My Fool Errands Led Me Here

For so long that false but pervasive urgency molded my perception of how it is and what it should be

I always awaited some trite event which quickly faded off into my incomplete and jumbled blur

At times I thought I was stepping sagely back, but really that was just one more, too hurried task

I strained so long under that pointless stress that I felt empty when I was casually cast off for good

Thought I saved time religiously, but although I never even spent a bit, my account is empty now

Drove thousands of angry and wasted miles between demeaning jobs and dysfunctional homes

Found novel ways to make foolish noise when I should have known to keep to a good silence

Exhausted by the vapid over-stimulation, I convinced myself I had grabbed for all their gusto

My fool errands led me on, time and again, growing older without noticing, almost til the end

I thought I traveled widely but I viewed everything with the same unquestionable beliefs

My lot was insipid variation upon pointless tasks prodded by the greedy, shallow and insecure

Overheated by implanted artificial needs I nosed blindly towards this infinite shared abyss

Their droppings stained me from above as we raced on the same treadmill for canned rewards

Any brief satisfaction was rapidly eroded by the over-hyped flood of the New and Improved

Often in the frenzy I caught short, sideways glances at details I vowed I must later consider

Sometimes I awoke from odd, confusing dreams, and felt thankful to be rapidly re-absorbed

Briefly disconcerted by my elders passing, I was quickly reassured that our lives must go on

I stumbled on after that hazy HappyEverAfter always radiating just beyond my event horizon

I never realized how the endless greedy distractions merely kept me quiet and uncomplaining

Expensively-empty vacations and merchants holidays kept me pedaling furiously in place

I lay in the night vainly craving the hollow diversions they had convinced me were so important

Too willingly did I suffer chronic fools in a synthetic hope of achieving their venal illusions

Slowly I realized I must race ever faster towards goals I clearly had never really specified

But, For Right Now, I always had this to Get Over With and that to Get Out Of The Way

Dutifully, I carted the kids between enriching activities they quickly and indifferently forgot

I envisioned a contemplative future but, sadly, my body wore out and my mind grew confused

Sociopaths set me to useless tasks, seeking only to lend some meaning to their own wasted cycles

Kept in the dark, led by the greedy, I slapped up their Just For Now with my own Quick And Dirty

I repeated their vile catechism of eternal vigilance, always preparing for more savage conflict

Brought back tiny inscrutable nuggets of extra-media clarity from times of sickness or injury

Forced myself to attend to their ever-changing office plumage and corporate sloganeering

Pretended my noisy, gas-powered wreckreation provided a fulfilling and re-invigorating relaxation

Gorged myself into obesity and illness mistaking nervous, gnawing emptiness for real hunger

Left the awful, incomprehensible future to the fuzzy heaven I financed through His Sales Reps

In the end, tried in vain just to stay in the rat race that I thought all along I was striving to escape

Struck finally into deaf silence by the blind truth of an everlastingly colorless and empty void

Rag-Dolled By The Roaring Waves

Wasted by a howling wind

Beaten back by biting dust

Pelted by the pouring rain

Frozen by that driven snow

Frightened off by lightning flashes

Swept away by swirling floods

Buried beneath building rubble

Stung all over by swarming pests

Swallowed up by dark tsunami

Ravaged by raging forest fire

Burned alive with bubonic plague

Weakened being tired and wet

Curled up tight against the cold

Driven off by constant drought

Carried over curving waterfalls

Drifted in with fat dead fishes

Decomposed in wasteful dumps

Shot dead by some unknown soldier

Broiled crisp under a burning sun

Entombed beneath icy avalanches

Dangled off of dangerous cliffs

Struck silent by so much starlight

Maddened under a fall full moon

Deafened by the thunder’s din

Silenced by their quiet suffering

Given cancer by corpro-nutrients

Rag-dolled by the roaring waves

Singled out by biting swarms

Ground up fine by heavy glaciers

Fried crisp in fiery volcanoes

Smothered by our own toxic smoke

Ripped apart in rock-filled canyons

Sunk far too deep in salty oceans

Tossed down from the tallest trees

Lost the way in dark limestone caves

Wandered off among the wondrous clouds

Once I Could Make Sense

As I lay before you here - gray, thin, bedraggled, sick and weak - Hang on for just a moment!

Just as now I am pausing in my vigorous, full-color life, equally as vibrant as yours is to you

Just as the long-dead doctor who spanked me into life so far in my past was, way back then

Do you try to imagine as he did then, and I did later, that you are me and I am you?

I was a boy who was glad not to have been created as an adult and especially not an old man

This useless and wornout husk you see now, did once actually quiver and overflow with life

Slowly, so slowly, despite all my best efforts and intentions, it must have all come to this

I lay gurgling, learned to crawl, walked, ran, walked again, sat down and now lay here, still

I apologize in advance and thank you so much from the real part of a life to your busy future

I likely don’t have a lot to say right now, but know that once even I could make a little sense

This shrunken and dried chrysalis, from which I am about to emerge, actually served me well

These bent and twisted fingers that can now barely even feed me, could make a daily music

I know not if memories of any of this will remain across the years, to my shrunken perspective

But once a light burned so furious and bright it often brought joyful tears to my eyes

I sat with my elders and later, my loved ones closer than you sit to me now and pondered

Are my eyes empty and blank, drugged or filled with pain, with no trace of this life now?

Once my faculties were sharp and my reflexes quick and I took the measure of this world

Its hard now to believe that I will strive merely not to soil my sheets and can barely sit up to eat

Yes, I knew the impossibility of imagining the weak and withered as the young and strong

But, I swear to you that my own life was no faded photograph, incomparable to your present

The meaning of my time may well be invisible to you and forgotten by me…but here it is real

I may have forgotten running miles, skiing steep slopes and swimming those huge blue swells

So, go ahead and make your pronouncements but simply remember that I made them, too

For all that remains to me is all that will remain to you, far sooner than you can prepare for

I grope for clever excuses, You replace what you said

I am turning happy pages

You are there, between the words

You are closing outside doors

I am rustling in the curtains

I have left things best unsaid

You are nailing me on the head

You tended to the garden tulips

I swept dream leaves late last fall

You are saving forgotten pictures

I finally cleaned off our north windows

I am spinning sugary fairytales

You are calmly filling pickle jars

You are taking copious notes

I try sorting random memories

You write letters by your flowers

I feel quite safe down in the basement

I am combining unrelated lists

You take off wandering an inner pilgrimage

You decide not to bother now

I spend way too much time, back then

I will often soundly daydream

You take naps with your dead mother

You still have what was a good line

I replaced the tattered script I finally lost

I am finding clever reasons

You replace what you had said

I look for more missing pieces

You struggle with the increasing autumn darkness

You are standing quite nearby

I just could, not quite, grasp your hand

Just one snowflake swirling

Just one snowflake swirling during the height of the mighty storm

A single quark in an atom of a protein molecule on one cell in my brain

A single note in the chorus of the marsh as the sun grows warm again

Just one voice among the billions either dead, alive or as yet unborn

Just one moment, quite important, except light years away in any direction

The only tree in miles of forest where lightning chose to strike

Just one small planet of an average yellow star midway out in a common spiral galaxy

One billion years of geological change witnessed by absolutely nothing

Colorful patterns emitting subconscious messages from the wing of a butterfly

Just one boy notices for the briefest moment as she alights just one time

Just a ripple of the many on a single lake when the breeze comes up one day

One mossy, glacially-striated granite boulder in that vast northern woods

An eye falls upon a single pebble among hundreds of thousands strewn about

Just one neuron fires in the hiker and no conscious thought emerges

Just one photon emitted long ago speeds past a blue-green cloud-rippled paradise

A billion cries for food and shelter turn into white background noise

Water dripping from the glacier has not yet become the river we will experience

Just one small flame from the roaring bonfire rends a single word of my book

Just one dream may fuel a people’s imagination for entire generations

A single skeleton encased in stone gives rise to a moment’s pause

Just one instant in the implacable present, so quickly gone despite my many efforts

Narrow beam of reason disappears in a fog of ignorance and superstition

The pallid sun of December briefly lights the room and then the long night falls

Just one more acre cleared will help to feed us and cannot do much harm

Just one life condemned to ignorance, hunger and filth cannot sway our faith

Just one salty teardrop falls drying in that hot, red desert sand

A single prayer cast outward into the twinkling black of the celestial firmament

Just one more futile gesture in a city fueled by desperate need

Just one more forgotten moment in a string of days from many years, now all long gone by

A single-celled creature living large in one drop of greenish pond water

The very first fat raindrop lost in the dust raised by its approaching storm

Just one life form based on carbon given over to a moment’s passion

Just one light ray refracted through one water molecule in a rainbow

The last waking thought in a meditation that morphs slowly into restful sleep

A single simple stone among all the rest in a long and winding gravel road

Just one shortest riff of the sound of a creek roaring in the Spring

Just one more filthy refugee trudging amid the sighing, shuffling pilgrims

The anonymous steer in the slaughter house with brown eyes so very full of soul

Simple problem that unravels systems far beyond its own importance

Just one second before the explosion and things remain quite ordinary

Just one more drink should solve the problems plaguing me like biting flies

A single golden leaf spins ground-ward on a still and sunny autumn day

A child alone whimpering in a cold building with shining antiseptic floors

Just one more winter comber slams itself upon the ancient rocky shore

Just one more bitter pill to swallow in a lifetime of mental self-medication

One and only one inattention brings on death in a quick, but casual, fashion

Just one happy smile can lift the gloom that settled in like some densest fog

The faintest chance of one small victory vies evenly with the certainty of death

A single light after miles of driving may seem either lonely or inviting

Just one brief thought spreading out from but a single soul among the billions

Just one day in an era of an epoch on a short-lived, but fortunate, planet

Just one more Monday arrives too quickly as yet another weekend fades away

Just one song in the misty pre-dawn stillness begins the entire avian chorus

In a single flash of insight an old problem is finally solved, for once and for all

Relative To One Another

I am slowing down as you are speeding up and we pass at an angle to time

They go up and we move down with the vast oceanic swells between us

Rotating slowly I see the beauty of the stars and galaxies all around us

Spinning too fast in my time I became disoriented and confused

I am folding up my ragged tent as you stake your newest claim

Her mother can no longer stand but your child has just learned to crawl

I am passing you as he is passing me and we cannot yet get out of their way

There is a new well in your village and we celebrate by our swimming pool

I read my book as you send one-fingered messages off somewhere into the ether

The snow that sent you off the road was welcomed by the farmers

We carved different ellipses around an invisible center of gravity

They waste more than they can ever use as we eke by on castoff remnants

I traveled quite slowly but was struck head-on by a speeding semi

When at last I returned it seemed nothing had changed but no one recognized me, either

The loss of the microscopic diatoms spelled disaster for the whales

Parts of seconds were to seconds as seconds were to the age of the universe

Her long lifetime could not be seen on the smallest of geologic time scales

All their simpering adulation could not push his boat across to heaven

We pass closely heading in different directions in all four known dimensions

Their silly propaganda changes timbre, Doppler shifting with the passing election

We observe a planet perturbing its sun as we are swarmed by microscopic mites

We attack our enemies while trillions of our cells hungrily struggle for their blood supply

Gentle winter sunlight shows the soft side of nuclear fusion on a truly massive scale

We destroy expensive, sophisticated satellites with simple high-speed brute force collisions

I am spinning slowly around in circles but you - You are really making a mark

A sun-glassed business woman phoning in a leased car distractedly strikes a fawn

I am sliding down the hill smiling, never to ascend again

He still climbs upward, his fatigue masked by the anticipation of the run

We both stand quite still as my train leaves you behind at the station

I briefly continue moving in small arcs after stepping off the merry-go-round

This seemingly small increase in temperature rippled through the biosphere

The insects hatched early, the chicks starved and the trees were decimated

My bobber went down just as you roared by shouting hoarsely from your speedboat

I sat down to be served as she struggled with the wood for their cooking fire

Our music and fireworks filled the air but not a sound went into space

I paused behind my muddy ox as your silvery jet gleamed far, far overhead

The difference in our ages would make a full lifetime for someone else

Our fossil bones would mix and date to plus or minus a thousand generations

The look in the eyes of the mutely destitute mother spoke too much to me

He thought disdainfully of all the little words he could ever hope to write

The poverty, filth, sickness, slave labor and lack of hope were as nothing -

Given the wondrous future paradise he learned of in the magnificence of the mosque

The clockwork universe was underpinned by the chaos of quantum uncertainty

Our most basic assumptions proved devastating to our ecological niche

I lay on my back with arms outspread in a field bright with spring flowers

20000 miles above, a geo-synchronous satellite moved right along with me

I breathed deeply as my beautiful vehicle turned oxygen into gases, poisonous to me

You survived by cutting firewood as your goats denuded the drying hillsides

He had his two sons and their daughter-in-laws, so he did not work any more

He strove hard to attain a corporate jet and to earn a 7 figure bonus every year

She remembered as a child that it snowed very heavily and it was always cold

Now, her obese youngsters went about smirkingly in baggy shorts and tees all year round

Each small change was imperceptible but the first and last photos were truly of different men

The runners showed amazing speed, but you casually drove by them so much faster

Dinosaurs dominated the earth for 160 million years but left here 65 million years ago

Our written history began about 5000 years ago with simple bookkeeping records

The sunlight that sustains me takes 8 minutes from its surface to my forehead

Four and a half years later, at 186k mps, it reaches the very nearest star

He looked at me with those soft brown eyes and I just had to stroke his ear

A long line of crowded stinking semis brought more cattle to the slaughterhouse

I am slowing down as you are speeding up, but for a while we have communications

I stand still on this rotating earth, orbiting the sun which revolves about the Milky Way as it moves towards constellation Hydra at a mere 600 kilometers per second

Night Walking, All Alone

I had a feeling I would not be heading home

I quickly left behind what I had known

There was a rustling with the restless breeze

The full moon shone through leafless trees

I pulled my collar about a bony neck

I felt the chill of night alone, one tiny speck

Still the inner voices spoke but remained elusive

As their echoes joined with the music

Solemnly I made a vow of recession

Slowly walking in that procession

Some mumbled secrets I could almost hear

Others walked alone in nearly silent fear

Through the night my pace adjusted

Bathed in light and star encrusted

Far from that life we’re daily following

On a path made only for those walking

As I paced alone through with that darkness near

wolves crying about me made things clear

there was no one there that I could to talk to

still I lacked the words to try and say so

I kept my thoughts to myself alone

Saw faint lights, but always far from home

There were outlines in the distance

Memories arose to trick the senses

Hidden entrances made me want to call her

Yet, still I held no course, so no need to alter

None traveled the path in the other direction

Where my route led was beyond detection

The night wind gusted from wails to whispers

where the pines gathered round to listen

The moon grew whiter as it got higher

Thoughts of my life burned away like fire

When I paused to test the breeze

Something small scurried away in the scree

I grew drowsy but dared not tarry

Lest I lose the tune that I must carry

Farther on past an icy stream

I am engulfed once more in childhood dreams

Walking on throughout the hours

Here and there I pass darkened towers

On this trip time cannot be saved

On this road there are no traffic slaves

Little worry in my steps

It seemed, for once, that time just crept

The night wore on beneath my feet

Thoughts of home grew faint and weak

Those once close now rejoined me forever

I found it right that we arrive together

Then at last came that first bird song

hope for those who had walked so long

I started down into another valley

There, where the sun was late to dally

As I turn then for a quick look back

Where I came from was still quite black

Suddenly as I at last awoke in some confusion

Just caught sight of my own apparition

There he was crumpled, pale and gray

Tired after his long night’s journey, he lay

For a brief moment it was not just madness

Though I could not but note, a touch of sadness

The More It Blurs

The hand that grasps cannot realize the fingers that point

But the mind that is empty remains full of surprises

For those no longer busy

There is always just enough to do

The mind that wanders does not travel far

While the hand that simply reaches out, crosses any border

A people with roots within the earth

Find meaning in simple rain and sun

The man who fears that he might fail

May just be content with what others deal

To glimpse the riverbed through flowing water

Might require good light and a high bank

For those whom time has passed by at last

This could be a blessing they cannot share

A dry summer might not seem important

To sophisticated city dwellers

The more we center all our focus

The more a blur all else becomes

To strive and fail is difficult

To strive again is harder still

For the angry man nothing satisfies

As too little always comes too late

A dog may lie sleeping quietly for hours

Exploding into motion at some unheard noise

The meaning that we attach to things

Removes something from what we understand of them

To sleep is not simply to ignore

To dream is not just to run away

These are the days I often spoke of back then

These are the days, I used to say, when we would only remember back then like a dream

These days, I now recall saying, we would wonder about what happened before

Now is when back prior to then joins easily with only a confused haze in between

I always felt then that now we would retain but little from that dizzying spiral

At last, these are the days I often spoke of as our emergence from that rapid blur

Details would disappear even as we finally try to consider them during our awakening

Now is when I meant that then would seem to have been too many years, gone by too fast

These are the times I said we would look back from, only to remember so very little

I always knew we could not possibly be digesting all that we were seeing every day

I always thought now we would look back on then as if through rapidly shifting mists

I always told you that it all would pass way before we would even know that it could end

These times, I said back then, we would regard like some old movie, stuck on fast forward

These days I see I was right to say we moved too fast then to have any appreciation

Those days are the ones I always said we would now remember like their old pictures

These are the times to which we left but little to be summed up, in too a short time

Now we have no choice but to try and grope meaning from our own ambivalent contrails

Those days recede back beyond our buckled event horizon into a jumbled darkness

Now memory has compressed the tight wavetrain of bygone days into indistinguishability

Those were the days from which so few events even remain still jutting up enough to be seen

The rest lie blanketed by heavy clouds viewed from far above here in this blindingly blue sky

Wait, What? Was I Ever Really Here?

The seconds making up this roiling present always seem to be speeding up, don’t you see?

Still, they pass through the portal of the moment one at a time, but just faster now, for me

That really old clock still slowly ticks off the numbered minutes of my wandering musings

I think I may have been dreaming since I cannot really prove that I have not sat here forever

It’s been hours since the twilight shadows were enveloped by that cold winter darkness

They had filled me with their emptiness and then simply gone off in some uneven silence

Then I thought about how long its been since the first time I said that I never saw you again

So I was left to question once more, if I had ever really even been there

But then, after maybe a brief ten thousand years, who was I who might have said anything at all?

Less than the shadowy blurs of all the memories I fumble through, as if in the dark

That small boy who, thinking back, came to that one memory before which there was nothing

Me, confused in my senility, losing sense of the life that I never had time for, in my prime

This recurring sense of unreality in my present casts a very suspicious light upon the past

Looking for a way out, I even try to rouse myself – As if this might be some sleeper’s dream

Calling forth pictures of who they are now, I cannot recall the path back to what I knew

Yet, scraps of old papers with names and dates do seem to locate me at given points

It all passed by so quickly, leaving an ever-compressing set of hazy, randomized images

I really did await, one at a time, each of those brief holidays I simply cannot separate now

Guess that probably wasn’t me, so who was it then in that there, which doesn’t exist anymore

So that must mean, in point of fact, that I am not really here right now, as well

We watched their futures become our past

As our days we slowly passed

we watched their futures become our past

In all those instants nothing changes

Then all at once it’s rearranged

Born as children, not like those with that white hair

Yet slowly we assume their shady chairs

As three generations pass while we grow tall

At last we become the next to fall

The minutes pass at first so slowly: Summer never seems to come

then the years fly by so quickly, as life flees before it's done

Through all our moments we string together

a tiny blurred fraction, we think of as forever

So slowly do our days we gather

it takes quite a while til nothing matters

Cast with fossil bones or glimpsed as insects trapped in amber

Brief, sideways glances we now scarcely remember

Our lives and history seemed to be so everlasting

in brief insights revealed by merest instants flashing

Long awaited events stored in half-remembered jumbles

Lives so short, but memories only incoherent mumbles

Time spent always looking forward to myriad trivia

Then off into the insensate void, delivered to an empty oblivion

In the end and looking back, it seemed as if it were quite long

yet I know I could not finish my confused little song

Both far away and long ago take on different aspects

On that day we stare back so blankly from empty caskets

Still we bend to pray for guidance with our knees to the earth

round our sun inside the galaxy, within a cluster, in just one universe

Having written in the beach sand, the hand of man, it shortly pauses

and just as quickly all life ends of insensate causes

Just as all things we thought important so surely disappeared

Their monuments and their memories shall no longer be revered

In the eternal mountains we lay our dead to rest in peace forever

though science tells us the peaks will not resist the weather

We work away the many years with vague promises to ponder later

then comes the day that quickly ends our short stay here

Our breaths will have a finite number, our heartbeats too, a small round figure

But time in the void cannot be grasped by any mathematical rigor

Long the sunset, fine the twilight, in that wondrous, warm June summer

but at last full darkness must induce, a perpetual and dreamless slumber