The Future in the Past

What happens?
When life transitions beyond the measure of your past
When the world builds a new, unadulterated stage
Beyond labor, or even wage
For a human life that’s meant to last
Through the fear and ambition of its own making

Where?

I would ask,

Is the future’s place

When it seems so rooted in the past

Through the eyes and words of an optimistic face

When it waits to exist and change, for a life that’s meant to last

The Changing Dream

Dreams always endure together
Within the burnt walls of old memory
Standing alone, and untethered
Isolated through flame and emery

And barely beyond a turning eye
Each endures perpetually transformed
Inside the confines of a single idea
The burnt perception that grows old and torn

But the symbiotic dreams continue
In a changed and kindled manner
Keeping the memory alive for another moment
The changing story that never stammers

Separated Lines

Your journey to each cosmos breaks

Like chalk dragged over an entrenched grain of wood

Digging against the pattern

The seasons of growth

The universes you misunderstood


And the white dust that settles into each groove

Divides the ambassador of your voice

Imprisoned in the stale air of its chamber

The narrow patterns of life

The walls of confusion in your choice

Apart from What Parts

“I don’t want a single sound,”
She said.
Arms crossed underneath the banging machine.
“Just give me something natural, you know, pound for pound.”
“Something away from these hunched over fiends,”
“who scrape in the dark.”
“Feeding on wires with blinded remarks.”

“I just want a single world,”
She said.
Her thoughts thought through, nice and thorough.
“A place where a girl can be one girl.”
“Removed from things that keep my imagination burrowed.”
“A life that never has to part.”
“A place where I don’t have to stop and start.”

“I could take a single moment,”
She said.
Under the light diffused by all these things.
“You know, the simple stuff.”
“The pleasure that doesn’t need to build wings,”
“to reach something that could be enough.”
“Something unrefined, not manufactured, something rough.”

From Truth

Nobody can see the world like you
So let it go
Nobody beyond the creation of your dreams
Nobody you know

Every ash
Every burning ember
In the sky that lasted for a minute
Reaches your heart
Your mind
A unique line
Leading far beyond within it

So let it go
Let it tell
Who you are
The subjective truth of an object
And the objective truth of sealed bars
That kill the hard fallacy of realness

On Me

Stand on me
Out but not beneath
Mixed within
My polished kin
More than we deplete
On the dried up surface of this Earth

Look on me
Inside but from the top
Where I thought
Lives were fought
Until the rushing stopped
Just like the opposite of birth

Fall on me
On top but without the knowing
Shifting round
A placeless sound
Where the dry erosion’s flowing
Behind the dried up shores of here

Talk and Not

We talked on the concrete
We thought he was begging to listen
As we spoke
Casual, and off beat
The kind of junk that glistens
In the sun stroked air

We scuffed the hot surface
He preferred the dirt and shade
The silence
Casual, with a natural purpose
The kind that stops and fades
In the quiet of plants and things

Talk turned to talking
And we began to fear
As we spoke about his eyes
Casual by the plants, stalking
The kind of pursuit that's weird
In the nature of it all

And we stared some more
Just begging to see
As he watched with purpose
Casual, but not bored
The kind that likes the trees
But never us

Concealed

Behind him
Wood burned inside
A metal prison
The old basement furnace
Feeding on dried limbs
Breathing through
An invisible prism

Onto the cool surface
Of Plastic
Cracked and twisted
Snapping sarcastic
Between the strained fingers of an old man
And the scattered
Memories of his past


Sitting on the concrete

Where a modern container
Chewed and dusted through time
Waited below green, baited eyes
Lit by the fire
Old, and more wise
Maybe this time

When the lid fell
It scratched loudly on the concrete floor
Sliding toward the furnace
Its edges melting quickly
Into the imperfect surface
More and more

The young man pulled up his seat
To look inside the past
Where things were more still
And are still
Where they were last

Enough to remove them
From their plastic bonds
To contemplate the furnace
Where and when
These things stopped existing
Eyes fixed and entirely earnest

On every picture, every word
He pulled from its mouth
Looking back at the fire
That lit his concealed canvas
Lived by an unbound painter
Unburnt and untouched

Until the moment
When each black iris
Constricted within the green
Locked on the orange flame
Knowing what he wants
What he had

As he threw it into the fire
With a painful expression
Fearing the future
That the past might bring
Within the absence of discretion

He coughed
On the black, stinging smoke
Picking up everything
Before the burning plastic
Would cause his mind to choke
And forget to leave that place
With everything he forgot

Where the edges of the lid
Still melted
And the fire roared for hours
Feeding on another cage
Into the moving light that devours

Bending in Chaos

Patterns of a single wrapper

Brightly red, melting in the constant

Sun

Catch the edge of every saturated,

Green blade

Carving a divided path

Where the winds of chaos chase and

Run



Chased by the one who sees every path
Before the blades are blown to part
And before the wrapper melts into liquid
A glistening red essence scattered
On the edge of time, where red flows from the start

Found before the Earth
Where synthetic colors sink and sank in their weight
Deep into the soil, reaching beyond the roots
Into the cracks of blackened, compressed stone
And dying a vibrant past future that cannot wait

When each blade finds its purpose
Under the sun that fails to end
In the past, the present, the future
Shaking a dried tip of sharp black
Where the wrapper forced the blade to bend

Free Beyond the Lines

Way up high
Beneath the atmosphere that
Blocks their cries
Above the ether of a calming
Life

Is where I’ll breathe

Where I’ll run and hide from
Their blue eyes
Where I’ll stand and look for
What I’ll find

Above the violence of the
Green-blue seas
Above the frantic plastic movie
Scene
Looking down but knowing we
Are free

Free beyond this synthetic earth and sky
Free beyond the fear that we define

Clouding vivid minds in misted lines

Pushing up and up until another time

When this moving plastic breaks our will
Forgetting fear that lets the moisture spill

Way back down into the green-blue sea
Back down to where I couldn’t breathe
Swimming back to where I still am free
Living back where we were always free

The Black Curve of Time

He was honest
Resting on top
Of the warm, protruding stone
Arching a deep black shadow
Above a hollowed throne

As he sat there, alone
He rested on the ceiling of kings

Unknowingly
Kicking his feet, and wishing for feathered wings
In a time of metal blades

His worn, polyester backpack swung in the breeze
Hanging from the sharp crack



That split rigidly between the rock
And the boy's callused knees

He looked down
Only for moments when he could
To view the waste of time
The erosion of what once stood
For someone
Blackly carved in, and impossible to climb

The boy thought,
"What was this place back in time?
And why is the wind eating the stone?"
His eyes grew wide, with deep black irises
Trying to absorb the unknown

Until the wind scraped and spiraled up the ancient walls
To shrill through the jagged crack
Pushing the flying boy to a shaking crawl
And just barely releasing the strap of his pack
Directly into the eaten mouth of stone

He gathered his thoughts
There, shaking on the mountain
Backed up from what he sought
Realizing he was alone

And found his way back
Afraid, but very alive
To his mother

In What They Dream

A peaceful invasion of words
Into the privacy of an angry,
Tired Giant
Who is too tiny and exhausted
To destroy or be defiant
Is exactly what he doesn't need
But probably what he requires

We think

Nothing violent or mean
Just something small,
Quiet

Something that inspires
The massive little creature
That's too gone in sleep
Dreaming of things
And possibly more

Things
Things that process deep
Under the eyelids
Which probably shutter

We hope

With every whisper
Every kind word
That we could possibly utter

Barely above silence

And maybe the sounds will stick
Into his subconscious
To be remembered later
So he knows our purpose
Our perfect knowledge

Truth

Something he doesn't know
An understanding that's greater

But we're still waiting
Waiting for someone
In the silence of whispers
To wake and stop sleeping

And care

To walk past the blanket of sleep
And finally stand and stare
To see
If the tiny giant is really there
As we all dream him to be

Standing Future

Photo by Ali West, June 21, 2007












Could I stand by you
Quietly by your side
Not behind or in front
Content and tongue-tied?

I wouldn't say much
At least about the past
But it's honest enough
Syllables that might last

As you face the clear ocean of reality
The perfectly clear liquid of time
With no bottom or surface
No low point or prime

We could watch and never know
Together, at the clear white caps
Forgetting the complex world behind
Letting fear and ambition collapse

I'll stand there
Looking for nothing beneath the surface
In the ocean that doesn't exist yet
Finding only a simple purpose

Wasting time with you
By my side
Maybe happy
Maybe tongue-tied

Together
In one sense or the other

Feeding on Plastic

A purpose inside the plastic of it all
Is hard to find
When everything stretches, twists
Like a million instant silver ribbons
Seemingly sublime

Reality burns through the shadowed concrete floors
Burns through every waking and sleeping day
It reflects off the rising glass
In a dulled, distant gray
The place where everyone looks but never sees

Meaning travels through the eye of moving squares
And voices through a twisted string of metals
Which doesn't really exist anymore
Active and blissfully unsettled
Inside each life that plugs in

Everything is clear, and better of course
Everything is better, in the clear sense of speed
Like the fulfilled desires of a human
Insatiably feeding on a machine that feels to feed
A machine that moves beyond the appetite of plastic

Awake Enough

Faint lines sketch the shade,
lightly at first,
under the inhuman eye

Ink seeps into the pores,
as the morning rays flood

Each an overflowing reservoir,
passing over every depression

Like a sleepless artist dreaming a tired dream,
smooth black pools create descending lines,
rapidly now,
in race of the unknown

Hardened ink turns into a marble-black surface

The liquid below sinks deeper,
abbsorbing into the submersed stream,
that breaks the symmetry of awareness

A tattooed callus of consciousness

Sealing the sleepy artist,
as he draws himself,
beneath the hardened ceiling of ink

With darkened eyes of his very own

Recompose

Pick it up
And hold a blue silhouette against the sun
Cut off half your vision
And smell the darkness your eyes have won

Rejecting blindness
Absorb the light

The half you like
The half that’s bright

And continue to breathe

In everything that looks different
A new cause and effect
A brilliant observation
Happily indifferent

Hiding the darker side of light
Behind the half

You reject

These worlds are yours
And yours alone
But mine if you choose to tell
The way the light hits your vision
The way shapes formed when your lids fell

Break

Drowned in the blue ether of influence
Invisible currents reach beyond the afterlife
Of a repressed partner

Past present and future tense
Working harder, and harder

A feeble recognition drips hand in hand
A lonely representation
In violently halved sacrifice

That washes in idle intuition
Worried and not half enticed

The influence needs to crash and break
Red blood of memory returning veins to life
Beyond the death of afterlife

Conclusions disappearing on the wake
Breaking you, after your life

Until that time comes
And the rain stops

To the Left of Your Wide Eye

Panoramic distractions

Visions burrowed into narrow thoughts

The faint sense of something
People
Or some, thing

Walking the landscape that eyes thought
Was never really there

Never really alive
Dry and bare

Scattered memories reach the light
Reminding the mind
That they are real

As each one walks
On the edge of fragile-seeing worlds

Peripheral
And surreal
Scratched into the far edges of life

But something has cracked
And leaked a new light
To bring attention

To everything
Every, thing

That doesn't stand directly in front of you
The ignorant king

Hiding to the left of your eyes
And to the right of your memory

Fake Ideas

Gone are the plastic bonds
Wrapped around arms and face
Transparent as the lips respond
Constricted above the waist

Silver-white lines track the expression
Cold fear precipitated on the surface
Moisture traces each depression
Escaping, flying to something worthless

Freedom

Is the last high

The restriction from a translucent truth
The place where immortal flowers lie
The place where green life is in the proof

Synthetic prisons rise and fall
Like the patterns of the ending seasons
The plastics crunch and crawl

The organic cover of the future,
Madness, and of reason

Breached inside the walls
Of the sour
The bitter
Spherical soul

Is a changed mind
A red world gone blue and cold

Tricks from explosions inside
On the wasted canvas
A light polluted silhouette
The creation you put aside

Constructing something new
Within the recess
Beneath the time

A newly empty slate
The windings of the soul
Hostile memories locked in their gate

Old ideas harden to wrinkled guides
Smeared across the skin
The forgotten brilliance
The creation you couldn't hide

In that dissolving sphere
The sour edges dissolving thin

Take You Again

The corners of your mind are round
And the thoughts of the ocean are simple

The dark edges of this world
Cut the color of your sight
Into shifting patterns
Seasons
Years

But inside your sleep there is soft space
The quiet of fantasy
The vacuum of empty submersion
And indifference

But the morning sun redefines
The smiling lines on your face
The hard shadow of your fingers
Shading the red glow

A light that somehow continues
Brightly
Beyond the definition of skin
Happily unbound
In a world better than fantasy

Island

Grasp my life
Deep inside your palm
Breath inside your cracks and seams
Sing it like a song

I was close to you
Once upon my birth

But now I've fallen
Fallen, God
Deep inside the Earth

Reach for my heart, please
Give me hope that I
Can run to you
Can run it through
Simple visions in your eye

I love you
And your return is the sea

Your crashing waves
Your silent face
Allow my heart to breath

The surface of your palm
Is all
All to me

Bring me to that island high
And teach me
The life that once was free

Happiness

So long ago

Happiness was born

Like the freedom that hangs low

In the iris of a storm


When the first thoughts conceived

In the chaos of your birth

What could your eyes believe?

In all that you are worth


The strands of time stretched

Breaking the common fate

Foreign symbols etched

Beauty in its current state


To shift another storm

Into the iris of two

Etching another form

And saving someone new

Eyes and Ears

Tilting on that stage
A footing can be found
Somewhere deep
Deep
But not too profound

Look inside the cracks
The cracks inside the wood
Memories stampeded
Stampeded
Where his and her feet stood

It’s all just a shadow
That drapes inside your mind
Your body is the freedom
Freedom
To find what you’ll find

So it’s gonna shine, shine
In a place that was black
In a river of stillness
In a portrait of cracks

In a place where time lies
Waiting to be broken
Sitting
And singing
Until the mind is woken