down through time

I can’t configure in my mind the time of day.  In some memories its dark, in other memories its day.  All in the same memory, the same moment in time.
Then there was the night before.  The phone that didn’t stop ringing.  We all sat there as it rang, slow to respond.  As I finally realized no one else would answer it, I got up and sure enough, it stopped ringing.
Then the morning after.  Again, the phone rang and it didn’t stop ringing.  Slow to answer, my mom sleeping next to me, said,
Is that the phone?
Hours later (so it seemed; light to dark), my mom slipped on clothes and hurried down the hall to answer the endless ring of the phone.
There are no words to explain what happened next.  Just,
“What did you do to Mike!  What did you do to him!”
And the next thing I knew, my brother was dead.
Not one of us questioned how he died until we were told how he died.

[My Mike Poem]
your life hangs over like a lamp
from the path i’ve drifted from
when other lights of color
led my heart undone;
and as i rode through ether
caught in strobes of scattered void
your watt improved in measure
and i could not avoid.
though i thought the world was dark
without your strength to light it,
you are the light that is the strength
with the power to ignite it.
if i made a promise
you would have to keep it too;
we’ll take your strength to lengths
unknown to me and you,
and light the way your life insists
and follow it to your transfer.
we’ll mark the exes, connect the wires
and there will be an answer.~

[between]

improving the aperture-
the forced light;
the swelling of cells,
the yelling through hell -
years of hell and i widen the lense a bit;
tune into the sound,
my own movements
beating rhythms in the ground.
amid the noise,
i tend to my voice -
a quiet light to resurrect her choice.
still as the will
of the angels strum
along to the
grounds quiet drum.~

[scissors]

stammered by the isolated trees
an empty breeze
a trickle of hope
just to trick to fake the cope
the alone, the unknown
found only by the likeness
of a feather on a breeze
drifting alone on an empty sea.~

bread and water

opening the cupboard doors for the tenth time never made more appear. yet the bareness of reality never kept me from reenacting, perhaps in desperation.

hope. maybe i had hope.

the wheels always turned in me and creativity spurred the most brilliant concoctions as a child:

  

• brown sugar and butter makes caramel, sort of
• bread ends with outdated yogurt and raisins
• pilot crackers and canned tuna, of course
• cabbage, lentils and chicken: something i like to call Beluga

growing up and even until now i never understood the virtue in poverty. maybe because i was too poor in other things like spirit at the time.

now though, as an adult, i see how intimate one becomes with God when they are poor. no longer merely self-reliant; when we have nothing else to trust we have only to trust God. if the world turns against us we turn to God. and so in a sense, those we damn and shame and judge (and maybe even yell out the car window, "Get a job!"); those we right off and cast out often have a far more exclusive provision with the Creator, than those who seek to fulfill their needs independently.

[penn-kos]

not the touch so much
but the "unreasonableness of it all,"
purge the innocent transfer
of smokey bays;
darkness in corners of whispers in formers-
the frame of shame of a girl.~