Early Morning

  Early morning 
 searing beach -
 low tide, 
 the whiff of
 fresh brine vegetable decay.
 
 A faint breeze mutes the humidity
 like a flirt whispering
 sweet nothings in your ear,
 
 making promises
 she will never keep.

Secret Amusement

 
 
 Every source of secret amusement
 comes with the cost
 of isolation, and
 the threat of smugness - 
 conviction of a specialness,
 a vestige of a
 childhood inkling
 that, inhaled
 like some illicit powder,
 maintains that delusion,
 when the rough truth
 remains: 
 it is not so.

Who Owns What?

 
 Born into a situation not of our choosing,
 an everlasting tornado of intentions 
 and events, 
 is what we were born into, 
 and what we will die out of, 
 and almost none of it is under our control.
 With illness and decay, 
 until we are no more.
 
 What do we truly own?

This Morning

 
 This morning I woke up
 to the constant chomping
 of the dog chewing
 her dinosaur,
 steadfastly digging through
 the cotton skin
 to get to the plastic
 squeaker.
 
 For a second
 my mind strayed,
 attempting to
 find a metaphor
 connecting fierce,
 extinct Triassic
 giants to this gentle
 domestic creature;
 
 but all there was
 was a dog chewing
 her squeaky toy
 in the morning
 before breakfast.

Clacks and Flashes and Chings

 
 All the clacks and flashes and chings,
 culture becomes a twittering machine,
 lost in distracting cravings from electronic crack,
 it’s shattered attention flung everywhere - 
 stroboscopic Soma.
 
 Myths are changed
 while consensus reality
 is distorted;
 three dimensions are reduced
 to momentary haze;
 
 anger misplaced,
 counterfeit pleasure,
 sentimentality trumps reason,
 truth is played like three card monte,
 and consequences are yet
 to be tallied.
 
 This is another engraving
 on the Bastards’ win list.

Feast of Expectation


 Abandon the feast of expectation,
 the odds favor recent ill winds.

 take refuge down the vertical time highway between
 foggy memory 
and unrequited longing.

Shifting

 
 Like everything else,
 human connections shift;
 from neglect, 
 from ineptness,
 from the stranglehold 
 of family ghosts.
 
 expectations demand retrofitting,
 the broken remnants of disappointment
 are discarded 
 onto the scrapheap
 of loss.

Nothing

 
  Nothing -
 
 impossible for there
 to be nothing
 
 unless you’re
 dead.
 
 then
 
 nothing matters.

Tentacles


 There are times of energy
 without etiquette, when
 the arenas of chatter 
 overwhelm - 
 
 like enduring the squawk
 of a thousand hungry gulls -
 
 devices and beings
 devouring fragile attention,
 that runs aground
 and is lost.

Wish Your Were Here


 Mischevious temptation:
 to speak,
 attempt to share, 
 to fill a void,
 rather than remain 
 within it’s vastness.
 
 Beyond speaking a single word
 the whole world there for the taking
 all without anything to say.
 
 It’s not a great matter
 of life and death.
 
 Open space,
 without end
 the meaning rests in the moment.
 
 Words are mere symbols;
 not the sky and clouds
 and green grass
 and blue reaching beyond imagination.
 
 They are the luxury
 of sensation.
 
 Time is best served by
 just shutting up.
 
 This place can be known,
 but you have to be here.