File This One Under “Sins”

What surprise to enter and find on the floor a visitor. A pale sheet. A spangling of black forms. Words (from a neighbor, from another dimension?). Who knows me? Why have I been chosen?

An indecipherable code, a message spilled, an operative discovered. I am a simple young man. I care not for the thrill of espionage.

A cold sweat broached his brow. Lifting the document (hitherto referred to as “the document”) to his eyes, he mouthed the printed words in air, fearful that spoken they may awaken a distant, slumbering, and hitherto unknown evil.

Having read the document, will our intrepid resident choose to:

1. Slice the document into thin horizontal slivers, rearrange the lines to form new messages, new words, new implications, doubly, triply indecipherable.
2. Invent a machine to erase his mind of all new found knowledge of the document and its contents, but risk in the procedure losing other valuable information obtained in the last few hours, for instance that Fly Pan Am is currently the main project of GYBE! guitarist Roger Tellier-Craig.
3. Travel back in time to yesterday and relocate to a new apartment, allowing a new tenant to bear responsibility for the document.
   
4. Spread this sacred knowledge across the internet, thereby removing his own individual responsibility pertaining to the document, voting with confidence for the democratization of decision.
   

There are Things and Cries

There are things and cries.
Voices, a thousand voices, contained in little boxes, in plastic bags, in copper pots,
in vaults beneath the tide.

Run ye over, be ye gone.

Wouldst mask my mask, eclipse my sun with your less brilliant star?

And these whispers,
from every crackling, tearing, unraveling.
Elves are they? Fairies? Evolving, mutating crustaceans?
Listening, mimicking, mocking, surpassing, or degrading?

Crafting stars from paper and lighting them in the sky.
We are more than gods.
For an instant as your face glows in red and orange,
it would appear that you were the source.
Heavenly diabolical.

There are things and cries.
In a thousand plastic cages, this silence is the sound
of our souls escaping.

n

Make a plan, a master plan, you diabolic.

Intricate it seems when webs are laid
and dimmed reality
peers as poetry is in one’s head
never spoken, nor ever read.

‘Tis a veil to veil the veil revealed.

The bird to chirp by some design,
refrains to chirp at all, but instead
would orchestrate and catalog the voices of the dead,
giving names and titles to these unexpected offspring souls.

If truth is true and the truth of truth
is true,
is yet the truth of truth of truth still true
of truth of truth of truth?

The web, delicate and firm,
strand by strand is pulled.
A word is writ, ne’er spoken nor read
and laid beneath the earth.

n

one and one is two or sometimes not

Seeing two objects
without comparing
he sees two objects
lonely
and complete.

seeing himself
and the reflection of himself
yet seeing nothing
he has reached understanding.

seeing an event
without a cause
he alone knows
why.

It’s hard to escape the urge to dive to the bottom of night

To seek a bottle to strangle
until something like life emerges.
A dark wet mass, slippery and crying,
squirming on the table before me.
It’s clumsy movements would cause me to laugh
till my jaw bone fell out of joint.
I would grin ear to ear like the
long dead
who are finally privy to the lightness
of their being.
I would join them,
gravity would lose it’s grip.
I would float
up out of my skin,
peer down
at the macabre spectacle below,
but only for a moment.
The moment might last all night,
but before falling into the dark solitude of slumber,
the foreshadowing
of the unabating rising sun
would be seen in the pink sky.

I would awake
floating on my back
on the surface of morning,
a bottle in my hand empty
but for a scribbled note.
I would open it,
but would be disappointed to find
that the ink was all smudged
and the note was
illegible
but for the signature.

Catch me if you can,
Life.