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

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

Small Prophet – The Garter Snake’s Tale

    This, from 'Lives of the Reptilian Saints’

I saw a slender garter snake resting near the road

I wanted to believe he had made that journey safely,

all the way from the other side

I was so amazed that he was even still alive

Something of a miracle with the way this traffic flies

Something of an accident or maybe, a not so simple, random magic chaos

Now he’s left free to disappear forever, down into the weeds

Just a chance encounter with another world that’s disappearing,

just a glimpse of things as they’d always been: Living and not building

Surviving not creating, adapting not administering, belly to the earth,

moist tongue probing ever so gently into that warm summer air,

Not driving behind dark glasses with the tinted windows all wound up

And as I savored those delicate, mottled stripes

the wonder overwhelming,

I finally saw that he had shown me, that I had, indeed, lost my way.

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