"the fire from within"
What do you want to know? “He” asked.
I want to know something worth remembering. I would like a secret worth not keeping.
I would like a promise ring to place on the fingers of the earth.
I would like to know the language of grasshoppers, also.
(I waited and waited and waited…)
Didn’t you know I had no answers? “He” asked.
I suppose I knew. I had found hints in bookstore “new age” sections.
I had come face to face with masked men claiming to be harbingers of truth.
I had breathed the gently used breath of men and women, all lovers of life’s farce.
None of them had told me a secret that I didn’t find later tacked to the bulletin board
While the scent of burnt coffee mumbled in my nose’s ear.
So are you satisfied knowing of the known? The unknown? The unknowable? “He” asked.
I turned my back on the Voice that sleeps on the couch in my head.
I had this sense that the vertebrae dotting my spine were oscillating floor fans.
I let the Voice chortle and cathode into the blender of my spinal fans.
The Voice(“He”) that knew all and nothing “did impressions” of darth vader
And I had this sick, sixth and seventh sense that we were quite reasonably alone.
That we were quite reasonably all clowns.
p.s. I looked up from my illumined screen and a “cute guy” looked at me and smiled. Then I sat and remembered how we had killed four mice in a row today in my cabin. I remembered hearing the mouse traps snap like pop guns, shockingly each time, because I knew that some mouse’s spinal cord had just been crushed. My companion in the afternoon would come and collect the trap and remove the freshly dead creature. She would pick it up by its tail and toss it into the surrounding columns of shrubs and trees. “Sorry, little guy.” She would say that and I thought each time of how easy it was to say goodbye to a mouse, and wondered why it shouldn’t be so easy to say goodbye to the dead bodies of other things. The dead bodies of family members or friends or lovers. The “dead bodies of love.” The “dead bodies of dreams.”
I watched my companion wash her hands and reset the traps. Then I walked up the hill on the narrow dirt path, toward the flat planes of the gardens above where I would pick “sungold cherry tomatoes” in the 2 p.m. lunchtime sunlight, eating one for every five I would pick and toss into my picking bucket.
I want to know something worth remembering. I would like a secret worth not keeping.
I would like a promise ring to place on the fingers of the earth.
I would like to know the language of grasshoppers, also.
(I waited and waited and waited…)
Didn’t you know I had no answers? “He” asked.
I suppose I knew. I had found hints in bookstore “new age” sections.
I had come face to face with masked men claiming to be harbingers of truth.
I had breathed the gently used breath of men and women, all lovers of life’s farce.
None of them had told me a secret that I didn’t find later tacked to the bulletin board
While the scent of burnt coffee mumbled in my nose’s ear.
So are you satisfied knowing of the known? The unknown? The unknowable? “He” asked.
I turned my back on the Voice that sleeps on the couch in my head.
I had this sense that the vertebrae dotting my spine were oscillating floor fans.
I let the Voice chortle and cathode into the blender of my spinal fans.
The Voice(“He”) that knew all and nothing “did impressions” of darth vader
And I had this sick, sixth and seventh sense that we were quite reasonably alone.
That we were quite reasonably all clowns.
p.s. I looked up from my illumined screen and a “cute guy” looked at me and smiled. Then I sat and remembered how we had killed four mice in a row today in my cabin. I remembered hearing the mouse traps snap like pop guns, shockingly each time, because I knew that some mouse’s spinal cord had just been crushed. My companion in the afternoon would come and collect the trap and remove the freshly dead creature. She would pick it up by its tail and toss it into the surrounding columns of shrubs and trees. “Sorry, little guy.” She would say that and I thought each time of how easy it was to say goodbye to a mouse, and wondered why it shouldn’t be so easy to say goodbye to the dead bodies of other things. The dead bodies of family members or friends or lovers. The “dead bodies of love.” The “dead bodies of dreams.”
I watched my companion wash her hands and reset the traps. Then I walked up the hill on the narrow dirt path, toward the flat planes of the gardens above where I would pick “sungold cherry tomatoes” in the 2 p.m. lunchtime sunlight, eating one for every five I would pick and toss into my picking bucket.