Tag Archives: space

When It Comes

When it comes,
the night don’t know no difference:
right and wrong
and that thin line in between.

In the dark,
you just watch for the lightning.
All the rest?
Doesn’t matter what you mean.

Simple truths
in the shadows become complicated:
black and white
both appear as shades of gray.

Choosing sides
beyond sight of the border,
where you find
it don’t matter anyway.

When it comes,
the night don’t know no difference:
You and me
and the darkness closing in.

In the end,
it becomes uncomplicated:
birth and death
and the sacred space within.

04 DEC 2015

Share This:

Something Else to Find

So, on the back of ancient drooling time,
whose wrinkled brow reflects an aeon’s span,
we ride like barnacles with some great whale,
our presence raising neither pain nor care,

and taste the salty froth of cresting waves,
as if some fine repast we have prepared
with skills acquired outside the meager cave
from whence we started and will soon return.

With such impressions we interpret life
as good or bad, as great or come to nil,
and would persuade the universe to score
the outcome in our favor, by and by.

So, in the maw of endless gaping space,
whose vast and silent emptiness we fear,
we speak aloud to hear ourselves alone,
pretending there is something else to find.

2 JUN 2015

Share This:

Space Between Breath

What still remains when words have run their course,
and soundless, lay exuberant and spent
beyond the realm of sound? What is the source
that waits between each breath, self-evident

for just the briefest moment, as the lull
when one idea dies and one is born
expands in pregnant silence and is full
of consonants and vowels not yet quite formed?

In which dimension does such time exist?
It has no breadth or width, nor is it tall.
It has no form, but hangs like evening mist
on summer nights surrendering to fall.

And past that quiet whisper, when all sound
has faded into nothing and is gone,
the meaning of the universe is found:
the stuff that only dreams are built upon.

02 JAN 2009

Share This:

No Surprise This Morning: an alba or aubade

That morning comes again is no surprise;
the laws of physics have not been withheld,
nor has the motion of the planets, if
those laws are merely whims, been held at bay.
No vengeful demons or vain deities
have paused the world in darkness for their play.

No, the edge of space where I sit has again
been turned and tilted to its burning star;
while elsewhere on the globe, lights flicker out
and someone borrows my fear of the night
(which is not trepidation of mere dark,
but rather, the unknown outside the cave
[or box, as we prefer to call it now,
since we are civilized a thousand-fold]
that waits for us, like some divine pop quiz
on that damned chapter we forgot to read).

So, morning comes again; and every time,
despite all evidence to prove it will,
and though our own experience and sense
would tend to ease our worry on this tack,
yet we stand dumb still, starstruck at the sight,
in shock that our blind faith
caused it to be.

04 AUG 2006

Share This:

I Once Folded Space and Time

I once folded space and time
and made it from Memphis to Jackson
in less than two hours
by imagining myself lifting the road
folding the blacktop
making sure the lines met up
letting them blur together into one
keeping the accelerator slightly down
and breathing evenly
deeply.

But that was a long time ago.

Now I find myself enjoying
a four hour drive
just watching the other fools
who get there too fast
and then have a lot of time
to get in trouble.

19 MAR 2004

Share This:

Space Between Breath

This life is but a whir of endless dreams
made into concrete that never cures, and
set against a mad rush of marching time
that blurs each second into the next. Its
seemingly solid instances are but
illusions; under scrutiny they turn
to small clouds of worthless dust, or crumble
in your sweaty hands like sculptures of salt.

With each new breath the world is fragmented
and reformed; a moment holds a million
tiny deaths, and gives birth to fresh legions
of galaxies that exist only in
that small span of temporal space between
the impulse to blink and the act itself.

Yet in that minute fraction of being,
before each fragile cosmos is destroyed
to make way for another one to come,
there is an opportunity to seek
beyond the strict confines of what is known
and discover, in a fleeting glimpse, in
the silence between inhale and exhale,
an infinite pause where chronology
fails, where the hands of clocks are motionless.

In this gaping chasm, our wistful dreams
suit themselves in the armor of whole flesh
and spend entire lives in the passionate
embrace of their own imaginative
perceptions, chasing their own chimeras.

And in between each dream’s breath in that place,
as with our own, there is an endless space.

08 AUG 03

Share This: