to.
I don’t want
to dissipate
like a
cloud.

The Colors of Nothing

The colors of nothing hold so much
as my breath beneath the heavy stillness.
The whiteness of air breaks into grey and
becomes nothing of reflections it once held.
I am but a reflection of white, then nothing,
then… a cloud, expectant as the rain it holds,
but waits for sad trees to shiver from winds
carrying the colors of nothing that paint
their leaves.

The colors of nothing scream like mutes
and cold stars, far from particles that
move in me, passing through light, fading
in earth. Soil and rock stare up at sky with
little longing to be more, and me, in between
with palette in hand, colors dripping from my
fingers. I am no artist and have only so many
colors of my own that dream with rainbows
under moons.

The colors of nothing are gently lapping against
Horizon’s shore and then recede back upon
the Day’s end, revealing wet days past
filled with colors that did not wash from the
canvas. My colors are elemental and bleed onto
rocks that never breathe life despite the brilliance
they may sparkle.

The Memory

The memory is the moment
that was that night,
outside the window,
drifting through air
like cool water, the speckled sky,
particles that were my thoughts,
words, whispers, still in space,
above the window that is now,
but far from the memory.

Grand Canyon

To not stand
as stoic as a mountain,
But to hold
in its deep shadowed tracks of time
secrets
that even mountains
Cannot know.

Black and White

Does the color of your thoughts fall between
the black and white, inside shadows, along their cryptic edges
where my teeming reality is recreated; where, through shadows,
they may resolve the discordance between art and the illusion of physical existence?

Do the places between black and white confuse your
expression of abstraction, clamored with the complexities
of color that are ill-defined in the mind’s eye?

How your lines fall with calculated imperfection,
rubbed and pulled, mirrored with asymmetry,
the delicate strokes of vision, the beautiful you,
blending, obscuring verticals and horizontals,
teasing the mind, seductively, with your allusions and held breaths.

Fingers dance, beguiled by black dust, seducing the page, each
fluid movement drawn to the last, each finger invoking a
sense. Images, watery, undulate toward the corners of some
reconstructed reality, haunting, in the wake of angles,
feeling, with your mind, the passionate you, the colors,
inexpressible colors, consumed by shadows, by black and white.

Turning Over Rocks

I would turn over rocks,
Revealing secrets, earth,
Searching for surprise under
Moss, over dirt, ground,
Cold and damp, revealing,
Light, to insects that probably
Wanted to be left alone.

Medical Student in June

The melancholy of the music stirred the nothing that filled my spirit-
the nothing that lay listlessly at my feet- the nothing that hung heavy in the
stale air- the nothing that has become my Zen- the nothing that
once was the meaning... the altruistic blending of my ardor laden passion...
the medicine.

I know, as I sense the funk of the off-beat jazzy confusion of sharps and flats in
sync with my arrhythmic heart, the caffeine has taken effect.
I am infused with artificial life so that I may try, just for a few more hours,
to trudge through the marshy terrain of flawed immune mechanisms,
all the while, slowly defeating mine. I will come to understand that
what others perceive as the cruel hand of chance in the ghastly deformity of
a young girl that I see as beautiful, is nothing more than a base-pair mutation.

Dusk imposes upon this cold summer day in Boston and my thoughts
turn to the clandestine passing of time.
Is it nighttime already? What has happened to the day?
I look at the dark rings crusting the bottom of my glass and
try to reflect on the day... the seconds, the minutes, the hours... blank!
My mind is an abyss.

Another summer day passed that could not offer sun soaked smiles
rolling off the breezy spirit of a fruitless afternoon. No dew-glossed grassy patch
to bear my easy mind. No undulating waters chasing the blue of a crystal dream.
I cannot hear the children laughing in the ignorance of their youth.
What a lovely ignorance, blessed with sandcastles, dandelions and puffy white clouds
assuming the shape of whatever free-drifting muse that has tantalized the mind.
Another summer day passed I could not spend exhausting my youth, running,
rollerblading, swimming. Instead, in my youth, I find myself exhausted with my life.

But I cannot think about that now. Instead, I must return to illness and disease, to the
mechanisms of pain and deterioration, to the caffeine and music that carve into me
the defiance of my resolve. The music and the caffeine have embraced a wonderful balance.
The so-called “zone.”

I must continue to study.

Sun-Tide

The crescent moon hung at the
edge of sunset’s wake,
Its glow unshaken by the
stir of twilight, like a child whose
feet are nestled in the sand at the
edge of a surging sea.
The patterns of day traced by
boy fingers were washed away by a single
ripple of light’s extinguishing. Still,
the luminous keeper of night
singing the velvet lullaby
above the azure fumes of the day’s
remains, cradled the earth’s sky
in its dark starry arms
wading through the swell and
now the ebb of sunset’s great tide.
The calm of soft waves faded
into the horizon, replacing the
heaven fury that for a summer moment
ignited the ocean sky.

Close My Eyes

I close my eyes and wait… for my thoughts to awaken,
To guide me, to deliver me through an abstraction
Of fragmented visions that are to be, or could have been,
A life I may know.

I close my eyes and see… foreign familiarities, events that seem
Accurate but not real, approximate truths in which
Times are collinear,
Coexistent,
But not cohesive.
Motions through emotions. Fine.
Disconnected.

I close my eyes and feel… a longing for something
Unexplored but not unknown,
An awkward self-assuredness in some distant place where
Life is one moment, reticent, alienated from itself,
Anxious to make sense of mistakes,
To modify
The past
By infusing into it the
Experience of My present.

Sleep Walking

The night knows things the day works to forget.

Dreams in its visceral tongue speak images
And invite unwelcome truths whose abstractions recount
An altered reality... one that is vaguely reminiscent of a known history.

Nights evoke emotions more real than
Wakeful moments of the day.
Perhaps my day is spent sleeping and
My true waking
Is in dreams.

In sleep I recollect dreams of my days,
Haunting
My reality and stirring deep in my gut.

I am tired.

I am not certain where I rest.