The Desire to Create

Creating is a desire,
stretching through space and centuries,
touching you,
tugging at the sleeve of your mind
until you follow along,
down the ravine
soaring up
all the way ’round Mercury,
bathed in Sol’s fire
and glazed in comet-tail ice,
all the time from Eden to eternity,
until waves crash unto canvas
and the paint smears your face,
staining your heart with a million words,
terminology of senses, satisfied;
until it returns, midnight or morning,
the desire to create.

Stormy Cadence

In the storm I turn to you but you turn into storm, around and out of the window, while the cloud-covered moon tells me in gibbeous gibberish you won’t be back to speak until morning, its crepuscular crescent appearing to disappear im your clouds as you rise to riddles, waxing on about waning winds and their wisdom, symphonic syllables but unspoken, unbroken by gusts of gale as you dissolve in absolution, leaving me to window shutters stuttering in the storm your silence left behind in restless ruminations, chasing the shy threads of wisdom you wish to retrieve before your returning, turning back your face from storm towards me.

Swamp Monsters

You’re hunting for swamp monsters in the fog of your brain, while the candlelight burns down along your spine, turning your marrow into molten steel and tallow, no light, darkness receding into the corners of your skull as reality seeps out of your pores and ghosts settle on your brow, burning lanterns of green lightning bugs against the crescendoing dizziness, disoriented creatures stumbling over rotten roots in your mind, and you run but there is nothing left of you to understand the concept of running, so you turn to fog to swamp to past, to myth.

Uncreated

Destruction of walls in empty rooms
you do and you don’t,
doubting the sanity of space
and your sense of time
in which lines collapse
to riddled seams,
reality unbroken by streams
while breaking rules,
defying structure of defined chaos,
the world you uncreated
by pure chance
when you turned the page
in the wrong direction.

Bone-Deep Knowledge

When the thunder comes rolling,
rippling down your spine,
and you bury your head into pillow clouds
not afraid but shaken by rumbling insight

when the sky opens the abyss
and you glimpse eternity torn open,
the atmosphere caving in,
lightning flashing through your marrow

and you understand the nature of nature,
the unreined mount of ancient force,
riding the crest of mountain and sea,
of night splitting into noise and silence.

Crisp Nightfall

Below the fading clouds
white fish are swimming,
warm breath, rising

exhaled after the rain
as cold air touches the darkness,
crisp as fresh bedsheets,
drawn up against the night.

Stand and Stare

Stand and stare
Through windows and between fingers

At stars wheeling by,
Those cosmic ideas

And circles in spirals
And dances in rhymes
Mystery words in minds
And thoughts without lines

—
(Combination of two short drafts.)

Lunar Dust

Have you ever sampled the moon
with fingers entranced,
lunar dust covering your eyes
and speaking to you
in faint memories of the beginning

—
(Had this in my drafts for forever, but decided it’s good enough to release.)

Trapping Moth Code

Each notion the rustle of a wing,
counting out binary thoughts,
tapping them into the palm of your hand
– flutters
01101101
– stirring
01101111
– gently
01110100
– inside
01101000
your mind;

caught in your consciousness,
kept safe in secret networks,
granted passage through the conduit of intuition
from fingertip to cortex;

movement
of silent transmissions.

Syllabus of Stars

Contemplation
filling pages
line by line by line,
finding words
in time, in rhyme;

Solace, comfort
spilled on paper
night by night by night,
filling void
with warmth, with sparks;

The syllabus of stars,
ignited,

the day’s adventures
settled down
to quiet embers.