The Poetry Marathon

A swirling stream of captured glimpses,
memories highlighted with stone and shadow, wildflower mosaics burying segmented
columns and headless statues.

Whole universes of civilizations having risen,
thrived, deepened, and fallen. Fading, fading.
Long before my footsteps dared to touch,
long before my mind sought to understand.

If I stare long enough, deep enough,
into this chiseled rock, crafted by hands
long since withered, decayed. Looking past
the modernity that surrounds these ruins,
beyond the busy chatter, traffic noise,
airplanes that sever the sky…
if I keep staring, might i see?
Might I glimpse, for a moment,
the true gravity of history?

And if it visits me only in quick
fiery specks of realization,
flashes of enlightenment my mind can barely hold,
but returning again, and again, as long as
I continue to stare, continue to freeze time
in the continual disintegration of stone to sand.
Can I put that gravity into my blood?
Move it through the course that feeds my body,
until it settles in the density of my own bones,
into the ruins I will leave behind one day.

Vibrant, sun-born tool-weilder,
muscle and oil and hair in full,
Stride stepper, woundless love maker,
Light and vine climbing out of shadow,
Heaven Seeker, reaches, sky chasing beast of the earth, granted wings of selfwilled evolution.

Love-drunk day thinker, boring holes inside your wounds, fleshing out bloody walls, digging under skin.
Each sensation a series of tremors, burning as they seize the arm, the fingers, blossomed palms with electric stamen.

Sterile white walls hide the maniacal sorrow,
Frame the wide windows facing nearby rooftops,
Through these endless wells of pouring desire,
she laughs and cries, looking at the same
fields disappearing in the distance.

On mornings after the rain, shallow pools adorn the roof,
where dragonflies gaily dance from each sheening surface.
Their tails entwined, skipping along the water. She cries.
She cries. And the dragonflies dance.
How sad it is to live for anything that blooms against the tide.
The heavy veil that blankets all, disconnecting
everything that meant more than what it first appeared.

How sad the synapses in her mind, growing weaker,
like the eroding gravity of cerebral stars,
senses can’t recall her best memories anymore,
there is only the recognition that it’s slipping further away,
just like the dragonflies dancing from pool to pool,
while all the world is in its final act.

How sad it is, as it all falls to emptiness.
The mind, the universe,
the universe within the mind.

There is a dull distaste for the world
that begins with myself. The anger with inefficiency
begins with my own lack of discipline.

How sorely I tread through the day ahead,
wounded and ready to attack. Behind all the sharp words
I save in my head, beneath the images of faces
I want to shout down, there is a disappointment with who I am,
with my inability to meet the expectations
I set for myself, that I expect of others.

An underlying fear of living a poor life.
Not experiencing the levels I want to reach,
to not be authentically myself,
when it’s the idea of myself that makes me its prisoner.

All my efforts, that I so desperately worry are in vain,
are, in fact, vainly attested to the narrative that upholds my self-importance.
Whose approval do I seek more than my own?
Yet the standards for that approval are conditioned by comparisons to others.

How do I surrender the idea of myself,
to the freedom to be whatever I already am in each moment?
To arrive as is, open to the experience, not resistant,
without preconceived desires working towards an ideal outcome,
just okay to discover the process as it comes,
to self-discover, as if stepping into a river,
when base instinct screams not to drown,
and intentions long to swim for the far shore.

Somewhere between instinct and intention is the river,
is the world, and amongst its folding waters is myself
holding onto the idea of myself that keeps me afloat, or so I think.
To let go, to let drown, to choose to ride the current,
and trust that authenticity will arise as the body learns to swim inside the moment.

No matter how great the swell may pull,
the gravity that anchors all to the lowest recesses,
the plum will drop, the center will hold
as the entire planet shifts.
I too am an anchor of myself, unmoved in the wake,
so still I almost forgot it was there.

Shadows trickle in the forest,
tiny hurricanes of light and darkness,
Solar systems beneath branches,
flickering throughout the rustling underbrush.

A soft tendril slowly uncoils upwards,
chasing the fleeting warmth escaping it,
taunting it to reach higher.
How sad is the fate of such fragile efforts!
Don’t you know the world is doomed?
The universe fated to cool,
to freeze all in immeasurable silence.

Why, then, should this small, green string
insist on rising from the earth?
When everything that lives is merely
gifted a moment to know its place
before being banished back to the oblivion that birthed it.
Why would a tree want to touch the sky?
Why does a flower unveil its glorious petals?
What is the point of struggling for a few mere hours of radiance?
Of suffering for a height that disappears as you climb it?

When the penultimate truth of all that exists, is to die,
enslaved to the entropic genetic code of our inheritance.
What is the purpose of such sad beauty?
What meaning is embedded in the sun’s brilliance?
That the inevitable ruin might not touch us for an instant,
That life should persist in the brief time it has to be.
That we might love the stars despite the encroaching darkness.

When all eternity eventually succumbs to the Void,
The only reason that remains at the end of everything,
was for a single day when we could feel the hope of light.

Where sunflower children encircle a swingset,
tippy toes point towards the deepest of blue skies.
And laughter falls through the air like frolicking leopards,
all spotted and sporadic, full of stomach and throat.

In this field at the edge of the rolling woods,
where sunflower children encircle a swingset,
dreams drop their leaves with each soaring defiance of gravity
to sequester in the old soil of earthworm labyrinths.

I am the watching wind, passing gently through,
Indifferent to the woes and the wishes that sway back and forth
Where sunflower children encircle a swingset,
And all the leaves rustle, like hot whispers of breaking glass.

In the tall fields of late August, the dry wood splits,
a trembling pendulum creaks the sad song of life,
The wind lifts footprints from the settling dust,
where sunflower children encircle a swingset.

The cosmic falls, this distance beyond gravitational bounds
Where plunging waters dissipate into astral mists
In the belly of some ancient god, the stars, illustrious, countless,
cast upon the immaterial universe,
like the scattering remnants of a tremendous explosion.

I am lost, searching for direction,
in an immeasurable plane that cannot
be quartered with cardinal points,
nor ups with downs, before nor behind.

Into a vision that continually expands
until it is swallowed by a greater vantage point,
beyond what I can see, each realm
enclosed within the other, an ever-growing
macrocosmic god’s eye view,
any point of reference related to here, this place, now,
is indistinguishable from the opulent enigma that surrounds it.

I am somewhere within nowhere.
Where seemingly unimportant arms of spiral galaxies,
twist, churn, fold over illuminated gaseous horizons,
Where the great star ocean is ever abounding.

There is a feeling he longs to feel again
And so he bleeds every new experience
for every drop of emotion it can arouse in him
Takes the glass to the table, time and time again.
Holds friends like hostages until they
begin to bore his starving appetite.

And the lovers who dared to share his bed,
he took from them more than they were willing to give
All for the sake of the hole he fights inside.
That damned emptiness where once
simple pleasantries lived.

And the vices drew close to him like
cancerous tumors thrive on disease,
The lusts, and the powders,
every god and every savior
drowning in the void that never ends.

What crime has he committed?
Against others, for sure.
Against himself, his witness,
confessing truths never revealed.

Longing for impossible imaginings,
Forever heartsick, romancing an eternal grief.
What a sad promenade, descending spiral,
A short-lived trail of light
all along the abysmal edge.

Bound to you in living unison,
In name, in heart, in body, in mind.
Companions in a daunting landscape
Where uncertainty threatens
at each weakening seam.

Returning to the bond that defined us,
that strange magnetism aroused
by the converging of our rivers.
We are embraced in the ephemeral freefall
like wild birds defying death with flight.
Bursting with a song that secures
the holy grounds of our bed.

This is the dream that is beyond words.
And is also this very moment,
as it cuts into our skin.
Where horizons touch graveyards,
and meadows end at fencelines.
Our truth is but a small orchestra
lost in the surrounding seismic noise.

My heart is a mudpie bleeding in the rain
So bright of red that it contains the sun.
Sopping clay falling through tiny fingers,
to the soft applause of relentless rain.
Cold petrichor fossils burn through icy nostrils,
choking back chalky mouthfuls of earthen fruit.
A child cries. Rivers of mud pour from her chin,
Death ebbs, all bloodied across her hands.

Until the tears burn like electric darts,
lightning of the mind, short-circuited, leaking,
Where Endymion eternally reaches for a fleeting moon
sinking behind the mountains of Caria.
My heart is a pale rock fading in the night.

The sky, a remorseless sea that seeks
to drown all light with its magnitude.
Where blue devils tear the sash from around my chest.
The harder they claw, the more death is like a dream,
a kaleidoscopic interplay of ontological absurdity
on the green table of mortality
where umbrellas float upside down
like orbiting fishing boats without rudders
until I drink the ocean dry,
and spit it back out,
filtered through my teeth.

The mad wolf turns his eyes towards the moon,
hungry and full of salt. The last bits of light
slip over the horizon forever.
Sweet, jellied darkness
I carried you in the womb of my nightmares!
“Aller Anfang ist schwer.”
All beginnings are hard,
until the stone smiles
and grows eyes so that it may sleep.
It’s draining arteries, a delicate latticework
of diluted oil drowning in the stream.