Stars N Islands

Stars and Islands

I am walking in the morning. The wind moves against the back of my
Neck. I am a habitat, I am moving-I think of all the animals of the world.
Tomorrow is like it is in the morning-and the night is sweet with its song,
Always moving, always in mourning. I don’t have enough money to get what I want to
Get, new clothes, or going on a trip to Ireland.

The airplane flies through the air;
And lands on a runway.
Night is calm, and burdened are we-
I see your face in my dreams.

Finches are on the island where Michaelangelo once lived, moving like shadows
In the dark. Stars come out to play. It is night, and the stars shine down.
It is darkness, and we are in the darkness, and we are like shadows in the dark.
That is glowing.

I want to go on a trip to see my friend. I want to see his silhouette marching down
The dark street, eyes like sparklers, moving in the dark.
The streets are lined with both darkness and sorrow; the street lights are lit with bright stars.

Stranger Things.

Stranger Things

He asked me why I didn’t come.
He didn’t see me walking ahead, my eyes looking backwards.
Some people claim they don’t know what I’m talking
About; I am a stranger in the mist.

We are a lot like apes in the jungle. We are clouds
In the mist of time. Some things are better than in your eyes.
We are like the lions that roar down the mountains.

I think, therefore, I am. I am missing, I wander down the road,
And look right and left for things unheard. This is destiny,
It is not my friend. I try to be friends. No one wants to be friends.

I try to turn things around. I look up and down. The snakes
Are curled in their dens. Most animals are hibernating, now.
I am not hibernating. I am new, as stuck as glue. Some people wake up
Much too late. Some people see what they want in their dreams.

There’s a child who doesn’t understand what we see. Who aches to be someone
In his dreams. He dreams of tall buildings, and time that marches on,
Up and over waters. And still as stone.

When Lightning Flashed.

Lightning flashed through the midnight sky-
On the evening I called you my love.
Against the fall of midnight eyes,
I dreamt of me and you in distant skies.

In dawn, I woke up to the sound,
Of heathen and the curled dreams,
And burdened of monkeys and other things,
I wake and see you in my dreams.

The dawn has come, and we are gone-
And night is over and time is done.
We are going upward to the sun-
But, this time, I went alone.

On the season of the sin,
We’ve known to become one within,
Our heart and mind that beats like rain,
And tender we move over the bend-

In this season, that does not end,
We are not burdened by the sky-
In our heart, we have not won,
But I see the passion in his eyes.

Today is Charles Darwin’s Birthday, and I am walking-

Kroger’s stands tall like a sentinel in the distance.
The yellow sun rises.
It is morning and I am walking to work, my hands swaying
At my sides-they sway to everything, the rising sun, the moon,
And I think about the distance from here to there.

I think about bacteria and how it was formed. I think about Charles Darwin on his
Birthday, he was born over three hundred years ago, and how he recorded
A sparrow’s song.

This song is for Charles Darwin, and his fascination, and his notes that he left
On his mother’s dresser. She was the one who found them, you know, not
The sailors, or the ones who seemed to think they were his colleagues.

I am walking, and thinking, and I think when I walk and the thinking is in the grandness of walking,
And I think about all the people who have work, and who walk, and who think great things
And change the sorrows of the world. This is more for Charles Darwin, because it is his birthday,

And I am waiting for my birthday to arrive and how the flowers bloom on walls-
And how the bacteria moves, and how poetry is moving, and finches are singing.

The Face In the Water-CHAPTER 1.

1
John Shubbard remembered the first time he saw someone else’s face in the water. It was nearing the end of August in 1978, and he was out fishing with some friends. He had just caught the end of a net and was bragging to James how many trout he was going to catch-James, getting angry as he always did, almost pushed him into the water; he stumbled, and righted himself; his ankle throbbed with pain. He twirled around to face him, his expression one of anger-the anger on his face was intense, and it made John cringe inside. He wasn’t used to the anger he saw on his face. James was usually a very mellow guy.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing!” he spluttered. “I could have fallen into the water! Don’t push me in!”
James Wilcox laughed-he guffawed and slapped his leg. “You’re such a wuss, sprout!” he declared. His grandma always called him sprout. John shoved him. James glared at him, his nostrils flared.
He looked like a fish who had jumped out of water and was having trouble breathing.
“Don’t talk like that about me!” he exclaimed. “I don’t know why you’re being so rude! We’re supposed to be friends!”
“Friends is as friends does.”
“What are you talking about?”
James winked at him. “You know what I’m talking about,” he gloated.
He glanced down into the water. He thought he saw the shimmer of something just beyond his reach, but he wasn’t sure. He shook his head, and frowned. Maybe it was nothing. John had a tendency to turn a lot of nothings into something. Scott Morrow put a hand on John’s shoulder, as if to steady him.
“It’s how he is,” Scott said softly. “Remember his sister? He ain’t right adder the car addident.” Scott had a little lisp and didn’t pronounce certain words correctly-d’s, and f’s, were always difficult for him. Jim’s parents abandoned him when he was a baby. John got a feeling it traumatized him to this day and he didn’t like to talk about it, but he knew how to relate.
Scott was lucky. His aunt took him in. John had gone to his cousin and then to foster care. It was a tricky passage. His relatives didn’t like him and he didn’t want to sound like a baby and ask for help. He had been homeless as a teenager. John’s parents used to hate him to death, and wish he were dead-they’d said so on many occasions. John nodded and stuffed his hands in his pockets.
He narrowed his eyes, in remembrance. He didn’t like it, though. He especially hated the remembering part. How he was always to blame for the problems. How his parents hated him and wanted money to go on a vacation and how they didn’t have enough money and this and that.
He glanced into the water again-something strange shimmered on the surface of the ocean, then it was gone, like a flash of lightning or a piece of string that had drowned. He needed to get laid, but his mind was playing tricks on him again-he must be tired because it looked like a woman’s face had been in the water.
He was thirsty. He needed to get something to drink.
He said goodbye to his friends-they were fishing again, and James had calmed himself down, that’s how it always happened and James was calm again and able to think rationally.
James didn’t have any problems in his family and John wondered why he acted like that but he did anyway and it wasn’t anybody’s fault but his own-he jumped into his car and drove downtown to a bar called Sherman’s. It was an Irish/Country bar. He didn’t have many friends there, but there was a woman named Hope Peppersen who was always flirting with him and he enjoyed the attention. He wanted to sleep with her, but she confessed she was married and although she liked John, she thought it was unnecessary.
“Maybe I’ll see you outside of the bar,” he’d said, winking at her.
She’d nodded happily, laughed and tossed her hair in his direction. He’d winked back. That was how it always was when they were in the bar together. The bartender laughed at him about it. John’s mind drifted back to reality. He had walked at the bar and was sitting down at the booth and looking at a large menu. The stools were red and brown. He pushed his hair back behind his face and sighed. He was tired. He didn’t realize how late it was. He should have gone home, but he wanted to see if there were any women tonight and to get a few drinks inside him. Maybe he would get laid tonight. Maybe he wouldn’t. He was hoping for the best. He looked around for Hope. He didn’t see her at the bar tonight. At least not yet. It was still early. He thought she said she still worked, but he wasn’t sure. He raised his hand and snapped his fingers and the bartender waddled over happily. He was an overweight, balding man and had beady eyes and curly hair. He was married.
John sneered at him. The man was pitiful. He needed a weight loss program and some dentures-his teeth were yellow and crooked. John knew he was married because he had a ring on his finger. He thought the woman must be very fat and desperate in order to marry someone like that. John fantasized about marrying for money, but it didn’t please him. He could make his own money. He was going to marry a supermodel and live in a large house and have 12 sports cars. He wanted 12 sports cars because he saw a comedian with 12 sports cars on television and thought it might please him if he had some, too.
“What do you want, man?” the bartender asked him in a slow, slurred speech. John thought he had learning problems.
“I want a slice of pizza and a glass of Diet soda,” he told him.
The bartender raised his eyebrow. “Soda? In a bar?” he said.
“I’m waiting for someone. I can’t drink when I’m irritated.”
“Irritated?” he’d said, and laughed.
John didn’t know the bartender’s name and wasn’t about to ask-he just called him the bartender. John waited, tapping his hands on the table. It was brown and made from plastic. The chairs were plastic, too. This was a high-scale place.
Hope came in and sat down next to him. “Hey, guy,” she said pleasantly. “How are you?”
“I’m fine,” John replied. He eyed her skimpy pink dress. “You’re wearing pink.” He sounded sarcastic but he was pleased.
She tossed her hair in his direction. “Yeah, so?”
“I thought you hated pink.”
“I like it, now,” she laughed.
“Why?”
“Because my husband and I are going on our second honeymoon.” She winked at him. “No imaginary sex for awhile, I’m afraid.”
John smiled at her and didn’t respond. That was when John realized he didn’t like Hope anymore. But, he still wanted her and it made him even more angry than he was before and he didn’t know why. He suddenly realized he got angry-a lot. And he liked it. He put her out of his mind and decided to concentrate on work. Work didn’t have heartache in it. Work didn’t have pain. He barely glanced at his female coworkers. It was for the best. He was going to have to get used to it.
* * *

The Singing Woman.

The woman sings in an open doorway.
Jealous is round like a key. The skeleton clatters to the floor;
A clock chimes. The government is shaken about anything.
We don’t know where we will go. Only that some houses
Have stairs, and others don’t. I thought everything was round
In the middle, and sometimes, the yellow daisy breathes-
I don’t care about the gentleness. I only care about the stiffness,
And the shadow that crawls on the table. She thinks she owns everything,
The world, and her children are in moldy, brown colors.
The rules are made from everything. She loses sight of everything.

She sings in an open doorway. Her hand is rotted, like flesh. She thinks
Things are getting broken again; and a man is walking on a roof. There are windows
In the house, and the house folds over, down-like caskets falling from the sky,
And landing on a blade of grass. The grass is like the cold in winter. The winter
Is swift. Everything is dry.

She has the pages of her book in front of her. She likes to sit still and count the craters
In her hand. Everyone stares, including the gold lion.

The woman is singing, she doesn’t sing.

The Mouths of Nothingness.

She puts words together, one by one,
In sentences brown as bone.
She goes walking, down one street, and up another-
She limps.
Her eyes are like pools of nothingness. She bends and breaks.
She opens her mouth and calls out to the morning,
In the ancient winds of time.
Burdened by the years of hard labor, she cries out to her dead lover,
The skull Hamlet left behind.
It was not hers. It was not his. They were gentle in his wake.
Death was not something to take, to bring back.
The spirits were left behind in closed doors. Someone thought she was
Wrong, that she couldn’t stay away from the broken doors.
Someone thought she was jealous, and refused to give her any bread.
The bread comes from the oven.
It is the soothing sound of her father’s voice that wakes her up, every morning,
In time for school.
She acts like she wants the world. She acts like she owns it. She knows nothing,
And pieces words together on a string-one drop after another, a pebble falls
In the water, and sounds are dripping everywhere.
It is the rain, the color of the rain, and the mood that is everywhere. She doesn’t talk
About open wounds, only the rape, that was cold, hard, bitter, and filling in her
Mouth. She doesn’t keep her promises. She is the echo of lies in the hearts of everyone,
In nothing, everywhere.
Her mother is dead, and living, breathing-
Her father gasps on a table. She is dead, and nobody moves. The lies sing like the lions.
Sometimes, things knock on the doors, like skulls, and hatred is ripped from flesh.
She hates the people who move her, and the sorrows are like tears gone dry.
She is dry as a diaper. The lion weeps from far away. A star falls from the sky.
She thinks most people are morons.

Broken Time.

The night has been broken into the minds of us.
We dismiss the shadows that move like grass.
In the wind, the whistling sound comes again-
Like a ghost that wanders in the willows.
Emotions? Are like a sieve, that waves.
A daisy is on the windowsill.
A hand taps on someone’s window glass.
The panes are like tears that come like rain.
Down the mountain, the wind comes.
Down the mountain, we don’t know anything.
My mother is a little hectic. She watches her mother
Go upstairs, falls down the stairs-one by one,
Legs twist with hands. She is like a water current.
Time goes, it slows-things move like shadows.
There is the dark place, the place we can’t go to.
The place in the heart, beyond all time.

Why is there so much hatred? Why is there so much sorrow?
I went to the library this afternoon-the woman’s eyes narrowed
At me, as if she wanted me to leave. I held out my hand,
And she took my money, but her hand was not my hand-
My hand was hers. She didn’t understand the way of the world,
How it was for young men and women in the army,
In the navy, in places that are foreign as the mind. The mind is all
We have. Like a creative fox.

WHY BAD THINGS HAPPEN TO GOOD PEOPLE

“You’ll get forty dollars.”
She pursed her lips. “I don’t know,” she confessed. “All I was doing was looking at the paper for a job-” She shook her head, dizzy and confused. She didn’t know why she was dizzy, only that she was. It irked her. The irkness was in her mind, and it quieted her.
“Shut up. You know the paper regulates those things, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Then you’re one of the few who still know about them.”
“I am one of the last,” she confessed. “That’s what they told me in fifth grade.” Her mind traveled back to the time in her real school, the real school she had before she found out about computers and what they could do. It wasn’t a good idea to talk about the aliens. How they crash-landed on earth and destroyed the dinosaurs. It was an accident, they said in the papers, long after it happened. They wanted to help fix it. Well, the wars came, and everyone knew the wars started because of the dinosaurs.
“Well?” the pimp was staring at her expectantly. “You’ll get a lot of money.”
“A lot of money,” she said. “Yeah. Forty dollars, first, then-”
“More than you have now, that’s for sure!” he said gleefully, and chuckled behind his hands.
It had always been like this. Ever since her mother had been taken away-she refused to call her mother a criminal-strange men had approached her and offered her money. She tried to go to a community college for three months, until the feds found out and took away her credit cards. She got several credit cards, and bought a small car with it-she thought she was going to get a job right away, and didn’t. She fumed at her family for forcing her to be in this situation. It was forced upon her because of the crime rate. Forced upon her, she insisted to herself. Forced upon her; it was not given to her. No, it was never that.
“Okay,” she agreed. “I’ll do it. I don’t got a choice.”
“None of us do,” he said. He led her down the street and into an alley. Shadows crisscrossed across the pavement. Pain in her feet, and the painful memory of trying to block out all those other times…the times when she was weakest. She didn’t know why, even though her daughter asked her why. She thought about her daughter in a half-bored, half-amusing, distracted way, the way a neglectful mother would think of her lonely daughter while she was fucking some dumb man.
She was alone in the enormity of herself, in the largeness, the grandness of herself. She was an overly large woman. Her daughter was an almost nearly byproduct of a rape, because the man didn’t want a fat wife-he wanted a skinny wife, he put emphasis on the word, she remembered with a sneer. She wanted a daughter and had one.
She couldn’t go that one route, what’s it called, artificial insemination, she couldn’t born her baby in a test tube because that was supposed to be a secret. She knew a lot of secrets. She understood how the world worked in her own special way-the psychologist said she was special. But, she wasn’t. She was trapped. It was in the Before-Time that Reanna thought about suicide, before she was born as a Hybrid, when she was floating in space in a test tube-that was how they made humans now, in a test tube, and put them down on a manmade planet that suited the aliens purposes, to be looked upon, and studied in such a way that was credible. She didn’t know what the aliens looked like, but they planted what they looked like in her dreams. She could feel them when they did it and she was being born in a test tube, feel it creeping on the edge of her mind.
The only thing that was outside of free will was forcing their thoughts upon hers. She thought she could feel their thoughts sometimes, in the way that their thoughts moved fluidly like water, slow and unearthly like the glowing of the lights. Sometimes, she thought about It-the thing that was more horrible than actually committing suicide, the actual thinking about it. She didn’t think of suicide in a way that she was going to actually do it, but she thought of it in the way that she actually wanted to do it but wouldn’t go through with it-she thought about the how and why and the liking of it and what other people would say about her after she passed. The darkness of suicide was always there, and the anger was there, fresh in her mind.
She didn’t approve of anger. She thought it was bothersome. She remembered once, her mother said she never got angry at anything, ever, that the anger was not how she expressed herself. It was, what they called it, the Remembering, the Time that was Before-After the Before time, and how it was sequestered in the rhythm of her life, the life that was half-lived. She had a half-lived life. She knew it now, could feel it in her bones.
The taking of one hundred pills or more, and dying in the living room, was romantic to her when she was living in the cold place underneath the floor boards in the man’s house, and the man called Todd came and fed her twice a day. She soiled herself. She was his pet; he was called a pimp, and she had been fourteen when she came To the Bad Place, and would be nineteen now. She always thought of her life with her parents as Before; this was Now.
The Days passed, longer more than ever, and everything seemed like a dream, or stepping stones on top of one another. Her face was streaked with dirt and tears; her ears were covered in crusted blood. She’d had a few ticks, and a few bruises. Her eyes were blue. She stared at them in the mirror in the bathroom in the basement.
Made faces at herself in the mirror, and squinted her eyes shut tight. She knew what the days were because they had left a computer in the basement and she turned it on and watched it hum to life, and she wrote stories and played poker and War, but she could not connect to the Internet to ask for help. The Internet would have been a great deal.
She remembered, a few years before she was kidnapped, she and her classmates had been learning how to use the computer and she was a fast typer, typed almost 50 words per minute.
It was the strength, those memories of good times that kept her alive, and everything inside her mind was shut off when the kidnappers came and made her strip for money.
They let her go outside, but someone was always with her-Ronnie or Howard or Denni, she was the worst, she was always getting guys’ phone numbers and wanting to do them and she took them down to the basement and sent her, stumbling, up the stairs to the living room-Boner was there, and Clyde. Clyde wanted some, but Boner said she was too young for the job-said the cops would come and find them, cos she was missing for a long time.
“You a missing girl?” Clyde asked her.
She nodded. “Yes,” she whispered.
“You wanna come home wit’ me?” he asked her. “You won’ be missin’ no mo.’” He chuckled, and Boner slapped him upside the head, and they glared at each other. Clyde snorted and stomped out of the room.
“Look, girl,” Boner told her. “I know you think I want some. You ain’t getting none from me. I’m in a committed relationship, okay? You safe wit’ me. I don’ need you, but you git some bones on you, gi’, you be a good one for my clients.” He smiled, as if proudly. “You be her dodder.” He nodded matter-of-fact like.
“What does she look like?” She sniffed, and wiped her hand on her nose.
“She real big,” he told her. “But, she pretty. She has red hair, kinda dirty, but not pimp dirty like Wanda.”
Reanna’s lips curled. She loathed Wanda; she was a terror.
She remembered Wanda, and how the woman didn’t know she was in a Dream Capsule. Stupid woman. Everyone knew that. How come she didn’t know it? She needed to talk to her counselor. She never did anything without talking to her counselor. Everyone was against her. She knew it. She couldn’t put her finger on it.
“I’ll take you, gi’,” he promised. “I gotta take somethin’ home to my wife-otherwise, I ain’t getin none o’ dat from her-nor you,” he added quickly, as an afterthought. She rolled her eyes. He grunted asset. “Get in, girl.” He shoved her in. the car sped away. She was tense. She settled against the seat and tried to enjoy the ride. The car stopped. He pushed her out and the car sped away. She watched it go and went inside the tall, nondescript building. It was a pale brown. The windows looked dirty. Everything about the place was old, drab, dirty.
“Are you Reanna Chanceitt?” the counselor woman asked.
“Yes,” she managed to whisper.
“We’ve been looking for you,” she replied.
She promptly burst into tears.
“Who was looking for me?” she asked a few minutes later. She wiped her hands on her jeans. They were dirty. Most girls didn’t wear jeans anymore, they wore the plaid dresses that were authorized by government officials-the aliens, she was told.
The woman looked surprised. “Why, your parents, of course!” she replied.
She blinked. She didn’t know what to say. No one was allowed to say parents. “What do you mean?”
She looked away, a little embarrassed. “You know. Parents. You look like you don’t know what I’m talkin about. Like it wasn’t implanted in your brain like all dem odders.” Reanna was amused. She didn’t know counselors talked in that way-most Foreigners spoke eloquently.
“I don’t. We’re not supposed to talk about that.”
“Oh, yeah, well,” she fumbled. “They changed the rules, now. We got some bad peoples coming in, the Pope had to act fast.” The pope was big and had a big chin.
She frowned. “Who’s in charge around here?” she asked. “I thought it was the Mayor, now, after the little problem at the post office.”
She nodded. “Yeah, the scientists are trying to bring the dead guys back to life-as zombies.” She shook her head and tsked. “I don’t think that’s a good idea. The good lord’ll fix it, I’m sure.”
“Yeah, sure you’re sure. You were sure three thousand years ago, weren’t you, during the Civil War.”
The counselor was shocked. “You’re not supposed to talk about that!” she said in a hushed voice. “We’re not supposed to mention War-the aliens are listenin’ now, what if they do th’ hangin’?”
The girl looked down at the floor. “I forgot.”
“I figured as much. We’re going to have to fix you, girl.” She nodded her head. “We’ll take care of it, right away.” Her eyes looked distant, sad, as if she were staring at some great distance, far away. She sniffed. Reanna sniffed, too. It was going to be a long day.
The paperwork was filled out, and then the parents came and took her away-to the Dream Time, the reality that was more based on reality than actual reality, based more on a calming realization of fictional thoughts being pressed against hers. She was being brainwashed, it was certain.

THE FORCE THAT MOVES.

I am not the force that moves inside of me.
The hatred flows in my heart.
It is the heart. The heart that is the word.
The love is casual as glass, like a spider when it comes down
The mountain.

No one knows about dates-this date, that date, everything is about reason.
The reason that is the wind, that blows in imagination down the mountain.
We talk about pine apples into the night. You steal kisses with a glass eye.
Shadows are dark, steeples are dark, darkness is dark in everything.

She is going to be fullgrown. She is going to be a lion.
Those are my predictions, I wrap them in soft hands.

Metaphors In Clouds.

He thinks she is the woman in the tomb.
I don't know the name of the tomb.
Someone brought me a newspaper and stuck it in the mailbox.
The wildflower lays broken on the sidewalk; people tiptoe through these lies.
I have ideas, they whisper in my head. Some people think they know what they don't
know, that their wives and husbands adore them. Then, changes shift forms,
things are moved to change-someone gets a job; someone loses a friend; a new one comes
into focus, comes into the picture. This is the picture I didn't know about,
I couldn't understand about that was looking back at me right from the start.

All of these people are like lawn gnomes. Things are gifts in the dark. I am not
a miracle worker, a slave, a Barbie; I am not your politician, someone to strike the dragon in the throat-
I am the one who saves the dragon, I am the shadow in the gust of wind that moves
through the trees, the apes are free, they have come to seek their revenge.

I don't know where my father puts his glass towns. I don't know where the light
is as it shines through the trees.

I know the forgiveness, in my mind. It is not in my heart. My anger is vast,
like the ocean, the night sky is flung away from me.

I look out of my window. My hair is flung back from my face. I close my eyes,
and think soft things. Sometimes, I think about what it would be like,
if the government actually fixed things, read metaphors in the clouds
and the sidewalks of the world. How large the world is. How real. It is not safe from my father, my lover, my enemy. Some people are enemies. Usually, they are small like bulbs of flowers.

Sometimes, a person jumps out from a bush to scare school children.

Life mocks everyone.

Then, the tomb is brought back out again. My mother is no longer here to take my hand. I don't remember her hand. I remember a blank wall, staring time, memories are latched to ghosts. Ghosts that I have not seen, the tomb is like a word.

I don't want people to talk about me behind my back, to fuel hunger in my veins-
these veins are red, distorted as time. Time comes back.

IN-BETWEEN DREAMING.

And then, people like me, are thrown from dust,
to dust-and then crows are called in for a murder trial.
I am awake to the sound of the trilling of birds out my window.
Destruction is like misery. It is hard to see, to hear-
a telephone rings, and begs goodbye to me. He is a wanderer,
the sound of summer in darkness, the sound of hands moving back to me.
The ghosts are woven in strands of summer magic, as if I believed in magic at all.
I am nowehere, Ohio, I am the state that drifts outside of who I am. My mother
ignores me. My father is distant in my mind.

Time does not become me. It is not who I am. My friends are not my friends. My friends are set in stone statues. It is the sadness that brings me. It is the rape
that is fresh in my mind, how tired I am. Some people read and speak in English,
other people eat their daily supply of bread. He was not my friend. He is the betrayer. The speaker of solemn words. Of pretend condolences. He is equipped with
nothing. His mind dreams about nothing. I wake up and the birds chirp in my window. Everything is like it was. He has his children. I have my bread. It is supposed to be okay, I am not reminded of anything in between dreaming.
From my father, I forget, from my father, I have forgotten. The shadow lies in the windows of time. The windows of destiny.

It is what it is what it is. It is from a far off state I have never heard of,
the place that is wrapped in paper chains. The sky that is colored and dipped
in red, the sky that is translucent in its wake. We are woken. All things are woven,
including despair, and the darkness that lingers here is strong like lions,
and beauty is written away with a colored marker. I am accused; I am the accuser.
I stand before the trials of the court, and shadows whisper to me like spiders,
in broken things.

Different things in the news tremble like a collage of voices.
I don't spit. I move like wind and tears.

The voices of the wind
call through the trees-this is the memory, this is the yesterday.
This is the time that isn't mine.
Sometimes, I think about when I was little,
and I was fishing with my father. My father, with the big blue eyes,
and face stained with tobacco and tears.
He spat on and on about the war,

how stories were woven from stars, and musicians sang for their food only.
That they never had any families, or spoke their minds freely.
War is not
free. It stems from the dinosaurs,
from science, from the act of being alone. I am alone in my grief, alone in the way I look at things.

From seventeen years ago,
I let you go, and my basket dropped in the snow.
I ran, looking ahead,
backwards again, and forwards-then, I was in prison, and my neighbor with the flaming
red hair set me free through his destruction.

He went on, and the memories of pain screamed in my mind,
I was like ghosts, and truth was destroyed.
Marriage destroys things.
It destroys whole families.
It turns humans into balls of mistrust, lies, hatred.
No one can see my pain, see my memories, my tears, or why people want me dead. They ignore me. I am homeless, the one whose innocence was kept silent. She moves on, in her grief, and doesn't know me, wants to steal my things. She has everything. I am a ghost, I fall in myself. People will never fix their problems. They will always enhance them, become them, and the dying will be sent to the scavengers.

Bad Behavior.

I tried not to be in love with lightning-
the way it tiptoes across the sky, and dashes into the clouds.
The clouds are angry, like lions, they are selfish and unnerving.
They are not petrified. I think our ancestors were petrified,
that they were unified in the realizations that all things are kept unturned.

My words are not my sorrows. They are not thrown into the piles of rocks
on the ground, they are not the brokneness that my life has become.
I try to make up new things for children to play with, and keep the thoughts to myself.
A young girl in Spain tries to take my boyfriend; tries to open a can of worms.
She is selfish in her reasons, as planes fly into buildings and heads are buried
in the sand. She moves like lightning, her thoughts are fluid as water running through
the stream. She thinks she is home. She writes fake letters and puts them in jars
and sends them out to the ocean, hoping to find some peace, some serenity, some inner
home.

She is turmoil. She is the sound of the ocean that rings with the voice, the sound of
summer.

This is summer. Things are in summer. A man and a tan and a pile of rocks-
he jumps on his engine, and turns it on, it sounds like firecrackers in the stillness.
She says goodbye to her words, to the night that is dark. She is like a ghost.

Apes Are Angry, Jealous-

I am a ghost that moves in a mountain.
No one speaks and no one is heard…
All around me are the shades of colors,
Locked in a dream. This is like my nightmare.
I type and I type and the words are thrown like shadows
Across an empty page-this is war, the war of temptation.
I spoke of yesterdays. They are like golden days,
My father is in Canada, my mother is far away. My wife
Doesn’t know how to talk to me anymore. My neighbor thinks
He knows me, but he doesn’t know that he makes me cry at night,
He makes me wet the bed. I look out the window and stare at a stream
Of flowers on the broken lawn. I think about our ancestors,
Who were not our friends-they are animals, and the animals speak to
The sky, the ground, the meadows filled with flowers. He doesn’t think about
Anything but his own selfish ways, the ways that are the center of the self.
He pretends he cares. He is the pretending. He makes mistakes on purpose.
He tells me lies, lies, and goodbyes. He doesn’t know anything about
The whispering of the pines, or how the ghosts of apes move through the
Mountains, through the colors and the cold and the dark and I have to tiptoe,
To try and understand, to not be in love because I am forced to.
He didn’t move on. I forgave him, but that thing is still undone. People move like
Tombstones, like shadows. He thinks he knows, he doesn’t know.
Only time will tell. Only time will move back, and forth. The reading is in the
Fire that burns selfishly. He is dead to me. Dead to my ears. My ears are
Burning as the night is burning and the lies burn in every fire place in every household
In the country. People force me to procreate, to be with nothing. Why? Why?
Why are these things happening to me, why can’t I stop them, why am I forced to write
In a diary that doesn’t understand me, that has blank pages?
You’re the ones who force me to be this way. I sit quietly in the dark and tears spill down my
Cheeks. The wind moans; no one hears me.

What Is In Riddles.

You said words are hard, they wrap around things unseen-
That distance lies in riddles, and things in between.
Nothing else will work out, quite well in the end.
This is the world we’ve been trying to mend.
I don’t know about the other ones, only we play pretend-
The flowers in the garden don’t want to grow,
Nothing is a seed that will be forced to overthrow.
I don’t understand the negativity or what we comprehend,
Why books have to have middles, or antiques are what we send-
Through the shadows, and the lies, and the hurt and goodbyes,
You tried to make me see something in a mystery.
I don’t want to go where you will go, except in time it will show,
And tomorrows are sorrows wrapped in a vine wrapped in misery.
You went to the ocean, and the ocean sent you home,
Your life was like something we weren’t even shown.
We fly like a flock of birds, and speak in sad rhymes,
The lion uses its wings to hear of unheard things.

THE KNOWING.

Of all the things that were created,
And the hands of clocks are turned backwards.
The guitar player plays at a pub in London,
And wildflowers bloom on the darkness and mist.
I thought we weren’t going to be here more than usual,
That things are tempted and not created-
That the fields and wildflowers are in full bloom,
And nakedness dances like urchins in the living room.
Light bounces off the fireplace. The night has come,
And shadows march across me, around me, through me-
People forget time, forget watches, forget bread,
The eating is not sinful. We are ghosts running against
Time, we are respectful, and we are dead. We are clocks
That spin around and around, and the sun melts into
Shadows. Someone sleeps in his cave, a dog barks at night,
The wind whistles like a train in a shimmering light.
My mother is awful, my father is dead-I have no home to call my
Own, only the night lingers like mistakes. The moon
Burns brightly, a lamp shakes, and bones shake like lightning.
We run away, and we run, and we keep running until guilt
Keeps us back.
No one sees me, no one knows.

SOCIETY.

WHAT IS SOCIETY

And this society, the one we live in, where people in wheelchairs
Are thrown into the trash;
And people named Mikel are picked on in public,
Carry picket signs down foreign-sounding streets, like Pickled Eggs;
Deviled Hands; High Street, the name rolls off your tongue.

The words are like plastic sheets put on a brown couch.
How autumn quickly changes into summer, and summer and winter
Are both entwined,
And monkeys are both riveted by words that are spoken from old vowels;
That the sounds of summer rain drift softly through the dark,
In the dark of the night, and the night

Drops like a monsoon out of Japan; and the Emperor was angry,
And the entire Atlantic Ocean was angry, and it was angry with its voice.
How people think they are not in a society, and how the society
Gets back at the smart people, and the dumb people get everything,
Especially the blondes and men interested in art.

Sometimes, the museums whisper softly at night, and the night
Calls down to the dinosaurs in the museums;
How the museums are like parts and ghosts wander around
In the dark, like softly moving shadows,
And how some people are homeless, and not breathing,
And breath comes out of me, and is me and NOT.

I don’t know what to make of this, what to speak of this,
In the words that pour from my lips, the lips that speak the poetry-how kings
And queens mock me, and think I am grand, but no one sees
Me stand in the shadows, unless I destroy entire empires…
My mother thought it was a bad idea, not a good idea, that ideas
Shouldn’t be put in society, shouldn’t be spoken of in classrooms.
Sometimes, even the walls are dim, and sometimes I can hear them.

"I'm Hungry!"

My eyes are like wildflowers wrapped in straightjackets.
Lions sleeping in cold cages; falcons walk on the tips of lakebeds.
Sometimes, when I dream, I can’t speak, I can’t see,
Anything but the blindness of my eyes staring at the back of me.

I hear about the soldiers in far off Guam, the country with the name
That sounds like twin cities;
And how we live, and the things we do, sound like list after list after
List;
Sometimes, we read magazines; sometimes, wives take cereal to their
Husbands in boxes,
And how old men named Marc and Liam think themselves better
Than others, and waste their money on the tracks, on gum, on
Whispers in the dark-

The stars, late at night, are like eyes that stare down on the world,
And watch over it, watch over it, waiting, and how Michael and Charles
Are like shadows that pour down stone walls,
And we think and we think but we can’t find the words to say.

“I’m hungry,” she said, and he brought her cheese and wine on
a gold tray,
and the bird outside wouldn’t chirp,
and the room refused to breathe.

GATHKA'S PROMISE.

Gathka said she wanted a normal daughter-one who was without physical perfection. A scientist would call it a genetic mutation; the regular population called it something else, they called it Normal. The word itself has been around for more than two thousand years; it was only in the last five hundred years that the definition changed. Gathka supposed aliens had something to do with it. Aliens had been visiting the Earth for hundreds of years, even before the birth of Jesus; they’d made claims of the cavemen, the dinosaurs, the wooly mammoth. They even admitted having something to do with global warming. Their ships ran on fossil fuel. Gathka supposed other races lived in the universe, but the kind they met were intelligent, smart, fast, their minds were faster than any computer. It was amazing to watch. Gathka sat behind the desk, nervously stroking her fingers. She always did that when she was nervous. She was a tall, blonde woman and had large, blue, cat-like eyes. The human race mutated after seven thousand years; the only things that changed were the length of their earlobes, and their eyes, which was more cat-like in appearance. Gathka was an anthropologist major in college, and had studied ancient humans-humans from the Electric Age; the Golden Age; etc. 10,000 years before that, the saber tooth tiger and other animals roamed the earth. Gathka highly suspected a meteorite did not kill the dinosaurs after all, but it was simply a genetic mutation that span over time.
She turned. A whisper of sound. The doctor entered the room. He was tall, muscular built, and had broad shoulders and thick, brown hair. Gathka couldn’t help but stare. He looked almost identical to her husband, except he had blonde hair and was much taller. He ran a business in New Jersey. They were from New Jersey. She smiled thinly and rose to her feet. She straightened her dress nervously. “Hello,” she said. “It’s nice to meet you, doctor.”
“You’re one of the few,” he began.
“One of the few, what?” She raised her eyebrows questionably.
“One of the few who aren’t going to go by Artificial Insemination. We have a huge sperm bank. We even have some celebrities, some politicians. Quite a few writers. Still no?” he asked.
“I promised my grandparents,” she explained. She hesitated. She thought it was silly explaining this to a doctor. She didn’t have to explain anything to a doctor! It was her body! It was her decision-and her husband’s, who was eagerly awaiting their first child.
“You promised your grandparents what?” he asked. He wasn’t being impatient or condescending. He was being kind, generous, and offered input on the best way to take. She had made up her mind. She was firm in her revolution, in her decision.
“I promised I would be a Norm,” she replied. It was a strange thing, to be a Norm when everyone else wanted to be Abnormal. It was weird. It was ludicrous. It was hard to imagine, but it happened, very rarely, every so often. In society, being different was wrong. She knew that now. She suspected it for a long time, but humans were conditioned to think and feel a certain way, and everyone went with what everyone else was doing. If someone did it differently, they were considered a Normal-or, a Norm, for those who wanted to know. It was something that happened, changed over time. It was ridiculous. It was absurd. But, it was how society had changed. They were different. They were a lot worse. The crime rate, especially, was ridiculous. A few murders among the Abnormals; the Norms had good behavior, but there were few of them left in the world. Few and far between.
“I want to have my baby the normal way,” she told her husband the next day, over tea. He had come home, and he stroked her shoulder. He was home after a dozen meetings at the office. He was a lawyer, one of the best in the state.
“I know, dear,” he answered. “I do, too. I’ve been doing research. Many couples gave birth in hospitals. Can you imagine such a thing? That’s where they performed surgeries on people! Can you imagine!”
Gathka could. “What about their genetics?” she asked. “Their genetics just appeared out of nowhere, like magic.” She shook her head. “I can’t believe people lived like that. It’s so funny, seeing how they dress, and what they wore-”
“How they made their food,” he finished, giggling.
She nodded. The Norms ate food, still; the Abnormals lived off of energy from the sun. The sun was a large thing, and radiation was recycled. Always recycled.
Gathka gave birth to her daughter on September 8th, 3443. It was midnight. She decided to give birth at a hospital. The building was virtually empty, save for a few Abnormals who were having their regular check-ups. Some Abnormals liked to act out their lives, and pretend they were something they were not-many Abnormals begged to have a disease, even though disease was wiped out 900 years ago. She sighed. Being human was very difficult work. A lot of thought went into every day activities. Her thoughts were slow, muddied. She had trouble breathing. She brought home her daughter after being three weeks in the hospital. The doctor was puzzled because the baby had come out of the womb. Most mothers who were brought in to the hospital born babies in a test tube. It was how it was, how it shall be-she suspected he thought she was slow, numb, dumb. Maybe all three.
Her husband was gone again; gone to a business meeting. They decided to revive businesses after the last of the wars, due to the wishes of the government. Her husband laughed every time he heard the word, government, like it was some kind of great, colossal joke. One of his ancestors had died in Vietnam. That could be the reason for his case of the giggles. Maybe it was genetic.
“Hello, sweetie.” Gathka sat on the floor next to her daughter. She was broad, bold, insidious. She was eager to learn more about her Norm daughter. She would take it one at a time, however.
“Hello, Mom,” she said, smiling broadly. “Look what I’m doing.” She pointed to the toy animals spread out on the floor. “It’s Noah’s Ark, Mom. But, I don’t have a boat for them. Can we buy a toy boat next time?”
Mom was an old-fashioned word. The Abnormals called their parents “rent” or “rents.” It was an old trend that span generations. She smiled at her daughter and watched her play.
“Sure, honey,” she said, smiling down at her. “We’ll see.”