Simple Math

These people
were asking about me
marrying you.

There was yellow.
There was light blue.

We’re not Swedish
but it was Summer.

And they asked
if I still think of you.

I don’t think you’re in
any mental space
to understand how
all these exchanges
are delicately computational.

Lofty clouds off in the distance.
A kingdom that’s become
nonexistent
or they
never existed to begin with
for the
sacred realm of words
up there

that materialized
destroyed
and echoed today.

There is disease in my heart.

My consciousness is a dance each day.

A beat that is slow, bad and good.

An apple
I remember eating atop Astoria, Oregon
while bathed in sunlight.

At least this was not you

. . . so I can somehow still live.

My Galactic Journey Cometh

I’m looking for the cashier at Target
to save me

I look because my heart hurts
and it’s way too late
in my life for this

I was supposed to be
on board a skiff
in the Mediterranean
at this point in the game

So I look for the child
who’s thrown a temper tantrum
left a pile of spilled popcorn
in the parking lot

I know he’s still with me
whistling along in make-believe

That’s why I can’t pass
the toy section
without looking

that’s why I cannot pass

Those gilded afternoons
without responsibility
the ones with Janis Joplin’s deep blues
they keep beckoning me
to leave this place
to leave this planet

my fleshen hands
by the soil the flowers the tears
the mourners

my galactic spaceship

my ticket
my journey

Exogenesis Terrestrial

Without your eyes I’m lost like an Earth-bound religion.
They were eagles to fly across mountains.
Canopies for the stars.

They exalted my lungs
to wake me each day
from the dream between the dead and the living.

The Dead Land turns off the lights.
There is an echo of your name.
Then the dawn comes and shows me the blue stories of
your deeply precious brain.

I’ve worn blue for many days since your leaving.
You know, the blue like the solitude of night.
This is an honest and probably unintentional tribute,
the consequence of mourning.
Your oceanic eyes are gone – the planet’s great reference.

I assumed your neurons were the Universe.
I assumed them as infinitesimal light,
the simple place where the living and the dead don’t exist,
the Universe.
The sound of your low voice in my ears
before the sea crashes, your ancient tongue churns me into
almost everlasting sand

and I am found somehow again in this confined, terrestrial
body

with the things meant, unmeant and unspoken.

These simple passings of eons.

For Naught A Winter Sun

Oh, to be able to see you again in flesh
in the perfect whiteness of your face and curves

to bend the day
and tell the sun the parable of forgotten ellipses

to see the person who is both
the most real and most unbelievable to me

I have been the most real for you too
but you are scared of that now

scared of my dark eyes that always
received the blue of yours

like space receives the fire of stars

in this fear the sun’s journey has not returned
for
the winter of my heart

. . . in your vanished wake

So I sit in a hermitage on Earth

or it could be any lone planet in the cosmos

with a fire of low embers burning

my cold frozen toes
and a cough that reveals the taste of metallic
blood

This is the land of my home

you are not at the ancient hearth

The embers burn, slowly, slowly away

and soon will go the existence of all the Universe
that follows in the death of the sun

Metropolis Of Scalar Memory Codex

I don’t know if you’re out there.

I’m not saying if made of stone or cells.

This cell was constructed over forty years

and then erased during a lightning storm

before they could enter into the dimensional.

 

I don’t know if you’re out there.

No intention is here or there

within a cupboard made of particle board or wood

who could listen to the instruments of the cosmos?

Who could remake the antecedents?

 

I’m a resident of the garden.

I’ve known sunsets and sunrises.

I held a dying person in my arms

then a lover left me when this new world was just

beginning

and I have been with the cement walking stones

ever since

bequeathed to the radiated air and rising city.

Morning And Her Coffee

I wanted to call you Lapiz Lazuli
this morning
as you drank your coffee
at the wooden table.

I looked for you.
With that burned aroma and steam rising.

Then there’s your eyes
that the sunlight touches
like an ancient port in Portugal
or a tomb from whence Lazarus hath walked.

I have traveled those aquamarine seas
in my dreams
and over the years of
my love’s maturing for you.

I’ve gone around the Earth
in those frozen, eternal moments
being born and reborn before you.
Amazed, I guess I should say.
Epic like Ulysses’ sojourn.
Unending like his homesickness.

I don’t need the postures of adulthood,
only this that cultivates silence.
The eastern wisemen call it knowing
and the physicists may preface it as God.

You are the ocean of my heart.
Vast.
The trade routes to my soul
and
across the ancient stars.

The lapiz lazuli precipiced upon your gaze
is a map to something greater than life.

An impossible summation.

So, I will wait peacefully for you to speak.

It is quieter than death.