Interior

Know it well

There are doors within.

Into all the other halls.

And they can bring you outside.

If you open them.

You might be inside.

I'm inside too.

I'd rather the air circulate.

I need the warmth sometimes.

But mostly I want the cool breeze.

It moves my heart.

In the black of memory.

Takes me back,
Knowing things are lost in the axis.

Bit by bit.

Pushed forward.

Against our will.

Don't we wish we had found those mountains.

That we saw them rise and fall in our eyes.

Got lost in the crumbling rocks.

Even this song keeps and keeps and keeps beating

When there was no beat I felt it still.

I clawed at that perception.

We haven't but seen the ephemeral.

We are tricked and tortured,

It's a moment right here.

I saw the moment.

I was lost in the moment.

That moment freezes and the rocks try to crumble.

The beat in this song keeps beating, but the rocks can't crumble.

His face, lost in time.

When the days lengthen and go on and on and on and on

Feel his gaze crumbled.

This moment is long frozen and past and beaten onward.

The jittered halted space in his gaze.

It's got a meaning when the mountains won't crumble,

And the pen slows its caress of the page.

I think I could see a time beyond these mountains.

And I can't tell if it meant more or less than this faltered awareness.

Please hold me close,

And let the time flow without us,

I want these currents to keep us here forever,

In the eddies where we'll never change.

He got locked into systems.

Even though he could see they weren't  impervious.

His rhythms seemed static,

The pleasant boundaries pulsing in place.

It was those times when people asked him to move beyond the walls.

He hadn't made the walls, but they still felt sacrosanct.

He felt anxious when he approached them.

Weird walls.

Walls that meant nothing except his confused sense of duty to an abstraction that he couldn't wrap his mind around.

There were limits to his thinking.

As he fought off the tortured stories of mistrust he sensed all around,

He fought the walls themselves.

He struggled to answer the unspoken questions.

Why couldn't he break them?

When would he be as tall as the walls themselves?

He had no answers. 

He only saw the systems locked in place.

His foolish feet planted.

A beat statically repeating.

In A Garage

The tools that I use draw me down

Into their hold, the music doesn't fit them

I don't know quite what I'm looking for.

I'm not sure that I should bother at all.

I can't find the soul in the chords.

I can't feel the lunge of the heart.

Only failed improvisations lost in

The weird twinge of keys.

Changes of time and octave and instrument don't work.

I'm not entirely surprised.

I can sing, but there's only the surprise of shouting.

A heartfelt note that can't linger past the moment.

Wherefore am I looking for the soul?

I don't see but the failed singular mechanism.

Unraveled

Which reveals that there is no soul.

I can't say we didn't try.

But I can say I didn't succeed.

I'm foolish for coming here,

But I'll probably try again sometime.

Where do my eyes drift to when I don't know the words?

The concern falls from the ceiling,

crashing to ground.

My breathing stays steady,

I'm not sure how.

Words and meanings mix in the mind,

Filtered through muck.

Stricken with a weird feeling I can't tell,

Is it all just dumb luck?

I should feel anger and fear and frustration.

There's this deep seated numbness instead.

Go through motions when I'm supposed to react.

Crashed.

Faltered.

Trapped and afraid for the wrong reasons.

I don't know the beats.

I don't know when to change the time.

I only know I'm off somewhere.

There's that feeling that should stick,

But it doesn't.

I know what should happen and shouldn't.

This shouldn't happen.

They shouldn't happen.

But they do.

And I know that, too.

I'm not as surprised as I should be.

The rhythms are there, the drums bear out their beats.

I'm scared to admit that the cynic in me expects this.

And when it hits, I'm sorry.

I don't know what to say or where to go.

I feel like at these points all I can give is my silence.

And wish there had only been silence, and no fury.

Chilled Night

I step out of the dark quiet cold and into the warm din of the coffeeshop. The late night comes alive as the happy chatter of people fills my ears, removing the blanket of a steady chilled breeze.  I'm part of this now, I'm feeling it, enjoying the love and life.  Perhaps I'm just a solitary soul in this din, but it's okay.  Take me in, let the tapping of these keyboard keys add to the distractions from the descent into stillness.

Suddenly I see, just beyond the glass windows, the form of a homeless youth I've served breakfast to. He isn't looking up at us inside, he's quickly moving in the night I know to be cold but no longer feel.

He was only there briefly, he only stopped a brief moment a few feet away from my privileged position, to inspect something on the bench outside. But he's moved on, probably seeking warmth at the shelter.  It's another community, one totally unstable, only suited to saving people stuck at the bottom, but hopefully he'll find a bed. I'm left here wondering.

How quickly this warmth and safety was brought into perspective for me. How quickly I am aware.  I still appreciate this din, I'm still thankful and in love with the life around me.  But perspective, right?

A bed of granite

When you saw the sun set and space come into view,
Did you feel like falling off the side of Earth?
When the Milky Way remained ever new,
Did it really seem to be a birth?
While clinging to the planet with all strength,
I saw the stars all pulling me away.
The light that stretched across my vision's length,
Was burning just as brightly in the day.
And so I stumbled down the mountainside,
Swallowed in the cracks of worth and time,
And wracked with doubt yet somehow full of pride,
I lost myself amidst my selfish crime.

They say, those poets and those knowing men,
That I may lose horizons that I know,
But tomorrow morning I shall once again,
Commit the deeds that stop the nectar's flow.