Untitled 12/9

The soles of my boots weather;
time flows on like molasses.
I wander, knowing no general
direction, feeling my way forward
into the premature dusk of
northern winter evenings.
During the daylight hours
I may be caffeinated, timid,
or tame; Come night, I wish
to dance with you, to play
and make games, to hasten
about in a crazed yet
idyllic way – to spread
my wings, blacker than
the falling twilight,
and breathe in the deep,
cool air.

Smoking, 17 Years Old

The darkness molested by the
pollution of city lights and
street lamps blazing through the
summer night hung low over
the pond — we called it the
puddle — and there we sat,
near the edge of the murk, in such
stark contrast to the relative
order around us, illuminated in
sharp blacks and whites like in
those old movies.
Cigarettes hung loosely from our
lips, smoke poured and streamed
into a poisonous plume,
in a smooth and sophisticated way –
as we fancied ourselves to be –
silently pondering the existential and poetical,
smoking cigarettes at seventeen.

Untitled #19

Autumn. A distant smile.
Laughter accompanied by
receding attention.
Rain patters through the
open window. Friends
depart, each looking into
the other’s eyes, searching
for glistening feelings. She
stifles a cry from the swirling
void within her heart.
The front door opens, and
I leave alone to embrace the wind,
decades ago. Cold rain patters onto
my face.

A dream during twilight

She bears a burden that chills her heart,
takes away the aches and pains,
slows the rhythm of life to the minimal
pulse excited only by alcohol and running
away from fear, fear of solutions to what seem like
indelible problems yet are as evanescent
and fleeting as fireflies.
Her body becomes colder and her frozen breaths
can’t sustain her for much longer.
Her warm appearance is unlike that which lies within;
while perhaps thoughtful, calm and capable of true
acts of humanity and love, she is as broken and twisted trees,
mangled not of their own accord,
yet still holding with a firm grip on to the power of life
through each brittle winter that howls and roars to claim.
It will take a year of working,
a year of sun, fertile rains and the
loving being of all that is, but she who
once stumbled in the frigid dark and
grasped blindly for a hand to hold
onto may know herself as herself,
alive and empowered –
nothing trivial, not any more.

Lapse Into Soul

The sun sets on
the silence of
another evening.

I see fingers of light
mingle through the
trees, I feel wind
freeze my beard.

The billowing
glow of stoves
and wood smoke
drifts on the breeze.

The moon peeks
through the wavering
clouds, cold, diffused.

People walk before
and behind me on
their way through
insubstantial space.

I stand in the middle
of space, now, the torrent
of blustery existence,
smiling for just a
moment at all the
world now around me,
harmony in complexity,
curiosity in simplicity.

Then, I am gone.

-hrafn

Desert Wakes Up

The expanse of lights fills up my vision;

I am awakened flying higher than Phoenix and

in the darkness of midnight I recognize no one

in the deserted city. We descend and drive through

the dark blurry streets that criss-cross the city’s wings

and soar on towards death in the Sonoran Desert.

The landforms that took a hundred thousand years

or more to form are recreated in sterile plastic for

a passing travellers palms to pass over, the palms’

leaves void and disperse the city lights in shapes

of sharp feathers out across the through-fares.

Beneath, the dark asphalt approaches the Colorado Plateau,

and begins the ascent out from

this endless circus of fiery lights.

The mimicry of a heart quakes beneath this city,

frightened, sustaining a thousand new refugees

each month — yet in a hundred years this place, fated

to become a wispy dune, will be a stronghold only

populated by dusty metal bones and mummified memories

of life, cracked and dried like those in Pompeii, trapped

in eternal gridlock for a drop of water, a drop of life.

There is oblivion outside my window as we drive the

steep mountain passes away from the immortal city.

Only phantoms of people and cars roam the street;

hope is  rumored to be forlorn, the grace of the modern city

is about to spontaneously combust –

and as the old desert sun rises and gives hot breath to a new day

I can see the ravens playing in the burning crimson light.

Meditating in the Attic

The room is quiet,
there is nothing here but
the silence of sacred candlelight,
the drafty air of an old New England
house, and that barely audible sound
in my ears when there is no other.
It is in this moment that
I can hear my beating heart,
feel the pulse of life within
my veins, wonder about all
those who have gone before me,
those who will go after;
within, without, they are all a part of me.
It is in this moment that I am alive.
Worry shimmers away into flames.
There is no need for merciful concern;
only peace is present here because
as I breathe, I nourish my soul,
and that is all that matters.

Drowsing Out Poetry

As of late, shifting among new medications and environments, the sudden workload of returning to college after a month off, the in and outs of the hospital hustle and bustle in a cognitively and physically excrutiating rush to get my symptoms under control, I have had much time to reflect and imagine. I might sleep for eight, ten, or eleven hours; none of it is enough to supercede the exhausting battle against epilepsy or the tranquilizing effects of medications. There is hope even here, in the place between drowsing and waking where reality doesn’t seem real, and my dream-consciousness is more awake than my own, and it is in the spirit of life. This poem is one of the many products my artistic drive has captured.

Untitled Verses While Waiting In the Hospital

My life is almost like in
those for-television-dramas:
the little boy is bald and
hairless and cancerous and
fighting for his life
in a medical ward in
some fictional hospital.
He draws with colored pencils
and speaks weakly to the
nurses and all their aides.
His smile is full of life but he
fears the condition that ails him
might be terminal; the concern in
everyone’s eyes might be
subliminal, but it’s there –
the raucous fear that flashes
inside of him like lightning,
takes his breath away,
stifles his spirit when
he most needs it.
Somehow, I’m different;
life is mostly merry and
the days are growing and good –
I, the patient, am still sitting here
wondering, wandering through
my thoughts like a human machine
transfixed on the organic world outside
my window. Flesh is an
anachronism here, a place of healing
where wires and blood converge.
My brain is no longer like the perfect vacuum
of outer space where theories and mysteries can
formulate, permeate, remain undiscovered when
the doctor shines his pen light into my eyes;
I’m plugged into the wall, a trendy
electric car, charging my batteries.
My sensuality is connected to electrodes,
connected to cybernetic nerves that pinpoint
and glimpse at every thought process
and heart-stopping, seizing suspicion of something
wicked yet to come, all fixed up among
my anxiety in the harmony colored electrical cables
that, in its empty inanity, looks almost like the stars.

Haikus for lonely New England

1
Winter in Maine is
a butterfly in stasis
preparing for life.

2
Once, the elms were here,
the great walnuts and chestnuts;
time, it took them all.

3
In the old man’s field
the birches, pines and maples
drove out all the cows.

4
The typewriter sings
in the middle of the woods;
the writer’s gone home.

5
On the summits of
the old Appalachians, a
raven will greet you.

6
A few forgotten
streams can inspire one to
imagine, wonder, go.

7
Atop Great Mountain,
challenged by thunderer,
you will find yourself.

8
Crow travels among
valleys and people; here,
there, home is everywhere.

9
The darkness settles,
the candles are lit, the storm
closes the shutters.

10
Harvest rushes in.
Corn, squash, oats, blueberries, all
people are merry.

11
An empty quarry,
a raven’s nest, rocky path,
New England, my temple.

A writer’s winter

The typewriter sings
in the middle of the woods;
the writer’s gone home.

He’s traveled back from
a sojourn of hiking trails
smoothed soft by snowfalls.

In the autumn he
searched for a little something,
came back with nothing

but rough hands and a
pair of broken boots,
broken ambitions.

The pages of his
novels were sundered by the
wind, cast adrift in

sullen storms, into
the upheaval, soggy, bleached,
unrecognizable;

if all his tales are
just allegories of the
long passed, he would write

them again, on a
typewriter inside a warm
cabin, through the winter.