Lifting Off From This Life

and as I saw myself where I lay quite still, just barely breathing

I began to leave in peaceful radiations

rising up, I separate, and leave a trail of gently streaming images

passing straight through the picture window as though it is not there

rising freely, tucking backward, a back dive arching upward

arms spread quite wide and I’m trailing, a rainbow colored mist

moving onward, climbing upward at a steeper angle, the foothills fall away

and from a spot between my eyes, an infinite image is unwound

much higher now, but not too far off, the mountainous divide comes into view

so very free and beyond being calm, evaporating in the contrail of my soul

heading West and ever higher my density decreases

in somersaults and laid out back flips, an entire journey in an instant

and then, high enough at once, I see the curve of our miraculous atmosphere

at last so free with arms outspread, it is escape velocity for me

moving cross the moon's lovely face a bright blue planet shines far below

then on around to the dark side to slingshot away with even greater speed

and faster now, cruising openly with the photons from the sun

leave the friendly ecliptic behind to get a feeling for the void

and in four short years my soul can visit nearby Proxima Centauri

but at this speed time passes so very slowly that I am aged but very little

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

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

Their Times Have Passed Me By

Time has passed me by

And I cannot really say that I was sorry to see it go

Time has passed right on by me

But I have been OK with missing out on all the latest fads

I think that maybe now I am slowly walking down a country lane

Instead of being stuck in traffic on a smoggy super highway

I even sat quietly in the shade for a dozing interval

and thought for just a moment that I might not be losing any time

It took a while but the times have passed on by me

now their confused dust is disappearing beyond my event horizon

I’m not in tune with the early adapters

I wear and repair a lot of stuff that’s secondhand

I’m not buying new cars, fast food, colas, snacks or taking out any loans

The advertising target on my back has pretty much worn right off

The beautiful people cannot even see me behind their expensive sunglasses

Movers and shakers in a hurry easily look right on through me

I listened to the birds and not the markets just the other morning

Haven’t had that tiny and insulting 1.5% salary adjustment for several years now

I’m daydreaming on the sidelines with my helmet off as the clock runs down

Not anxiously awaiting another dream vacation I cannot afford and will not remember

Content to be cut off in the slow lane and watch the power drivers roar on by

Not quite so sure the future is still brighter than the past that I came from

Cast ashore for good by social waves as their dirty, teeming river hurries by

Not picking up the kids or meeting some prospect for an expensive power lunch

My rapid advance towards as yet unconsidered goals has slowed down to a crawl

Now as I regurgitate their sound bites, people say I sound a bit sarcastic

To the masters of the universe, I’m a useless deadbeat who pays his credit card on time

Caught up in the gears of progress I feel lucky to have been spit out while still alive

So now, somehow, I’ve eddied out for a moment just as I approach that unavoidable abyss

Thank god they spun me off and passed me by for this brief instant before our eternal nothing

It’s far too long for even eternal love to last

Cantor’s diagonalization argument for uncountability > infinity: The real numbers is an extraordinarily special set. If one were to graph the real numbers on a line, any segment on that line contains the same cardinality of points as does the whole line itself.

It’s far too long for me to plan for any future

It’s far too long for my constrained imagination

It’s far too long to engage simple emptiness

It’s far too long for even eternal love to last

There’s just too much time after this blue-green-white earth is gone

There’s just too much time when my memories are thinned beyond recognition

There’s just too much time to be totally senseless, thinking nothing

There’s just too much time to be far less than alone

It’s way too much to even outline

It’s way too much to hold inside

It’s way too much to get a grip on

It’s way too much and still, there’s so much more

I have extra time that I did not even have to save

I have extra time unfolding like a burden I cannot hope to lift

I have extra time growing longer and more overwhelming

I have extra time moving ever faster beyond my shrinking comprehension

I have nothing to do and no way to get it done

I have nothing to do and all the time in the universe to do it

I have nothing to do then and do not even know it

I have nothing to do and cannot get over it

I don’t have to work anymore or ever again

I don’t have to work because there are no workdays

I don’t have to work and I have no boss

I don’t have to work because I flow like water

Freedom at last without any more choices to be made

Freedom at last chained in molecular compounds

Freedom at last in the vast black and near-vacuum

Freedom at last at so close to absolute zero

I’d be happy to live in eternal sorrow

I’d be able to get by with constant pain

I’d be alright with poverty and suffering

I’d be better off than unconscious in that empty and unknowable void

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

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