Misshapen

Sometimes, after anger
or during stillness,
I experience an emptiness that makes me think of words.

For when I am shuffling through my vocabulary
looking for sounds, or letters
that might materialize me in some way,
I realize that any words, or series of them
are insufficient to fill the hollow that gave rise to their use.

Monsters

I dreamed that I was in the bathroom of my childhood years,
beautiful old porcelain sink atop that dark base where we stored things;
maybe cotton balls?

A snail suddenly appeared,
large and shrinking the edge of that sink like the fantastic perspective in Medieval paintings.
Frightened, I doused it with Lysol, and it was gone,
though quickly reappeared.
I though that it might have been the same one (perhaps it had only changed location),
but then there were definitely two, now doubled in size!

Panicked, I struck and threw a couple of lit matches at them,
thinking that the Lysol would ignite, which it did,
and they burned away, seemingly human.

I believe they screamed, but it may have been my own voice reacting to the violence.

Wider vision

Walking this morning in the park 

so dark and quiet

I felt as if my vision had widened

Perhaps due to a recent change in routine,

it seemed that something behind my eyes was reaching out

to disappear into the expanse ahead of me

My head must have been soft enough to allow some of its' insides to escape

because I had felt no distance between myself,

the cold air, and the trees.

Now, a bit later

I am wondering what had happened to my eyes during all of this,

and have come up only with this;

that they had ceased to be necessary at that moment

and had vacated the spaces that they occupied in my skull
so that something could escape.

Carmex to car

As I walked that morning, I remembered,
during a moment of deep meditative thought,
that I needed to replace the Carmex in my glovebox.
So I took out the phone from my right front pants pocket
and typed into the 'notes' icon;
"Carmex to car".

I was amused how those three words had come from me
so easily
onto that phone application,
and tried to fathom other instances when words like them
could be obtained with such effortlessness.
They were just simple instructions,
but I was disappointed by my thinking too much about them.

Words and sentences

With my held tilted up, I see the sky, and think suddenly of the richness and depth of words, momentarily feeling that I can grasp the infinite.
Yet when considering both sky and words, only the latter seem even the least bit pliable.

I am ashamed that I find the ability to form things appealing
a person that professes to desire the infinite and the unnameable!

And even though I don't consider it possible to bend the world around me into squares or rectangles
(or maneuver it into a shape where if twists back onto itself),
this feat seems entirely manageable with sentences.
I need only imagine it doing so,
and find it unnecessary to do anything but describe it.

Fernanda Cooperstein

I find it hard to fathom, even strange,

that someone should choose to share a name

that I have been more or less forced to bear.

I remember the day,
(though a little hazily),

when I asked the former Ms. Casal if she would like to keep hers,

or take mine
when we married. And she chose mine!

This person, who decided all those years ago

to relinquish those five letters for my eleven, 

can on occasion seem so known to me

that she can appear unrecognizable.

So I wonder, as I press these keys,

if the repetition of seeing the same person
often intimately, for more than fifteen years,
justifies this idea:
that knowing so well might also embody the inverse,

where I comprehend that much less
in perfect proportion?

Labor day

Driving the short distance to where I took my morning walk on Labor Day

I recall thinking how beautiful and quiet this normally busy is.

I remembered times when Fernanda and I have vacationed

in some small northern California town

and I had gone somewhere to write in the early morning
while she sleeping in the hotel room bed.

There is often a stillness in those places and times
that I find remarkable
and lonely.

Probably due in some part to the lack of visible cars and people
I thought, on that holiday morning

that perhaps there had been a declaration of war

or news of a bomb or impending catastrophe.

I had the sense that I would be perfectly at peace if I were to die 

perhaps not at that very moment

but on that day
would be alright

and imagined that I could probably not ask for much more

in death

than to feel so ease at ease as my life ended.