The Poetry Marathon

Own your disenchantment.
Stay blissful engaging the tragedy
There is meaning when you choose to die here.

There is something real beneath the farce
The mirror’s shadow held behind the glass
Own your disenchantment.

The descent cannot be avoided
It is always lethal
There is meaning when you choose to die here.

Transcendence embraces demise
To celebrate the unavoidable 
Own your disenchantment.

Dancing all the way down
There is happiness in the sorrow
There is meaning when you choose to die here.

Do not hide from pain
Or race to meet death
Own your disenchantment
For there is meaning when you choose to die here.

When my shadow broke from me, cast out, misshapen,
I prayed for a mold to make me right,
placed faith in an average that could dull such extremes,
a chameleon’s tone concealing everything unique.

There was a moment in the car 
when we were driving down to the lake,
you read poetry aloud from a book I kept in the console,
I think we found it then, 
it touched us for an instant
as we engaged in a place we never reached before.

It wasn’t normal, but perhaps was the idea 
of how I thought normal might feel.

Footsteps repeating, life taken in at the pace of its original intention.
The labor of my body propelling itself forward, swaying in stride.

The soles of my feet touching the earth,
Anywhere I may venture, is an honest measure of my efforts

The sidewalk, night air, city lights, and trees, 
What orchestra will arise in the hours ahead?

And in this quiet motion, will my words rise to mind?
As oxygenated blood flows to fingertips

Wherever I may arrive,
My pride will never surrender the dignity of my feet.

This mode of travel is pure
Earth-treader, a wanderer is something to be.

Lithium batteries, aluminum foil, melted plastic. 
Cardboard boxes heavy with wet ash, a mouse heart.
All the garbage that won’t burn.

Old paint cans, half-used tubes of epoxy,
A pinky finger, carcinogens transfused through cells,
Old tires, cancer.

High cholesterol, heart disease, diabetes.
Curly red hair turned to wavy auburn.
Alcoholism.

A collection of keys to unknown locks,
A flash drive, digital cameras, DVDs.
Technology to preserve human memory,
falling to memory.

Striated towers of earth, 
secret pillared mountains emerging from the mists.

How majestic you are, 
each cut separately from the other, 
collonades assembled like the ribs of a fallen giant.

Once upon a time were you not all 
of the same mountainous hillside?

Centuries shaped you, withered you, 
carved away until the skeletal towers 
protruded above the disintegration.

How too are our lives like crumbling mountains,
rumbling tempos of ridgelines, uneven,
Severed and regal, creviced and lowly.

Peeled away by storms and 
stripped to the bare rock face.
Softened in hanging clouds, 
moisture heavy layers shed 
against heightened winds.

I too cling to the bottom of the sky,
My body a broken staircase to the stars, 
My life a releasing grasp at the heavens
Dwindling, loosening, falling to rubble and rock fields 
of its former magnificence.

Fractured edges lose altitude, 
landslides of lifetimes,
Echo on the high plains below. 

Family gathers around tables in front of the farmhouse.
After a year of sheltering, 
retreating from contagious threats,
A world reopens to fill the vacancy of time lost.

At the center of the yard, 
a mighty pin oak weeps from a severed branch,
secretions stain the trunk, 
spilling over its own roots, 
lost in the dirt.
I place too much importance on what I feel.
 
The fields are overgrown, 
waving in shallow winds,
voluntary trees sprout up from the ocean of wild grass.
Low hanging limbs reach down, 
swaying just above drifting seedheads.
Some liminal space hides in between the touching forestry.
I place too much importance on what I feel.

Missing family members who departed long ago or recently,
to travel upon those talking winds, 
carried over these fields at the end of day.
Their presence is remembered, 
felt missing, I am reminded of their absence.
The trees mourn in unspoken throws, 
the wind widens the vacancy with invisible fingers.
I place too much importance on what I feel.

Perhaps all of this is merely time passing, 
an awareness that everything is falling away.
Significance doesn't exist beyond the contemplations of my heart,
there is no real resonance in nature, 
no imprinted mysteries, 
or ancestors whispering in the woods.

Just the sorrows of gradually fading, 
surrendering to closing circles,
with bowed heads, 
silent in the essence of our surroundings,
and me placing importance on what I feel.

The stronger the better,
until my hands shake and 
palpitations reverberate in my ears.
Until I'm so manic I become 
willing to subject myself to work.

It was never about needing energy.
I drank you for motivation to continue
and honestly, I couldn't brew enough of you.

Now you have betrayed me. 
Our relationship is no longer as indulgent.
Somewhere along the way 
the accelerated thinking took a dark turn, 
I experienced the abyss too real, 
came to know those palpitations 
as fleeting seconds on a clock.

The increments I ingest you with 
are more measured, watered down, controlled. 
Too much of you is crippling, 
mind petrified by the worries of existence, 
anxiety amped up on a burning fuel of self-collapse.

As the evening sky presses down on the distant hillside,
the last lines of light fan apart, streaking thin,
like pale darts flashing in a final instant
disappearing beyond in the world unseen.   

Chapters closing on his tongue,
swords sheathed, farewells laid into their beds for sleep.
Unity, rebirth, or eternal departure
resolution rests in the soft exhaling words.   

Fizzling sparks flame bright, swift recollection 
calling for the mind to acknowledge,
the heart swept up in the current of meaning,
lost before she can say his name. 

Does everything that ends burst apart before it dies?
The sunset's retreating brilliance,
a storyteller's dagger gleaming, twisting,
The mind's feeble memory, illuminating an old face.   

How sad are the finalities of fire,
whisping, choking light, shrinking from the air—
a dying dance falling beneath the underside of ash,
buried in the remnants of its own consumption.

A peach, small and plump.
The promise of nectar for dry lips.
Teeth press against fuzzy flesh
and catch sharp edges of the pit.
From his mouth falls a diamond.
A flawless jewel concealed inside the fruit,
A gift within a gift.

Prometheus and the fennel-stalk,
Prometheus and the Sun.
To protect creation he endured
the eagle’s bronze beak and talons.
A story with a part of myself inside it.
A jewel inside the fruit.
A gift within a gift.

Blake’s devotion to innocence
Worldy sand, heavenly flowers,
Infinite hands, eternal hours
A poem that speaks the truth.
A story with a part of myself inside it
A jewel inside the fruit.
A gift within a gift.

Fossiliferous stallion,
speckled stone steed grazing on dust,
you are the color of rock, gray, yellowed.

Tiny bones buried in your skin,
crinoids and brachiopods, tabulate coral.
You are the carboniferous ocean floor,
astride swimming hooves,
hardened by land, rain and rock
sediment poured through your crevices.

Poseidon’s hippokampos washed ashore long ago.