In the Doorway.

Time is in what we tell,
and it waits, floating above shadows above,
in a doorway, on wingless arms,
reaching to the still winds of grace,
the sadness of forgotten and mine.
In the wasteland, the old man toils,
and turns and mutters in his house.
The stories are forgotten in minnows;
and the places are mapped out on walls.
The seeds are for granted.
We are not what we do.
No mistaken is for the shadow,
the place beyond the grass-grown walls,
and the temple that overflows.
Ask them, and ye shall receive.
People waking and people sleep.
We wake and we dream and the dreamer's
wake,
shadows mask rinds of time,
space is continual as a drum.
A drumbeat of yours and mine,
continuous in its tomb.
We use imagination as a quarter,
and our face is veiled in the midst.
We use no forms of communication.
We drill holes in West Virginia,
and Fox Mulder pops out,
quick as a rabbit.
We have not given into ourselves.
The rest mock dangerous exits,
and swift movements are mistaken.
We go and we come.
We exit and we leave.
I am not educated. I am not the working.
I am not the dumb and the worried.
I am the heart that is the heart.
I am the door that is left unopen,
the place between sunlight and the daisies,
that rise out of the darkness of nothing,
into the midnight sun.
It is like being something and nothing.
It is like being an orphan when no one speaks.
The sadness is in the silence.
Our hearts and thoughts are quick as lightning bugs.

It's About Conceiving.

The darkness itself is not my friend-
my house is my only haven.
I am trapped in the barbs of wire,
lost on winds of time.
I keep myself isolated.
Trying to permeate through the fences of
confusion,
I have become a master at the art of being alone.

Alone. Everyone wants me to be alone-
from bakers to Irishmen,
who turn and toil in their moss beds.
The wind moans quietly.
Some people are angry because I eat.
Some people are angry because they tell lies.
Some people are homeless-dead, and
broken.

My friends drink. Everyone drinks every single day,
and don't know what is happening to their bodies.
Only the fools know.
The rest conceive.

The Nature and Nothing Else.

The long drawn out marches,
bridges on solid grounds.
A black cat in white mounds.
A tree on blue birches.

A finch sits on a warm rock,
and tweets to the wind-
the sound of the rhythm,
is in each crack and bend.

The grass waves in the wind.
It weaves around the trees.
Everything we seek, is sheltered in the breeze.
Nothing else is what we seek, and in what we find.

A finch warms itself on a rock.
Everything around it is empty and lonely,
and the houses at night are botched-
everything in the dark is a phony.

A sparrow flies and sits on a rock.
It dances and moves in a graceful arch.
He is a brother to the finch; you don't want to pick up the block,
and put it down and on you march.

I sing chorus to the wind.
And in your naked eyes.
You weave and you bend,
and tell permanent lies.

Nothing else is broken; nothing else is the same.
We took the lies out of distant cries,
and in the end its in the name-
we say our last goodbyes.
The wind moans its own name.

You told me you wouldn't find the trail
of the sparrow-
that you wouldn't let on, you wouldn't wail,
and you would see me again, tomorrow.
I guess I tried to let it fail.
You hear the naked demons wail.

That's what they call finches and sparrows.

Tears of Magic, Tears of Bone, beginning.

Prince Edward had wild brown hair and blue eyes. They were fixated on his father this time, and his mouth was twisted downward in a frown. He didn't like the way things were going at this current point in time, and was defiant in all ways possible. He thought he would show it by cursing at his mother, his grandmother, and the doctor who came to call upon him. “What are you doing in my room!” he snarled. “I beg of you to be gone!”
The man loomed over him threateningly. “You know you are not to curse at your mother! How many times do I have to tell you that!” He shook his head. “I have a half-mind to send you to a boarding school, you no-nonsense, egotistical boy!”
“I'm not a boy.” He straightened his shoulders. “I'm nine.”
“Nevertheless, you are my son,” he replied. “I must protect you from the bad things that are out in the wild, in the world, in the great vast unknown that permeates this land. The kingdom is becoming more and more civilized. The next time you act out in public, may be your last.” His eyes gazed down on him, and the boy shivered. “Mark my words.”
He turned and left the room, slamming the door behind him.
The boy jumped up on his bed and howled at the night. Outside, a wolf howled along with him.
In the morning, the king's messenger pigeon was found dead on the ground, buried by a snowdrift. He didn't think a wolf had something to do with the pigeon's death, but wolf tracks were around the bird and he had plucked away some of the feathers before skirting into the night. The wind moaned. The sky was dark and cloudy above them, and everything looked surreal in the fallen winter light. It was mid-morning, and the archers were getting ready for practice. Prince Edward was not ready. He was eating a piece of baked bread in the kitchen, sprinkled with pumpkin seeds. The butcher had gone to the vegetable patch and had gotten a pumpkin and brought it to the cook, Mildred. She was an overly large woman, and had large, glassy eyes and a wide, smiling mouth. Her nose was long and crooked and she had been hit in the face with a ball when she was seven-years-old.
“Hello, youngin',” she said pleasantly. “Whatever are you doing, eating that bread, for? Your archery class is about to start.”
“I don't want to play right now,” he replied.
“But the king...”
“The king is my father,” he said firmly. “I do not have to listen to what he says all the time. Unlike some people.” He sniffed, and shook his head. “Really, Mildred, I think you ought to have more sense, listening to my father like that.”
“He does pay me,” she reminded him with the tiny hint of a smile.
He shrugged his bony shoulders. He was small for his age. Most of the boys in his class at school were heavier, and had bonier features. “I'll pay you from now on!” he vowed.
She couldn't help it. She burst into peals of laughter. Tears squeezed from her eyes and she wiped them away with her apron. “You know, you are a bright lad, but you don't have much sense!” she gasped, doubling over in pain. “You go on now. Go outside. You don't have to play archery, but I have to make dinner for the soldiers coming tonight. They are going to be a hungry lot.”
He raised an eyebrow. “I never knew you to follow the rules, but all right.” He picked a cookie off the plate and scurried out of the door. It slammed shut behind him. A gust of wind nearly blew her over.

The Forgotten Bedroom.

The anger was a rotten fruit.
Caught in a spiral of forgotten things,
That dreamt of lowly spirals and soft movements.
She said she wouldn’t come. That she should never stay.
Her thoughts were distant and parched as dreams.
Her mind would gently sway.
Back and forth, she left on the perched top of
Branches and trees,
The freedom of thought is a circumference of images,
And things bending in the mile.
The sea turtles have come out to play-
Waving softly their green hands.
It is my month, and I am picking grapes. The sun has come out
To play and the spirals of golden centipedes
Are free of thought and my hunger isn’t aching,
It is aching and homely and my thoughts twirl downward.
The anger is in everything. The anger has sheltered
Great wisdom and my face is not gently scorched nor showered.
And the wanting takes me and shakes me and I am diseased.
The disease is of the mind.
I am forced to make choices between myself and the bed,
Between my eyes and my head.
You are the trees that sway in the wind. I am forgotten.
I am a dream that is dead.
We are cotton candy clouds.
We are things that cannot be seen.
We are a table in a bedroom.