Railway

-She stands on the platform, her hair flowing, sunglasses covering the brown of her eyes. She fusses with a cell-phone but it’s useless and she puts it away. She looks around and walks up past me and waits. The train arrives, yet only her image is present in my mind, the glasses, her shape and her fair complexion. And they’re the remnants of childhood. I walk up past the door to the rail car in front of me and make my way in her trail, entering and passing, where she is now seated. She scoots over, toward the aisle, a […]

August 16, 2004

Absence

-“It is exceedingly difficult to maintain a sense of absence without turning that absence into some kind of presence” -Mark Epstein He wakes in the dull morning, the light filtering in through the window. He stares at the ray of light that slices through his room. Putting his hand in its stream he watches the light fill the creases of his palm. ‘What does it say,’ he wonders, remembering a co-worker he once had who always insisted that everything about you is written in the palm of your hand, in exactly those little creases that sometimes disappear in the sunlight. […]

August 10, 2004

Like Molded Clay

-Some people make you think. You watch them and somehow can’t wrap your mind around their existence. That they exist. It makes you consider existentialism and philosophical solipsism. Are they really carnal manifestations? I was walking home the other day and as I passed an alley I heard a soft pounding against a hard surface and I couldn’t keep my self from looking. As I turned I was able to see a man in his twenties pressing himself into a woman, somewhere around the same age, their lips wrapped around the other’s. As I watched, I started to wonder if […]

August 4, 2004

Zen Cloud

-Sometimes there’s this feeling, this yearning to find this secret path that takes you to the place of dreams, the one that was stuck in your dreams in your infancy, when you believed the world itself was a magical kingdom. And I’ll lie there and escape my predicament, escape myself, if only for a momentary lapse of consciousness. And I can go no further. There’s that threshold I dare not cross, to be enamored too completely with your dreams is to be enamored with fantasy and to eschew reality, and to eschew reality is at long last in twenty some […]

August 2, 2004

Clarissa

-Her eyes, sullen, as they fall on him, his expression vacant, his lips still, not quivering, like hers, when he told her he spent the night with Clarissa; it was at that moment her lip began to quiver, as her mind raced back to that night, to her sitting in the dark, in their apartment, alone, and she suffered with those words, night after night, living the solitude of two nights, the present and that night, alone in the darkness, in a bed made for two, and where was he as her heart erupted, dampening the pillows in a flood […]

July 30, 2004

Dancing with the self

-In the dim pale morning, the light finds it way to his window and weaves itself past the blinds, as the alarm goes off; music enters. He stumbles out of bed, eyes shut, and in the stumbling stubs his toe but without pain and so, unaware. He dances in the darkness of the room, with no one else around and still ever afraid to dance alone.

July 29, 2004

Traces

-Sometimes they return, the indelible traces of where you’ve been, the footprints of existence and experience following you, only one step behind. You close your eyes, forge on forward, but you know they’re there. They dance at family gatherings, as if they’re more at home than you. Reminding you of the peace and of the suffering that have woven of time and space the presence of your essence, one manifestation after the present. And even as they fade out of memory, they remain the lingering sensation that life is more than what you see when you’re awake and greater than […]

July 27, 2004

Mind

-The question whispers its monosyllabic presence, an inaudible sound, but it is there. In the night I enter my dreams as the armed poet who can turn the tides of emotion within a heart, but at sunrise my ability is latent, weakened, and the relentlessness of words is a truth only held in my mind. I float through life with that dreamy look of desperation or the frightened look of fatigue and there is in the genesis of my soul, that, unresolved conflict of self. I build a tower to words and of words and end up wrapped in a […]

July 26, 2004

Nothing Else

-Our feet collapse the snow as they fall heavy and create our path of footprints. The winter has stopped its tears as we stand feeling the cold breeze bite into us. The lighter’s flame is quickly snuffed and it’s orange hue freezes into the pale winter blue. Parts of the city have been erased by the fallen white. The lighter jiggles in his hand as he sparks the orange hue, again. The cigarette ignites with a crackling and he inhales deeply, his stare, into the dissipating cloud of smoke. His hand falls before him, the cigarette dangling, reminiscent of a […]

July 23, 2004

405

-Smoke billows from my lungs… The 405 at midday, from 6 to 7, and through the night; headlamps weaving their way through, fading in the cavernous passage. …I stand watching… Mobile entertainment centers on four wheels, weaving through, what was there, is there, and will be no more. Ravaged, for the need to live by want, desire to have more than we have. …the cigarette end burns in my hand, I let it fall… Uproot nature and supplant it with a new landscape of concrete, plaster and tar. The neighborhood always dreamt of, A hundred miles away, at the other […]

July 17, 2004