Debts to Pay


When I was young and dreaming

I never stopped to think.

The earth I grew in spoke to me

and the wind taught me to sing.

Warm morning sun would wake me

and draw me out in play,

when I was young and dreaming and

had no debts to pay.

A Story, Perhaps

A time comes

when dreaming is as important,

no more important,

than the awake world

in the lives of some people.

These people believe they can dream the world anew.

They start

by doing the smallest things in dream:

they blink their eyes, nod their head or

wave toward the view of the dreamer.

With time they begin to build things:

a desert from a sandbox,

a garden from a blade of grass,

a shed, a house, a castle.

Eventually,

they connect with others

like themselves in the realm of dream.

Their circle grows as they form

a meeting place

where they choose to spend

part of their waking lives in dreaming.

Some go crazy, or get caught-up in a nightmare.

Others simply disappear as their dreams

fade from consciousness.

But, a few get through

to the reality of dreams

and they begin

to remake

the world.

Self Portrait

My caricature is outlined
in the jar of vocabulary

On the edge of expression
I tear into existence

Plying limits
self-imposed

Exposing me
composing me

Not a Requim

I think when time
shall cease to be

than
I shall cease
to wonder.

And life
and its
sentiments

will
no
longer

matter.

Why We Wait

We put on these bodies

but, they never fit that well.

Life. Life so short-we can't bear it.

The pain of our longing is a cry

caught forever in the throat of creation.

The light breaks through dark clouds,

and the beauty of the world washes in

and flows into every ocean.

Time is the great magician who flicks his cape 

to give the mechanical lie to creation.

But time can only

delay the eternal,

while it puts a mask on the god-head

and hides reality in an alarm clock.

We put on these bodies

but they never fit that well.

The song of the earth is sung

the melody echoes through our bones.

Crockett, California

Half passed 5 on an August morning in northern California,
I sit at a messy desk on Tenny Terrace in the town of Crockett
and look out across the water at the hills of Benicia.
Below me I see the roof of Mr. McAuliffe's house,
his chimney echoes the line of the telephone pole
where turkey vultures and squirrels will perch to sun themselves.

The trees in the ravine are mostly coast live oak and bay laurel.
Buckskin hills rise gradually up to hold high-power lines
that slice my view of the Carquinez Strait,
choppy in the morning breeze.
Dillon Point juts out on the north side
obscuring the cove where a small boat tilts.

A narrow band of orange smears along the eastern sky
lifting a lid of dark clouds holding down the approaching dawn.
A tear begins to open the line of clouds and
pink seeps into the yawning morning.