Going Home

I came, I saw, I wasn’t there.

My whispered name was blistered shut.

A floating body faint with wear,

Revived in sacred ground and mud. 

Prairie winds swept fields of glory,

Drenched in June and bygone days.

Sunsets burned with ancient fury,

Sunrise bled a satin haze.

 

Heavy air and jangled wind chimes

Snagged the sky through steepled grass.

Siren songs of fowl and horse flies

Painted dusk in dusty brass.

 

Memory morphed with light of day,

Blurred around the ashen hearth.

Snaked through shades of blue and grey

And smashed into the hallowed earth.

 

Shadowed corners bled confessions

Drowned in floorboards bent to pray.

Sputtered breath pumped good intentions

Clawing up through deep decay.

 

Joy is here—in sunlit dinners,

Christmas Eve, and borrowed time.

Chairs that held us both through winter

Bury grieving past its prime.

 

Fight and fire recede with evening

Down through gravel, sand, and stone.

Embers float on darkness creeping

Into starlight cold as bone.

 

Twilight blurs with law and gospel

Stretched across a bleached war zone.

Here the world was shaped and shattered,

The greatest love I’ve ever known.

Sunset at Pulpit Rock

Violent rifts of bludgeoned light

Slice through creeping dusk,

Flooding gorge and painting rock

On twilight’s sharp’ning tusk.

Brilliant hues of rust and sky

Are dimmed by evening’s chase.

Gold is caught in swallowed stone,

And clouds recede to lace.

Racing sunlight to the rock,

Time is only this.

Sacred mission of boot and soil,

From daylight’s parting kiss.

Crafty paths through field and brush

Weave lies and stolen time

As daylight dips below the ridge,

The earth maintains its climb.

But now your labored breath is caught

In jagged sandstone peaks.

The clock has stopped, the race is won.

The world is at your feet. 

Feathered pink weaves through the clouds,

Framing stone and pine.

Sewn with streaks of waning gold,

The pulpit’s preached divine.

Rehearsal

Whack. Whir. Clang. Thud.  
Brazenly bursting labor’s song.
Dissonant variants high and low,
Strummed from a ladder of short and long.

The strike of the hammer, metallic and sharp,
Ringing with ancient, storied notes.
Steeped in mythology wielded by Thor,
Tolling the bell chimes John Henry wrote.

A shimmying ladder clatters with vinyl
Like paper clip wind chimes molded in steel.
Double-time tempo is mingled with halves
As the hefting contraption clangs on with zeal.

A nail gun decisively pounds like a pendulum
Piercing the noise as the steadiest beat.
The militant metronome rallies the rest

In a boisterous binding of friction and heat.

Gliding below the cacophonous racket
A velvety whirring of whistling blades
Slices through silvery slivers of wood

As the buzzsaw subtly enters and fades.

Graveyards of sawdust flank chiseled-off steel
As the orchestra's glory subsides to a growl.
The blaze begins setting, the instruments sheathed.
Rehearsal concludes til 9 a.m. tomorrow.

Cove of Stars

Walk with me along the cove of dusk's forgotten stars.

The path is lit with bygone nods to battled inner wars.

The trail is blazed through backwards time, before the world was old.

You'll see the soul you thought you had, the one you used to hold.

 

I think the world was different then, or was it only me?

A backwards glance reveals a well of ink-black memories.

Somewhat faded, somewhat dark, but standing all the same.

The stories change with piling years, as if you never came.

 

In and out you’ve woven through the myriad of time,

Here you cut in front of me, and there you jumped the line.

You grabbed my hand and tore across the narrative we wrote,

But now I see the jagged lines, the ships that couldn’t float.

 

Yet burrowed in the glowing coals along the rugged trail,

The silver thread of laughter weaves its music through the wail.

Survivors of a storied past are receptacles of souls--

The ones we loved, the ones we lost, the ones that left us cold.

 

While battered red with bloody scars from every opened heart,

The way is clearer looking back—you almost see the start.

The pain remains a slicing shard between a wince and smile,

Yet warmth pervades with passing days, and every carried mile.

 

You might be made of someone else, or used to, anyway,

And now you see the story stretch across the moonlit bay.

The cove of stars collects the fractured fragments of them all,

Heavy burdens, floating sighs, a vision in the squall.

 

It’s all collected whispers of a story not yet told,

An ever-growing memory of those who made you bold.

So walk with me along the cove of dusk’s forgotten stars,

And know the radiant legions made immortal in your scars.

Shiny Veneer

Lilting crucibles of floating light,
Churning with malleable, molten glow.
Eyes arrested in burning glint,
An empty flow of cruel evolution.
Focused eyes search for focused thoughts,
Left to drown in a sensationalist lie
Of shiny veneer.
The glow fades into vapid translucence.
Shattered focus solidifies into sedentary darkness.
The burgeoning hope of bright magic,
Blackened.
Useful, practical, unmagical.
At least not the magic you were looking for.

It Felt Like the Moon

For a moment, the dull glow of the towering street lamp

Cast a shimmering shadow, painting your profile

Against the second-story patio door.

It felt like the moon, for a moment.

A solid grey line against the weathered wood

Danced around your hair,

Your nose, your eyelashes.

It could’ve been the moon.

It wasn’t.

Did it matter?

Self

Self-discovery.

Self-worth.

Self-love.

Platitudes smeared across stock photos.

Modern sages of ancient wisdom,

Bombastic prophets paving stairways to heaven

Preach a gentle sermon of introspection and isms,

Lay down the laws of eternal life.

Yet there's gospel in truth, teased by a quiet irony:

A quest for self in pursuit of others.

Their laughing eyes, their burning tears,

Their singing souls, their wounded hearts.

If the world knew the truth, it would end with a maze.

The souls of the lost and the damned and the weary,

Each of us,

Searching not for meaning,

But each other.