Gunshots

War broke out and I dropped my camera.
It managed to photograph this man's fear.
Unlike a gesture held, this was split second.
Indescribable, really, I could not depict.
But the camera, and its fractured lens,
                                                         did.

In Search of Something New

I find myself in my reflection, the selfless disappearance of the self. For weeks my thoughts sat on a shelf, recollections of times when I was played with. Toys are not the same as they once were. Their parts are more complex. Worthless or instead maybe, full of worth.

Die Out

When I'm gone,

you'll never know the difference.

There will be clouds overcasting the hills of a crowded
desert landscape and valleys involving
houses.

There will be tortoises.

There will be canvas.

There will be grains displaced as oceans
dash across higher plains,

collapsing,
twisting sound.

There will be difference in the world, but a world of
difference?

No.

Not Philosophers, but Fretsawyers

In tragedy, a grin, though formed upon the upturned face of the tuxedo-ed dragon, reverberates like a firestorm, not optimistically, shining like the serrated edges of an elongated blade ran between the tree's fibered soul.

The Darkest Coffee Smells the Sweetest

Although he spoke it, I don't believe it to be true.
Auden's picnic, where his downlying gentleman broke his bread and drank wine with a flash of light overhead and unheard: a distance undervalued.

The rain began tapping on top of the hazel wood milk like a kaffeeklatsch and
barking dogs: the Labrador. O, the Labrador.

The Duke

It doesn't mean a thing, really.
Those Merlot stained glasses, tilting.
The tracing of a protractor
around its plastic frame, numbers
and senseless numbers smashed
into degrees of the leaf
after it has fallen from the tree.

Shamrocks grouped together in
a green puddle the boy laid inside
when he was eight, care-freed
and free to care::
about anything, really. It doesn't
matter now that holes have been dug,
and inside those wholes dug out,
each body seeded the same way.

The world swung around
the sun on the 2's and 4's.
And as its audience snapped
their fingers on, well.. the 1's and 3's,
martini's were filled in orderly fashion
by those fashionably dressed.
The piano asked for ice, and
would you believe a thousand waitresses?

Page 178 Portrait

"Cranly of all the tumults and unrest and longings in his soul, day after day and night by night, only to be answered by his friend's listening silence, would have told himself that it was the face of a guilty priest who heard confessions of those whom he had not power to absolve but that he felt again in memory the gaze of its dark womanish eyes.

Through this image he had a glimpse of a strange dark cavern of speculation but at once turned away from it, feeling that it was not yet the hour to enter it. But the nightshade of his friend's listlessness seemed to be diffusing in the air around him a tenuous and deadly exhalation and he found himself glancing from one casual word to another on his right or left in stolid wonder that they had been so silently emptied of instantaneous sense until every mean shop legend bound his mind like the words of a spell and his soul shriveled up, sighing with age as he walked on in a lane among heaps of dead language. His own consciousness of language was ebbing from his brain and trickling into the very words themselves which set to band and disband themselves in wayward rhythms."

J. Joyce -from Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man