Passages

I like it here but I need someplace to go. Someplace to grow. Someplace beyond what I know in the day to day flow of my life. I want noise and joy and busy life surrounding me and drowning me in the hum of its movement. I want quiet and solitude and midnight hours enfolding me and soothing me with the peace of stillness. I want faith in the loud life and the soft life and just in life in general. I want a center that isn’t harder and harder to hold on to as the days march by and leave me standing at the side of the road, watching. Watching all the travelers move through their days with fear and love, with tears and smiles and all the while I’m waiting. Waiting to fall in step and let my burden go or walk away from the silent, lovely show.

I want to want no more.

Once to feel the pulse beneath the skin, the flow of blood rushing from our straining hearts. Twice to feel the tears slide from your eyes, mixing with mine over sighs and shallow breaths. Thrice and done and the world clouds over, shuddering and still again.

Sometime in college…

The piece below was written as a quick reaction to a now forgotten poem a professor read in a class I attended. Whatever the words, the imagery it conjured was of me watching my father find his name on the Vietnam Memorial Wall in Washington D.C.

The professor picks two poems
The class hears them as he speaks
With one my interest mildly sits
the other raises my level of awareness
while catching me off guard
I’m gone from class and sit in myself
as I was many years ago
My father with that worn Air Force parka and black bandanna
the sign “Another Viet Vet for peace” forgotten at his side
And I see it, I see his name
his whole self reflected in my father’s eyes.

Original Piece: To Whom I May be Concerned About
A letter to someone from the past.

Why couldn’t I save you? Why couldn’t I have helped? What is there left to say? I know. Remember. Remember the gazebo in the park on that perfect day. Fall leaves circling around us. The crisp breeze lifting your hair. And the colors. Oh the colors. Like a landscape painted just for us.

“I love you.”
“I love you to.”
“Will you dance with me?” I asked
“But there’s no music.” You said
“There is always music…you just have to listen…”

I don’t have many clear memories of him. He was sort of a peripheral member of the family in my young eyes. In fact, the only times I really saw him were at family gatherings like birthdays, holidays and the like. What I do remember of him was money, fitness, beer and loud laughing. I remember him saying vulgar things at the dinner table that made the kids laugh, the parents look uncomfortable and the grandparents frown. In the later years of my youth I heard the darker stories from my parents regarding his lifestyle. The divorce came and went and he faded out of the larger family’s life.

I saw him recently at a funeral. He seemed fragile, depleted, sad. Attempting to display a front of calm compassion and support came across as nervous confusion. He looked like a puzzle piece that arrives at the table only to find a more compatible piece has taken its place. I remember speaking with him briefly. I remember overhearing his nearby conversations with relatives. I can’t seem to recall any of the words however. All that comes to mind is thinking “He is shorter than I remember him”.

A few blocks. A few miles. A few lifetimes away. Years and years of life squeezed into a handful of moments. A handful of tears from eyes too dry to make them. Too hollow to see.

The heart’s words spoken with a harsh edge. A cruel expression without pity and without the soul of comprehension. A stray set of words let loose without a thought to the impact…

concussion…

wound…

backlash…

College Writing II, Feb. 25, 1999

The best sermon I have ever seen was not issued from the mouth of a human. It was not spoken in the dusty caverns of the holy houses. It was not chanted by the learned priests in temples far to the east. No simple human voice could reach it’s complexity or awe. The sermon that I saw came from the thunder of the ocean. I had traveled far to see the spectacle of the water that blankets the earth. Many had told me of the change that seeing the ocean and hearing the waves could cause in a person. I was skeptical about this marvel and was therefore unprepared for the impact it would have on me. Continue reading

Someone was breathing…

Somewhere in the dark someone was breathing. Rapid breaths, sharp against the otherwise silent cloak of darkness.

The darkness itself was palpable, seeming to flow like a liquid around objects in the alley. Over the trash strewn about the ground; around the overflowing dumpsters; through the hanging bars of fire escapes long unused; along this cursed corridor of the city. Vision in the nightmare blackness was like seeing the world through the oily smoke of burning corpses. Ink-like in its substance and foul beyond imagining. Something unnatural and not of this world. The darkness always came with It. Continue reading

Already shortened gasps of breath steam from a chilled tongue. Overt and heavy, cold with heat induced condensation. While the time ticks by, the unknown awakens. A conflict of the hyper-real and scintillating dreams. Exhaling and inhaling the aroma of clear, crisp loneliness. A shock that is so alive with aching that to deny it would only add to the massive emptiness.

Breathe…….breathe…….breathe…….

Open my eyes to what’s missing in the moments.

Free flow to the soul and I forgot to follow lazy rivers down paths with golden seams. How far have I gone without willing the pen to fly over seas of doubt, forests of sorrow, pastures of…

I’ll skip the biblical references. No need for irreconcilable differences during a reading of beliefs.

How far can I fly without starlight and the moon bright? Wings of silver casting shadows of white on the ground in the moon lit night…

Can’t I wander for the sake of it? For the joy of it? For the freedom I find in my mind? Leave the doubt behind and cry and love and pain and everything wonderful in the world and beyond. And if I write what I feel and express myself with an eloquent tongue, a rude tongue, a crude tongue and true tongue, then where will I go? To the hall of scholars, to the dusty courtrooms and holler, “Hear I Am!” Or will I find myself with a pen and pad writing what I think is sad and wrong and not doing what I can to make myself a better man?

Words are mine, but with them I just wrap my life in self-important prose and flowery words about a rose and in the end no one knows that I weep these words onto the page and sadly walk from my own stage.