Poetry: In the Cracks

a random poem that spilled onto the page just now.

*

People who fit into the cracks
don’t get there by falling —
they slide, duck, and twist,
slick as shadows,
as they’ve always admired
tree roots for their secrets.
Jeweled branches that reach
above ground into sky praise
themselves too much. They’re too loud,
too brash, too selfish, always
in the way of someone else.

Those who fit into the cracks
can be but a blur of light, barely seen,
the way curls of smoke
are scarves for air.
These souls smooth
themselves into a second skin
over wounds and ugliness, hoping
to be unnoticed,
like a stitch that holds
a despairing heart together.

Those who fit into the cracks
become what is needed
in the manner of an underling,
a servant quick to please,
or a mother-goddess tending
her young;
the same thing, sometimes.

And those that notice
the wisp of a quiet girl hidden
in the cracks
might see a frightened deer
or the bravery of star-birth.
She doesn’t mind
which you choose;
she’s busy knitting
purpose into the lost,
and perhaps, looking
to see where she fits
into the cracks of you.

POEM: A Nomad Mind

Her existential crisis,
a late-onset failure to thrive,
found no crumb of meaning
in this hand-to-mouth life. It felt
too similar to the assembly line itself.
To even think 
on it, especially when traveling 
on the streetcar,
or in bed at night,
or at the grocery store --
that was abomination, admitting
to herself that she was but waiting
to die. 

With a practiced breath
she steadied her thoughts. 
In her mind’s eye, she pressed
dawn’s dew from a clump of moss 
and let it drip
onto her tongue, parched
from singing the stars to sleep. 

In the outward world, she exhaled
slowly, swaying
with the streetcar’s pull
toward the factory. She smiled,
her thoughts stretching 
like a cat from sleep, refreshed. 

Wildness had long fled
her flesh, her physical life captured
in a consumerist orbit
around this modern sun-god 
of eternal hungering.
Hers seemed a joyless people,
staid and satisfaction-fearing.
Such people who would desire
to wall up the wind, lest it beguile
a curious mind to feel
a true and natural power. 

Such a world inspired
only emptiness. She survived
because she’d decided 
her mind was a lawless place. 
Within, she found a raw landscape,
hers alone, where a life could be made
idea-foraging,
making camp in a moral debate,
and seeking the fertile fields of soul.

Here her nomadic mind worked 
out her own domestication,
unbound 
and traveling light, cultivating
her existence like an artisan’s craft.

Rivers ran for a living, too.
Stagnation so quickly turned
water to poison. 
All flow and cycles and seasons felt
entropy’s breath at their necks,
and never since stopped
to see if they were still being chased.  

The streetcar squealed to her stop. 
Now she’d cross the street and spend 
a twelve-hour shift working
the line, all the while traversing
a rocky steppe of her mindlands,
choosing stones that struck
her heart as treasure. 
 

[Prose]

She cleared off her writing desk, jaw clenched with effort, and resented that she should feel so at odds with everything. 

“What of the future?” her mind groaned anxiously again. 

“Oh, what of it?” she bickered with herself. “That old man? The future, as far as one can foresee, is but the withered end, where all dreams dry up under hungering winds of remembering. The future longs for old ways passed by and lacks all forward drive.”

She felt some cruelty in her judgment, but tempered it with a tithing of pity. 

“Only the present moves. It deserves our full focus if we’re to care about navigating it at all.” 

Satisfied, she sat deliberately, her desk more enticing now by being bare. 

“Tomorrow is silent, only capable of eternal submission. Now is the place from which to rule.” 

She set out a book and leafed it to a blank page, then inked a fountain pen with measured movements. All the while she listened carefully to stray thoughts and fragments of feeling. These vagrants rolled through her as morning fog in hilly pastures, so she noted each expression and let them pass.

“Would thee fight flame with a knife?” she wrote neatly, then sighed a blade-crossed breath. 

Self-governance required both the servant and the queen, she thought and nodded once, a bow and an order given simultaneously. Then she pursed her lips and gently turned the still-wet page.

[Poem] Two Sides of the Same Coin

You were a mute Hamlet, pacing

the bridge, your stage shaking

from the violence

of an ice jam beneath. You heard 

a man drowned

in the black river yesterday, taken

by the whim of a Spring

too eager to live. 

You held a quarter like Yorick’s skull, tossing

it to the question To be, or not to be, 

while the ice screamed

obscenities

as if to mock your acting. 

When the coin spun out and tumbled

out of reach, you didn’t move. 

You were numb, you watched

as if beheaded 

while a woman bent to retrieve 

your lost verdict. She must have seen

your silent monologue;

she must have known

the coin’s value was life and death. 

She rubbed the quarter’s edge, raised

an eyebrow, and offered

it back to you, saying,

“A coin has three sides, you know.” 

You felt like falling.

You felt you’d already died

and gone somewhere you’d never seen. 

Set free, for once, to choose

anything and everything,

something somehow between

the laughter and the tears.

The Secret Life of Stones

She told me that stones lived,
crept, and even flew,
just slower than our imagined 
rate of time.

Years later I understood
how to love a river rock
like a bird, for time pulled
hard upon my beloved, until 
we were distant in the same room. 
Her breath became one unending 
syllable of a phrase I’d never hear
completed. 

“Ahhhhhhh,” she breathed,  
and if time ran fast enough for stones to fly,
she would say, “I love you.” 

I had faith enough to love
her and this life she now lived, 
a love undeserving of pity
from those who never knew
the secret life of stones. 

I came to move slower, too. 
“Ahhhhhhh,” I breathed gently,
my shoulder pressed upon hers,
too scared
to refrain from finishing the phrase, 
after a while:  
“I love you.” 

Then, last night some urban creature
dug up the fallow flower bed
outside our front window. 
When I drew aside the drapes
in acceptance of another day
behind us, I wondered
about the torn earth -- would time heal
this like a scraped knee?

I set the question free, turning away
from the living land.
The garden had only a minor wound,
and the stones of the walkway 
leading from the door
were full of thoughts and dreams 
as always.

My beloved was breathing, “Ahhhhhheeeeeeeeee....” 

I love you. 

Poetry: Airlock

Poetry: Singularity