Hung under the canopy
Like origami stars
Crafted delicately
In goddess hands
Dangling last embers
Bursting like stars
In their own right
Into bright new flames
As slits in the surface
Reveal pockets of air
Come consume
Claim their own stake
And sleep passes
Like an aura beholden
To the waning heat
Burning for silence
A midnight river
Echoed off the trees
That line the night
Standing like sentries
Folded against relief
Squinting into the deepest end
The midnight river expelled into the sea
Descending to the depths
Where the moonlight shone no more
Yet the river flowed on
Merged with the many rivers
Come from dark places to be one
And those too
Come from the land of the midnight sun
Illuminated in perpetual twilight
The air filled with pieces of its radiant end
Invigorated in the fleeting
The distant knowing of the depths to come
The eternal light dancing flashing in the long night air
Above the glint of the midnight river
Remembering the slant of the midnight sun
The sinews were dry
Synapses lapsed into oblivion
It was the deepest lair
In the pit of Creation
For which you had no belief
And thus no hope
Whet your inspiration
Just dry air
To breathe in and out
The glint of a logic
Dimmed by the Capitalist Reason
But what of the silent Reason
That was your deity
In the very lack thereof
And from the deepest reaches of your Mind
The appearance of Nothing
And hence meaninglessness
In fact the essence of the very beauty
That was fleeting in its Being
Yet eternal in its absence
And thus it was Divine
And so you did not dwell in alienation
Abalienato
But always with the Other
Even in its nonexistence
Clandestine
Sinew cut from memory
Bound the fabric of your perception
Each moment partially obstructed
By something once was
A meaning saturated in your identity
Dry and silent without expression
Unrecognizable
The faded scent of humidity
Burnt in the bareness of new death
Before the taste of being cleared the air
The lightness of existence
Approaching the upper limit
Of the speed at which your memory
Can travel through time
In a vacuum of self-reflection
Stretching the sinews
In your perception of time itself
To expand the distance
Between your being and identity
Embedding the memory
Into the vast silence
Of your self-expression
The waves a ceiling of light
Stretching indefinitely
Ad infinitum
You dreamt
In the redwoods the cypress
A dance with your god
That was movement
All hearts were fluttering
For that which once was
A step
Around the solitude
Of being
You see that time
Is no arbiter
Of existence
It lives only in between
Moments that are eternal
The joy of missing
All that had been
In the night blend
The words of the song
The feeling
Like your wings might give
Incanted
Hollow of trees
Tomorrow
To drift with the unseen
Is the hidden meaning of life
Bursts of movement erupting
And splotches of color smeared
The aftermath of swaying branches
Frozen within themselves
Along the ground
Was shattered ice
Like shards of glass
Reflecting in your light
An interpretive dance
That for seven years bode its freedom
’Til one late some night
The spheres they hummed to move again
A deep stirring in the shortness of day
Dragging your consciousness
To biding time
For the one long night
When sheer in the dark
Streaks of being itself
Expressed a primal drift
That knew neither rhythm nor song
Only silence and wind and peace
The very lightness of nothing in your soul
Fear rest deeply
And deep set
In the hidden places of childhood
Were the walls run red in dream?
The river’s marrow
Washed the roots
Soothed them still
Held the fear under
Strength in alienation
You buried the remnants of God devoured
In the water
And the years flowed freely
The vessel was adorned
Its adornments blossomed
And from the bottom of the river
Came back fear
All that was beautiful
Was fleeting
All that sustained
Was finite
The river itself endless
Though only in dilution to the sea
The fear with it
Buried in the darkest waters
Killing time
Find the heart
That consumes all dreams
Do not distract
A formal denial
To succeed
The inheritance of Earth
Will to recant mastery
Return to beauty
Of self
Throw a veil of chicory
Porous for thy light
For abysses dug in shadow
The pits are black
In the absence of belief
Alienated
Enclosed by sweet flesh of fruit
Consume the dream
Or let it rot into Earth
It’s already plucked from the tree
The theater of humans
Gazing (descent / dissent)
The light of the sun
Yawned through the recesses of your mind
Throbbing for the day
’Til sweet night did clear the soul
Yet the dull sense did drone
Cautioned you to wait yet move
But what could waiting do?
Maybe nurture a slow hunger
’Til your appetite did whet
And your thoughts could paint the sky
Like the wind and clouds
Though fear too did grow
Held tight like ivy
Best not release your celestial grip
Else a star could fall
Into oblivion
Into obsolescence
Forests have weight
Said the long night in summer
It sinks in
Like thoughts on a lake
A humid air minding
Your consciousness
No other to break the ineffable
No slanting of light
To cut the calm and dark
The forest was deep
In your being
It grew in entanglement
Through dim moist shade of day
Quiet mostly to the conversation
Mindful of a clearing
And preferring of concealment
Then come black
Healing itself by silence
The spirit of your inevitable
At one
Yet expectant
To the next coming of light
The next encounter with other
Breaking the wholeness of forest
And tearing night's perfect canvas
With unbearable veins of color
Imagine yourself at the end
Past the cusp of the first death
When all that passed before
Turns to stone
In historicity
At last you can discover a thing’s meaning
The quiet
As seasons pass mostly in darkness
The great night of Logic
Descended upon humanity
In the embrace of technology
The afterlife a series
Of calculated guesses
With faith left meritless
In the awareness of near zero probability
Those who still believed
Ensnared in a circular argument
A peaceful place
In the nature of uncertainty
Underlying the codex of Reason
As it was written
Into the fabric of existence
That left even your soul mortal
And all things ephemeral
Asking how to find meaning
In a stone’s temporality
And the incapability
Of Logic to perceive
A time without space
Or a space without time
What lies within and without
A circular Reasoning?
Philosophie was a fire
Raging through your existence
That you could not put out on your own
But then came the salt
The white dust in the grass
Along the freeway
The bleak winter wash
A flutter of the heart
When the music asked to dance
But you sat and stared forward
A deer in the headlights
The windshield smothered you
In stillness
The silence of an ember gently dying
Deep in the back of your mind
That you could not spark on your own
And so you waited for the forest
To grow its branches like tentacles
In the recesses of your brain
Pining for the fire
Come alive again
A near death experience
Walk the human night
With your paint spilling
The colors of your being
Giving shade to old gods
Finding respite in being reborn
Through scars of tradition
That you painted over
Though even in irony the ritual persists
And a full moon splits the air
Where you walk only half in body and spirit
Witches begging the moonlight
For resonance
It escapes in your steps
Like a stillness
A colorless painting
Step by step you show no change
No preference
Perfect in your image
While your memory it dances
Celebrating the other half of your existence
No old soul thinking bodily
And no body in spirit
No spiritual entanglement
No compressed sentiments of society
No connection to the earth
No energy to seek
No calming agents
No stillness
Only motion and nothing
And the night
Burning to move
Like body like soul
Flesh of the mind
Peeling in layers
You found what once was
Waves of resonance
With the spirit of the world
Now peelings of logic
Without a reason for their being
Merely filling the space
In their absence
They thought themselves gone
And after several revolutions of light
You found yourself
In the dry verse of the pines
Burning for song
Burning for dance
Burning for the freedom
That rang complacent
In southern forests
Lined with towering crosses
And beds of needles
Drawing blood from what once was
Divine
Now dark inlets appeared
Along the edges that thought
What beauty was burning
In the pockets of shadow
Shrouded in
The devil's night
For years they’ve taken me
And I’ve shut my eyes
I wear a shell
It’s thin like a ghost’s
Impaled on the bare limb
Of an old oak of wisdom
Vibrant and full of health
With a sick vein
That let in
You ran through the archives
Of your free mind
A projection on the wall
You thought dearly
Surely you could hold the edge
Your animus knows no depth
Greater than the layers
Formed in your self deception
There was no dichotomy
Any more than before they took you
It was you who let them in
The gods of sense
It was your Reason that deceived you
Remember that existentially
Hypocrisy is freedom
Like it ever was
August, Vermont
The lake held
What nostalgia you had
Below the surface
It was blue in the distance
Wherein the mountains you dreamed
Was a clear black at your feet
And you stood clothed
Wanting to dive in
Submerged in water
That would fill your silence
With a pressure
To speak
Of what once was
In the ripples
Now empty gestures
The rain of days before
Blue in the distance
Of a clear sky
On a perfect day
Dark roads mend the night
The gaps in your mind
Gaping in wonder or shock
You yawned through their closure
An exhaustion that set you loose
To spin an untold tale
Dancing on the forbidden steps
With the eyes of cynical souls
Abating you
Now wait for the summer to burn in
An orange glow to your blue eyes
Saturated, humid, smelling of fresh rain
A mesh of reflections clouding
The unbearable light
Like laughter in the fading of day
Specks of night shining through
The gaps in your teeth
Dark holes pretending to be
Hidden, consumed
Your spirit, your song
Silent behind the hum of the machine
Sit, and wander
And change
With your hunger for beauty
Satiated
What was left
The colors were blending
Into a purity
An oblivion
You still the chameleon
Took on the properties of nothing
Clear, invisible
Camouflaged in many colors
None that stood out
The empty airs of casual conversation
Pervading the meaningless interactions
The night dull
In the throbbing pressure of exhaustion
A wakefulness that would not end
Save for the slow ache
Of a fundamental boredom
Even the sharp points
Of discussing subversive politics
Were polished and rounded out
In the steady flow of incorporation
Carving a canyon that hollowed out the deep
A maturity of landscape
Made it seem
The desert of language
Romanticized in naivety
An old soul young in spirit
Pressed on to the bottom
The midnight river run dry
The child who dreamed it
Glistening like a midnight star
In memoriam
The mirage revealed
In the blending of your dry, coarse skin
With the unforgiving rock
Of an ancient riverbed canyon
When the water was here
It was lush, and humid
The air was tangible
The memory stirred
Threads of time
That wove your body
Into a knot of brevity
What had been hidden
When you were born
And when you walked
And when you wandered the forest
You could feel the spirits of animals
Haunted out by humans
Along the edges
Like vines that hung ominously
Still in the songs of birds
That you observed with nostalgia
Absent the memory
Reciting each shrill of resonance
Day in and day out
The higher power of your self
Had entranced you
In a circular derivative
Of your imaginary arguments
Posing your Reason against the hyperbolic logic
Of some contrived essence
Of some other
And this was your form of relation
To ideate friendships
Seal them in cellars of your mind
And let them age
If after the elapse of time
The concept had spoiled, then set it to rot
If it became something like a wine
Then let it age some more
And find a moment
To indulge of the ontological intoxication
At the exact specification of your conceptualization
Save the drops for the cellar
To age something fine again
© 2022 Jason Greendyk. All rights reserved.