Multiple Choice

The secret night opens six inches in front of your next step. It is exactly 12 years from your past and half that from your future. You have to enter it else be trapped forever. The solution is understanding:

a. Why
she feels slighted at the Oscars.
They don't know shit she says in the dark,
no make up and writing her own lines to boot.
No idea.
Weighted with bags enough, she practices with
couples in the park. They just smile and stroll on.
She doesn't hear cut and keeps talking until
the last bench, where she sits to smoke,
stretches her varicose legs until her bit part
in the next scene.

b.How
some people
are completely themselves in public,
as if the open air act of being noticed
enables their own private perfection.
For you, he laughed, its a gauntlet.
Just make it through and shut the door.
Exhale. Allow the closed world
to refill what keeps getting taken against
your will.

c. Where
the perfect blue is cut slant by architecture.
This sky so close above you,
Some worlds need pressure to form, you think.
Something about oysters and pearls and
small incisions that hurt now but help in the end.
Blue oblivion edging the relief.
But then there's the steady state view,
something says. An old man every night
outliving us all in a field
just outside the city.

Tunnel

The strange chemicals in my brain have leveled out once again, and the world is no longer seen as a reddened singularity. It is fascinating to watch myself, as if from the outside, behaving like my father. Those times when he would implode and wend, with perfect subtlety, from stoic king to half-mad emperor. Kurtz ala Brando. The tribute to Hollow Men. A concrete weight is placed on the face and heart, the air you breathe rationed with sadistic measure and scented with bondage. The world you have created for yourself has been effortlessly assumed by sly raiders who have done nothing to earn it, save for their patience in waiting for you to drop your guard.

Fairness becomes an excuse for the beaten. Entreaties from everywhere like peels of sardonic laughter, masked just enough to keep you playing the game. It is not unlike dreaming, when the monster is upon you and you're slowly sprinting in quicksand. But here you're the monster and the horizon is teeming with hoards of  decisions that have brought you here, to the place you cannot bear and cannot leave. So you rattle the cage, ironically impressed by its solid construction, by the beauty of light glinting off the life your very own hands have shaped.

Vacation in Catalan

Finding yourself in Catalan
where the brave cliffs still tell stories and twist
winds through the minds of madmen.

In their cracks the plans of melted genius
have taken up hermitage, waiting for the world
once again to call for Roche.

Your group approaches the castle and whispers
its way up the winding stairs. It's dark, but from behind
you see the thin glowing line that connects, the one that
stops at you.

On the roof your friends veer right
to hear the new language of architecture,
see the lights of the city as they pop and start
the arousing work of night.

You wander left to a cannon,
hard and ready for a hundred years.
And as you load it with your clothes,
they don't notice that you're free, 
that you're propositioning a whore to light the fuse.

Pan in the Cloister

This weekend I decided to embrace my inner Pan, who breaks free of his provincial bonds every summer and fall, and return to the waters that sated and bathed me, those earliest years of my new life in Minnesota. I saw a faerie there (yeah, really) and the energy of that place helped ease the turbulent transition from my old life in TN to my new one so far north. It is a certain spot on the Mississippi, just west of where it joins the Minnesota. This space is a sacred cloister for me, a place to recharge the soul batteries and get perspective from the daily grind. It would be fifteen more years before I would discover that this area is also sacred to someone else, the local Dakota who consider the place where the two rivers join, the Bdote, nothing short of the center of the universe. The place of Dakota genesis. I'm telling you; you feel something here.

My spot is waiting for me, though the weather has transformed it from a hidden sanctuary to a pit stop on a well traveled path. I feel I have traveled sideways through time. Enormous puppets and madrigaled beauty surround me. Ren Fest made real. People of all ages in some kind of celebration. Seems like something to be imagined, but it is only good timing. Lovers holding hands. Feudal love, requited. How wonderful. I am passed without a glance, shielded by indifference or native glamour. The old driftwood tree, which has always centered my visits here, has somehow escaped the spring floods and glows in the afternoon sun. It is more beautiful in how less it has become. Once imposing, now a stark piece of art Zen against all thought it could be so. Its protective skin long gone, smooth grooves hardened perfectly by everything it has weathered.

There are still nymphs about. I can't see their ethereal curves; I feel them. They approach me, whisper in enticing breeze, giggle out of nostalgia. They ask me where the hell I've been. I try to respond, but have nothing. One pulls on my shirt and I smile. Pan, the wrong time, always the right place. And the old Pan simmers here in the light between the trees. Visions. Primordial drive and open sky. Earths moved by desire alone. I am shone fires that still burn beyond the day. A silent proposition. The sun laughs. Pan, too. He miles at the newness of everything. He wants to make long love to the modern world. Remind it through coarse sweat what it keeps leaving behind. He wants it to call him in the morning.


As I prepare to leave the modern self begins to take over. "Where am I?" The sand just laughs. It wonders why the question is always the same. A day trip to Fey, I tell myself. The rumored madness not a fear, but a blessing that prepares me for the return. The timeless clearing seems at odds with the world that waits. Come here at you become the thing that does not fit. Join them both inside you. Tighten the bands while opening the soul. Rectify infinity with the stone ticking of the clock.

~