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

Hanging On With No Assurances

Stumbling blindly into sunlight

Filling up with inner darkness

Straining for that long lost silence

Ringing from the foolish noise

Breathing hard on rocky trails

Nodding off to inner plans

Lighting candles after dinner

Bombing villages from far above

Observing simple fossil starlight

Blinding them with LEDs

Laughing without hurtful smirks

Sobbing softly from leafy branches

Jumping over corporate hurdles

Tripping up on contract details

Staying focused on their message

Waltzing by important minutiae

Standing up for squishy causes

Remaining rigid on silly issues

Holding firm to other’s opinions

Hanging on without assurance

Counting down to a miraculous

Betting upon the quite impossible

Standing firmly upon shaky ground

Building higher without foundation

Damming up the inner flow

Blocking out the quiet voices

Blasting apart the fearful silence

Stopping up that ancient wisdom

When Thoughts have lost their words

I am only breathing

          Breathing deeply, very slowly

All the noise seems safely, very safely, far away

          Letting go of everything, everywhere, all at once

It is simple breathing, as the hurried world rushes past

          Softly breathing here, quietly, just behind my eyes

I am only breathing

          Slowly, slowly filling with a mild sense of calmness

Each inhalation brings a bit of cosmic background peace

          Each exhalation, part of that deep relieving sigh

There is nothing more required

          Thoughts have lost their words

I am only breathing

          Delicate and subtle but somehow very vast

A warm glow suffusing from somewhere deep within

          When I am filled inside, I see that it surrounds

A center spreading outward, smoothing angry tides

          A calm that reaches well down into my autonomic side

Warmth and tranquility spreads from my soles to my scalp

          A phrase repeated as I respire nurtures every cell

For I am only breathing

          Innocent and fragile, feeding inner strength

The restful hum of the quiet mind comes to the fore

          My gratitude is mixed with a faint sense of relief

Moving smoothly now in time, no longer young or old

          Sometimes even floating skyward in our blue atmosphere

I am only breathing

          But my brain is producing, a set of characteristic waves

I warm each and every ache and pain and relax all of my old wounds

          with that calming flow of radiant energy from the center

Increasingly I am absent in the middle of my breaths

          Then slowly come the images at the edge of sleep

I am only breathing

          The adrenaline ceases running and my vital signs slow down

I clear aside my worries and anxieties, the fears and the doubts

          I am safe somewhere inside the instant between each calming breath

I let go of time as I did while floating in my mother’s womb

          Bird calls and breezes can now become part of me

I am only breathing

          Briefly, I am not driven by empty hunger and undirected restlessness

Random thoughts of pressing issues slowly decrease in frequency

          During some intervals I am broadcasting my most harmonic waves

I am quietly filled with a subtle ether, quite dilute and very mild

          Seconds change to minutes in the rhythms of the houseplants

I am only breathing

          Yet it frees the quiet joy at the privilege of simply being

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