The Rumpel Felt Company

Where machines once danced,
the air is stale and heavy with
absence.  Concrete, bricks
and signs suggest more than stirs
in this industrial ossuary.

I imagine visiting the skeleton
of an old friend, laughing at
a shared joke, disturbing
memories until the atmosphere
is as dense as a novel.

And I want to yell, Come on,
stand up and dance,
you must remember the song!

The Void

Canon EOS cinema cameras
get ISO 80,000 via firmware update

And with that, light may
no longer be necessary.  Just
point into its absence and
images will appear — something
in the nothingness with which
we humans observe everything.
Like speed signs on the expressway,
warnings of disaster, that slow leak
of time from the day and ourselves.
Just point and shoot meaning into
the void.  Just point at the nothing
before the big bang, before stars
and light, and see.  Something.

And For The Older Poet

How long have these words been around
like a hug, or paper weave, when all
the parts find together again?  This always
circling, crows murdering sunsets, events
trampling the views with absurdities, life
taking resolutions and shoving them from
the speeding streetcar; it leaves time
befuddled, an old man with crutches for
each and every emotion and memory. 

Perhaps it begins with the first moment
of conception, when such momentous
decisions are made, as though a tarot
deck is tossed into the air to land by
chance, and by circumstance colour all
those unpredictable events which lead
to death.    At that point, perhaps it is
easier to mumble ‘fate’, and shake
your head, apologetically smile, as though
the storm of conception passed by far
to the south, rumbled through those
mountains of history which are ever
hidden by mist, more fantasy than fact.

To have a reason seems easier than to have
a choice; to look at the interference of Zeus
seems easier than to understand that the
storms which are slowly sinking the floundering
ship are nothing more than November
weather, nothing more than the last time your
hands reached out, accepted the cat’s cradle
and altered it for a moment before the
next hands were there, ready to carry on
in an alien way.

Tears

Between time and its unravelling,
tears.  Oh so many!  Between
events and their consequence.

In the movement of clouds, imagination,
the slow drifting of might have been,
the eddies of the realization of is.

Fact.  And yet, has that ever been enough?
Has that ever sung with emotion, long
after nightfall, when shadows dance?

Like entwined hands, cool September,
the way a song stirs something so
buried, so in the rear view mirror that

it is almost invisible, a taste of pepper,
garlic on the tongue, which awakens
sometime after midnight, in a silent house,

full of dread.  And sleep is impossible,
the air pixels of an unresolved picture,
the future as empty as this longing.

Flowers

By the river, where the trail is bent
and detritus has lodged after spring.
September is not a kind season, nor
are the falling temperatures a hothouse.
Though it always returns to time,
the way change tramples the known,
leaves doubt in its wake.  And rot prospers
because it can, because it conquers each
hope, each aspiration.  Construction —
a cat’s cradle moves from configuration
to configuration, not solid, nothing set
in stone.  Nothing snow blowing across
our words, freezing each word until it
drifts down, wordflake, nothing snow
can define and call its own.  Nothing
that cauterizes the moment when
we remember and lose our way.

Time

The seconds are a picket
fence, memories the border
and hours children, the hedge
growing.  You smiled and
smile,  the various times,
the cornucopia, the words,
a string laid tangled across
events.  I felt and feel.
And bend inwards to
a day.  Just a day.  Just
a quick compendium of
unfinished dreams.  Awake,
I am, and the colour of
eyes is startled, surprised,
secretive.  Like maple sap
in that ambivalent moment
between nurturing a tree,
or turning into syrup to be
poured on breakfast
pancakes, making what might
be ordinary, something special.
Time with you.