Tag: illusion

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Sunday Morning, Pink and Black: Ten for Today


Awake. Dark room, light shivering between slatted tears in sleep’s cloth curtain, no,

It’s not cold. 

Frozen eyes, shuttered left, off kilter for Sunday morning’s churchyard calm, dazed and scarcely hunted.
 
It feels encrusted shut, my eye, right, no left–at the shake of a quiet mind’s head. 

I’m not sick.

It’s just…just…not like a Sunday. 

Swollen, itchy, red…no, I feel pink but not like a wisp of ultra violet setting rays into the dusk.

Like pulled cotton candy, taut, sticky, stretched to disappearing.

I have pink eye.

It’s red and puffy, and the itch that can’t be scratched for the contagion that she brings.

I’m catching.

Do I call in, call up, call out this small disease, this lodged discomfort, virulent invader?

I look it up.

Warning signs, good sense and no regrets; I confess to all I anticipate in a day’s walk-about, 

a Sunday.

“I…I have pink eye. No, I think my hands touching my eye, touching you.” Can I see you without touching you?
 
Will your money be repulsed, sweet-toothed craving not crusty but cultured,

the dissonance like shimmied NO, a gulp, grimace and gag.

I should stay.

But I go, and I lie without guilt, smile without repercussion, moan without regret and leave, sailing

like the marine layer over our beach city, puffy, cloudy, windy and cool-breezy could care less.

I’ve planted seeds now.

The growing season well nigh past still yields a muddy crop, sunken, aphid-riddled, shriveled dawn.

I took camera digitally clicked snapshots.

Thick waist sloped into fleshy hips, fortresses to meaty buttock questions to the sheets.

Am I asleep? 

Or am I just pretending you loved me kindly, tenderly with your chestnut grin and molten eyes,
 
clear, clean and molasses.
 
No, not pink. Ink. Like night, pintip pupil black.

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Story Line

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It’s the same old story told and re-told,

Thin smoke, a fire sparks newspapers sold;

“We’re up in flames; this place is doomed.

Who will scrape our souls from the ruins?”

 

Truth be souled, we scale our weakened edges,

Lurching through time, jumping off its ledges

In silken ticks, slick with moist memory mold

Like a baby’s crown bridging gaps grown whole.

 

Since the plates never cement, never solidify 

Merely surrender the quest just to realize

How little matters matter in the big scheme:

Unceasing cessation’s sensation’s our dream.

 

So forget about alarm bells and anxiety spells,

Smoke, pills, drink and dare-to-extreme thrills

To awaken sensate waves alligated to a vision 

When real proof appeared at the first incision.

 

At the flash, burn and expulsion, too hot to stay

A core so full of inevitable dispersion to always.

That’s life, I’m told, living between fire and ice   

My story and yours, again, and rolling the dice.

 

Chaos, our freedom, this overlaid order a fraud,

Some call it nature, some karma and others God.

I call it “whatever” or “ok”, often I call it a day,

To rein and saddle numbered hours’ silly anyway.

 

The ending never arrives, the plot never unfolds,

That’s the same old story told, retold and untold

Since the steadfast mute, reveal no master divine

Across the divide no dying secret passing the line.

 
Image: http://www.designedforlearning.co.uk

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Butterfly wise

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In the days of our illusions

A certain shadow passes like a cloud momentarily obscuring the sun,

Its ray-beams struggling to burst free.

That darkness backlights the rolling images,

Reels of grass, sun and bare feet

Spliced with grimaces and shouts,

Cheers of hurray and way to go and not this time

Flash like solar flares boring holes in memory’s crust.

Dual reality of being here and gone, I

Split-watch now and leave this, then and thereafter–all behind, all ahead–

Like spinning wishes for days like these already gone in nostalgic longing,

While breathing the day’s passing–now–before future eyes.

Lazy time, lazy mind, the butterfly blinks and I am wise.

And then I am the grass, sun and bare feet–once again as never before.

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The Poetry of Being

  
The components of being build essences of the all told, acted, sung and noted.

They shake out doings done and yet to come like San Andreas’ fault, not a fault. 

Did we quake? My shoulders shuddered like a surge, a heart murmur or eruption.

No, the inner mechanics of rebellion taking a stand on all things ingest just arose.

When the ear throbbing starts, I know I’m lost to it, going into floated notice din.

My heartbeat declares so loudly inside my ears in its under water muffle-areum.

I doubt creation’s pen then, my mouth moving silently, my hands ripping at keys.

Keyboard fingers fly like the cocaine toad hopping brain’s clicking away at strings.

There’s this word association that bleeds writing, a lapse, slide gurgle into them:

Strung words, the meaning of which is not revealed until they mix and sit together.

They settle in a rhythm and slur, brushed water tinted smears blotting tilted space.

Poetry and being entwine thus: letter, scene, wish, guess all overlaid in blindness. 

Squeezed juice, the nothing of matter becomes me-you, and we polish air’s shine.

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Sleep Per Chance: a Tuesday Thought

 
 
Watching you sleep, I see defenselessness, frozen worry pocketed momentarily, far from the muscles in your face that folds into the linen encased pillow. Your eyes roam the darkness inside you. When you awaken, you’ll reach for me, close me into your warmth, your body heat rising as you battle weariness in slumber’s imaginarium fraught with curiosity and care.
 
Easy. Sleep devours some while teases others, a little here and there, never on command. Always an uneasy relationship with sleep, I could write a book on the cruelty and charity of insomnia. After all, some mysteries solve under the light of the moon where the sun smashes them to smithereens, overexposed and heated.
 
“Mommy, what happens when you sleep?” The same kind of question like “How does your eye work?” that left me stumbling when my daughter, then 6, asked me. I did not know what the question meant or how to answer something so ordinary, so taken for granted and so available in the age of the internet. But how to explain it so she would understand was the mystifying assault on my usual ready to inform mode.
 
What happens to anyone in sleep–that great world divider between hope and despair? Death. Death to the waking world, the one we make sense of daily, and birth to the enigmatic world of weirdness and worry. Dream-works piqued wonder to others way before Freud. Prophecies preistesses told by dreams as hypnotic spells. And sleep, so much more than eye rolls, rapid eye movement and rest, reveals time’s illusion. Though the clock handles spin unceasingly while we play dead for so many hours, we have no recollection of its passage and do not experience it as we do awake time. The numbers do not lie, only our consciousness creates bent experiential time.
 
We travel in sleep, we fly, we problem solve and hit all kinds of brain receptors ranging from the pleasurable to the terrifying. As if the horrors of daily grinds, near missed vital truths and fatal accidents, deep abiding love attained and lost, rational solutions and indecipherable chaos, cannot affirm living human sufficiently. We need another look, another more creative, spatial-emotive glance at life’s curious condition to assure ourselves that it is better to live than die: God’s inserted micro chip in each of us. Otherwise, who would be there to entertain IT so thoroughly? Not all the others swaddled in space, far more advanced yet far less amusing than we.
 
credit: flickr.com

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Adrift

  
I call him a drifter, 

but who remains static?

No thought ever nailed itself

down, tacked to airless walls.

No body stops unceasingly,

all that pumping and throbbing,

ever moving cogs and wheels

the sentient and incognizant alike.

Even in death and decay, there

movement devolves-transforming.

Stillness breathes a steady notion

but no such evidence exists.

Ever in motion, roving nomads,

we, the universe compels it.

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In keeping

  
Walking away

into the folly of night

my eyes followed your heels

as they lifted and lightly pressed

against the notion that keeping is outside

when everyone knows losing means never having.

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Just Until…

  
Just until I am 10, then I will almost be a teenager and can do more things, and not be treated like a baby.

Just until I am 16 and can drive, then I will be free…to work, earn money, and buy my own clothes.

Just until I am 18, when I can get the hell out, be on my own.

Just until I am 21 and can drink–legally. 

Just until I am 28 and will finally graduate from bull shit schooling, start a life.

Just until I am 35 and can finally give in to the urge to procreate.

Just until I am 40, when I can stop having kids.

Just until I am 45, when the kids are in school and I can work more, go back to school.

Just until I am 48 and get my PhD finished, I can teach locally.

Just until I am 50, I will give myself permission to have a mid-life crisis, go away, learn to surf, dye my hair.

Just until I am 55, when I can make a plan, hold on long enough to finish growing up my kids, get them through college, just another 5 years or so, until I am 60 when I can begin to wait out my term, be on my own watch, do my own thing.

I wait. As we all do. We abide biding time as if time could be had. We are had by time and its illusion. Desire is the expression of suffering we live to fill space with all things but ourselves. There really is no time–just inhale and exhale.

 
credit: edge.neocha.com

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A Single Thread

  

A small thread, a half inch or so, little more, plays peek-a-boo on my sleeve,
one minute spied from an eye corner, the next invisible to squint-study sight.
 
Poking up among the finely woven linen threads formed to panels, collars,
buttons and tails, a renegade refusing submission, seeks its tenant’s notice.
 
Like a bee, child, snake or lover, it tentatively positions itself seen and unseen,
always at vision’s edge, reminding, teetering, like all teeming imperfections.
 
And when I spy its frayed head atop my wrist swathed in tapestried symmetry,
like chance, options, luck, sleep, hope, and calm, I reach to pluck it, and it’s gone. 

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Day 4…

No sleep. At first I could not sleep for a reason, traveling, driving, moving on. Then I could not sleep for no known reason. A body rebels, becomes overwrought at the indignity of abuse, as if the parasite and host switch places.

Recreative plant and synthetic substances exist to induce a copy of the mind of the severely sleep deprived, only overlaid with some false euphoric-producing chemical. Surrealism must have been born in the condition of dust float watchers too exhausted to move focus. 

 

 
Like this:

Slatted windows, the verticals section the sun and leaves like an ironic cell, full of light divided.

Like the days waiting for deliverance–a package, a word, an acceptance, a surrender–the intangible falls prey to the patterns of urgent need, a tendency to sliver air, measure it up and pat it down, or hone it til it’s sharp and tight, acutely folded into square hours, minute feet, and toes of sleight-of-hand time.

The shape I am, even spaghetti strands of illuminating insight pass the day, squander the vision under scrutiny and sap the fight, a nap’s prelude. Only night crawls my skin with sparks. I’ll wait, multiplying numbers to the wheels’ passing golden trail.
 

credit: maimai.sega.jp

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