Moon Water

Sometimes a thousand words are used when one would do.  Sometimes one is used when hundreds were needed.  Sometimes words just spin into a pool of image and you're not sure how many there are or even should have been.  Sometimes they mean something, other times they don't.  Maybe they're just fun to think.

Moon Water

Moon water flows through my window

I never just look anymore

Mountains, shocks of amber burn

Blue bright sky, dark on the peaks

The moon burns with them- 

The amber cliffs

But moon water burns white, pouring through my window

Friend light-

Like light on the tide of home shores,

Smiling water flows in.

Aching

When something written makes you forget you were reading as you read it, a little light turns on to remind you that language in and of itself is beautiful.  I don't dare claim that I can do that with what I write.  But I will write about the happening.

Aching 

     I ache to write.  For the eloquent phrase scrawled on the sea of a page.  Not for the sake of eloquence; not to be applauded, or named, but for the sake of the words.  To touch the knowledge of beauty that is innately part of us, and so often unlearned.  To expand the glint in every child’s eye to a gleam, then a flash, and a blaze.  A glint still in everyone’s eye, though it may be hard to see.  Are we not all children after all?  To have words so simple, so clean that the ink on paper is lost and only their meanings meet our minds.  Sentences that hide in the dusk before the dawn.  The dawn of ideas filling the soul with the knowing of potential.  Incalculable potential.  Words that take no attention for themselves but are there only for truth to stand on.  Wordless words that do not mean but simply are; that do not match the absolute, but meet to lay it bare.  I ache to write such words but rob them with my strain.

  I imagine that writing should feel as the pouring of water from a glass.  Each drop so fluid with that last that only a clear stream flows.  The weight of it released, let down through thirsty leaves making full and empty the same: an empty glass, a fuller flower.  Such satisfaction rarely comes from pouring out; from reaching the bottom.  But only after the bottom is met do words leave ourselves more full.  Only as the candle burns can corners be brought light.  Dark corners we may fear to go until a candle comes.  I burn to write so purely but always ashes fall on my pen.

  Don’t think me hypocritical.  I see my toils coming short.  But what pours better than a waterfall?  And even they splash.  For the sake of the words I continue.  For the ache to write I go on.

Panic

Panic comes in the strangest forms. Though usually nothing to laugh at, sometimes it just is.


Panic

Sitting alone, desperately alone

Amongst the various clicking tickings.

What if my nose begins to drip with them?

What then?

Someone must come, but surely they won’t.

I am alone and will remain so.

My legs ache and prickle

Like miniature threats that I’ve been here too long.

And the ticks tick on.

All things within my reach

Are but leaves in the fall--

Dying diversions form the oncoming winter.

Oh! That I had not come here today!

There must be another way.

Alone, undone, cold.

I perish this way.

I am out of toilet paper.

Blank Pages

Marvelous things, blank pages.  It's hard to write without them.  So much potential, so much to offer.  So much reason not to notice blank pages.

Blank Pages

Blank pages.  

A sea run dry.  

Shorelines unzipped blaring at the sky, 

as if to cry out against it.  

What did the sky have to do with it?  

To be filled is not the only use for spaces.  

Blank: the word thinks for us.  

Unused, undone, un-learned-from.  

Pages left unwritten are no proof of not writing.  

The life-trails left in the sand of the sea aren’t a lack of ink.  

Stripped, torn, beaten, worn; the pages bind and grind and burn.  

Holding itself so high the sky cries “blank” at the frozen sand.  

Silent as the once sea stones, blank pages flash back and grin.  

There’s room for that on 

blank pages.

The Zipline

A story from my childhood.  Crazy story.  True story.  Enjoy.

“Let go Lee!  Drop!”

“I can’t; I’ll fall!”

Smack!  Lee face-planted into the tree.   

Take a trip with me to an easygoing little street in the neighborhoods of South Provo.  The houses have a dried-out shoe leather quality to them.  The people are much the same.  They would just as soon water their lawns by hand, and in the fall they rake each other’s leaves.  The air has secrets in it.  Schools out, there’s way too much energy available, and there’s nothing left to do.  I don’t remember who’s idea it was; we were all collaborators though.  Leave it to a gaggle of bored nine-year-olds to think a zip-line’s a good idea.  

Allen had a fantastic backyard.  The trees were like leafy parapets of an abandoned castle.  A rusted out van was the carriage under the archway of golden branches.  The peaks of the castle towers was the perfect place for our project.  Michael   was a “big kid” from across the street.  He always had some sort of junk cobbled together into contraptions too varied and useless to define.  This time it wasn’t so useless though.  Bicycle handlebars and a plastic pulley can do amazing things with the right application of imagination.  Jordan’s dog ran ruts in the ground around the stake he was tied to. I’m not sure where the dog was while we were using his cable.  My contribution was a set of obsolete snow chains that made a marvelous ladder.  The blueprints were more mental than print.  The planning consisted of, “We should build a zip-line!” followed by several resounding, “Yeahs!”  It wasn’t long before a board, resembling the solidity of a dead fish, was nailed to one of Allen’s trees about twenty feet off the ground.  We tied the cable to the tree just above our platform, stretched it almost to the ground, and tied it to another tree as far away as it would reach.  I cannot, for the life of me, remember how we stuck the pulley to the handlebars.  We may have used spit for all I know.  But there it was, in all it’s splendorous, horrifically questionable glory: The Zip-line.  Oh, what a beautiful invention!  A goosey little nine-year-old could feel truly free as he rocketed through the air, holding on until the very last second until he had to let go to avoid the tree at the end of the line.  We never thought to put down a pad of any kind down.  All we were thinking of was how much fun we were having.  My Mom didn’t believe we had actually made a zip-line; she had seen our inventions before.  Our flying machine made of cardboard, plastic wrap, and a fan; or our time machine made of Christmas lights and a bed frame.  She had this uncanny ability to make our equipment malfunction on it’s maiden voyage every time.  Anyway, it was all fun and games until Lee showed up.

Its astounding that nobody was hurt sooner.  Lee was a bit younger than us, and a bit slow to boot, but when the threat of, “I’ll tell my mom” pours out of another kid’s mouth you start cutting deals.  After no small measure of begging and threatening from Lee, we finally consented to let him ride The Zip-line.  Thinking back, his awkward midget-like steps up the ladder seem like the banging chimes of a clock-tower just before your carriage turns into a pumpkin.  “Hold on really, really tight,” we told him.  “One, two, three, go!”  Off he went.  But one important detail had been left out.  We didn’t tell him how to stop.  All at once everyone screamed at the top of their lungs, “Let go Lee!  Drop!”  Being small and stupid his only reply was, “I can’t, I’ll fall.”  

Lee didn’t let go.  Lee didn’t drop.  Lee’s face was all over that tree like ugly on a moose.  If ever you want to stop quickly, smacking into a tree is a good way to do it.  We told him to walk it off, but I doubt he could hear us past his own wailing.  Again, it’s uncanny; the ability mothers have to ruin fun.  Maybe it’s my fault for telling her about Lee’s near-death-like disaster.  When she finally saw it, she might as well have shot a disintegrator ray at it.  The Zip-line was no more.  All this hullabaloo only lasted about a week, but oh what a week.

In a town on a street where life is what happens while you’re busy doing other things, sometimes drastic measures are necessary to compete with boredom.  We didn’t just compete with boredom; we obliterated it.

My Candle is the Low One

The ramblings of a tired mind.  Formless blurts of non sequitur sentences.  There must be something in it.

My Candle is the Low One

Standing in the ashes falling,

Existence in your arms.

Light through grey is grey.

What color would the light have been?

What color should it be?

“Ivory and gold!” comes the cry.

Some hearts reflect the river, some the sky.

The softness of forgetting is lost

To the scrawl of the learned man.

How do you stop the pendulum swing

When hard earned blood runs dry?

As an arsonous flame to the school of thought,

Clouds of broken chaos breaking;

My candle is the low one--

I’ve been burning it.

Let the Ink Run

Some recurring themes are blatant in this poem. Writing it after sprouts of thought had already begun spreading leaves, I was left with reminders of the seeds that had sprouted; feet that didn't trust the ground, a welcome to the scraps of an unsettled mind, dissonant dreams hedging the dawns.  All like stones marking the gardens of words that I seem to have stumbled upon; and sometimes stumbled over.  But watching things begin to live is worth some dirt on your hands.

Let the Ink Run

God bless the colors of your mind;

The anthemic operas of dissonant dreams

Standing before you, a wall to the day.

Volumes said to the wind,

Screamed at the deep.

Are you as silent inside as out?

So let the ink run.

And golden light of day and dawn, 

Though mountain hardly purple shines, 

Burn in bolts of amber sun

More cold than aching time.

And let the ink run.

With a quiet huzzah, 

You walk through the dawn; 

Tearing its seams as you pass.

Tearing its seams at your dreams.

Walking alone with the rest of them.

Like walking next to a ghost;

Like dancing with no bones.

So let the ink run.

Welcome to the scraps of an unsettled mind.

Speak not your silencing solutions.  

Their breath is too shallow to still the deepened soul.

My feet don’t trust the ground anymore; 

Delicate sole.

And let the ink run.

Pelican Dreams

Sometimes dreams have a funny way of turning into stories.  Albeit very short, this story is one of the ones that makes me smile most. 

Pelican Dreams

A small, brownish pelican gently moved the other birds aside with his beak as he boarded his little raft.  They fussed some but this raft was his and they let it be.  As the tide went out, I watched the brave little pelican floating out to sea.  Some days he’d only float some yards from shore and later come back in with the tide to go about his little brave business.  Other times I watched him disappear over the horizon to brave the deep and the fishes from there that would visit him.  I feared once that he might not return but he finally floated in, head high and eyes sharp.  A tear came to my eye as saw him ashore again.  It was a somehow noble thing this little one did, braving the waves and the deep -- a sentinel of sky and sea on the little wood raft he rode.

Charlotte

I cannot, for the life of me, remember where this came from.  Being obviously incomplete, you may have to use your imagination a bit.  But more should follow.  Welcome to the first story post.

Charlotte loved her uncle Charley very much.  After all, he had been the first person to ever make her laugh.  From the time she was born onward, she couldn’t help but smile every time she saw him.  On top of everything, he was also her only uncle.  Every time he came to visit, which tended to be often, she would charge at him with open arms and a smile so large it was slightly silly, but in a beautifully endearing way.  She would ask, “How now uncle?” (as they both shared a love of reading and of writing,) and he would respond, “Alas poor Charlotte, I’m still chasing the dream.”  At this they would laugh and continue on to less poorly spun silliness.  What was left unmentioned was that the dream he chased was not the average, typical ‘dream’ that everyone else seemed to mean when they said this.  No, he had had a dream and was truly chasing it.  His dream, as most worthwhile dreams do, had come in bits and pieces of clarity.  When he first had it, he decided to find the place he dreamed about and do what he dreamed he had done.  He went from place to place, doing this thing and that, trying to live this markedly average, but remarkably particular dream.  You see, it’s perfectly respectable to chase a dream like freedom, or starting your own restaurant.  Even admirable.  But that’s a different sort of dream entirely.  No, he had dreamed events and, for years, had been trying to make them real.  Not surprisingly, this was not approved of by his family and he was asked not to mention it.  Especially around Charlotte: because she was too much like him already and it wouldn’t do to have her wasting her life chasing “actual” dreams.  

It is necessary, now, to mention a very unfortunate truth.  Charlotte’s parents weren’t really her parents.  They had never told her this and she, like very nearly everyone else, thought that they, in fact, were.  Another unfortunate truth is that dear Uncle Charley, contrary to popular opinion, had not always been single.  His dear wife had died inexplicably at a young age.  Poor Charley had been left, heart broken to say the least, and very alone to raise a very small child.  In short, he knew he couldn’t do it.  Not that he wasn’t willing to try; he was never a quitter.  But Charley was also not stupid and he realized his daughter deserved more than he could give.  Rather than give her up entirely, he gave her to his brother and his sister in law.  Being a very bright girl, if Charlotte had been told this story it wouldn’t take her more than few seconds to put it together, as you surely have.  Charley was not Charlottes uncle but her father.  This more than likely accounted for all the unique similarities they shared.  It is also worth noting that Charley’s dream had first come with the death of his dear wife, and this more than likely accounted for his chasing of it.

Hope rolls

I've decided to move back to poems today rather than adding another tab but that will come.  This poem seemed to be a physical dawning in form of thought and word as it came together.  What does it mean?  Work on it; it's more fun when you define it yourself.  I've come up with more than one of my own meanings.

Hope Rolls

Let moon console the morning

As pass the morning must

And come the gentle evening

To hide away the dusk

But swiftly as the hours roll

The moon must go to sleep

And come the mighty morning

To light the shadows deep