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.

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.

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.

Richesse, France, 1997

Sweet smelling European cigarettes flicker
in the shadow and I know it’s him sitting on the
stoop smoking and watching passerbys.
The worn brick steps of a hard building
from the nineteenth century. Relax.
I float on by in the morning and at night.
Laughter is suspended on the
perpetual cigarette smoke whisked around
upon clouds permeating under streetlights.
He is lax, and I am walking fast;
we exchange glances for the four-hundredth time.
I want to tell him this time that I can’t speak French
so he should stop trying to talk to me, but then
he puts the cigarette in his mouth and swooshes
his heart’s sooty smoke into the evening.

Tyler “Hrafn” Noyes

Intertextuality

Click for larger image

Progressive Soup Eaters

I am atop a screeching seesaw
teeter-tottering above not chasms
crags or cliffs but large steaming
bowls of condensed soup, and
rather than feeling the terror
of making a miscalculation or error
my dilemma is between the
tomato and the chicken noodle,
the salty and the frugal,
a crossroads of sorts where the
fork diverges the road for a long ways.
The cans teach me about the flavor of each,
the nutritional value and why I might
reach for one over the other, why
the seesaw ought to totter in one direction
or teeter in another – but I am viewing
this all too simply, for my bowls of steaming
soup are really two roads ahead of me that at
first diverge and curve along in their own,
snakey ways, crisscross across bridges between
people – places – but at the end come together,
anyway, in a way that makes my choice between a
tangy tomato and a chicken noodle with too
much noodle and not enough chicken
seem irrelevant, superficial.

Dissonance of Seasons: A Narrative

Another human life washes in with the
Cold confusion of the misty universal tides.

Her infant body has been broken over the spines of
The ocean’s rocky protrusions, burned by the brine,
And beached on the sandy illusion of safety.

Shadows and dust are all that she may be,
A complex driftwood husk, Ash or Elm, lifeless until
The moment she breathes her first earthen breaths.
Her skin seethes hot with life, and is fused with color.

Her thoughts begin to analyze, and to imagine.
She witnesses the clockwork strife of things.
When she draws the first longing sip from her
Generation’s naked breast, she begins to understand all the rest.

She is exposed and sensitive, a chickadee with her mouth ajar.
She is a child who abides only by the moon-tides.
She sleeps at night and awaits the break of dawn,
Hungry to witness the human fray that preys on what is natural.

Courage becomes her only hope along her journey through life.
In the sky suspended on high, she finds her father,
Smiling from the iridescent infinity of space and time.
Immersed in the wonder of such beautiful things, she pauses,
Then begins to travel again, to wonder and ask, “Why?”
When she meets the lonely sundered woods.

The forest has had its defenses breached;
Slowly, utterly, it shrinks and then falters.
In her lifetime, the wilderness mounts its final resistance;
It is folding and buckling, churning and chuckling,
At the slash-and-burn persistence of the greatest predator.

The child continues on, and finds her mother among the desolation
That is in all the ages and in all of the places on this Earth.
With the wisdom of the sages, Mother gives consolation,
Meaning to the isolation, all life now stripped of what it was once worth.

On the damp soil that lies beneath her feet and
In the quiet shelter within the shade of the trees,
She finds solace in Father’s timeless embrace,
And courage in Mother’s nurturing whispers.

She has become a woman now, and with pride and
Intent, she walks and strides to the rhythm of the wind.
Her shadow is the darkness that creeps across the falling leaves,
That bluster past us in frightening, frigid blasts.

In the short moments between the shifting dissonance of
Seasons and societies, ages and phases,
In the time it takes for our ashes to become oaks,
She has found her home, her heart, and her reasons.

All that this Earth once was is now fleeting,
Save our remembrance of the smell of the endless sea,
The pang of salty brine, and the cool turquoise breeze.
Our woman watches and waits and we take the bait.

Above the splashing waters and the groaning waves,
She waves her reverent farewell to us and notices
The color when it drains from our drooping faces.

Death relaxes each of our hallowed forms in time,
And lays us first to bake and broil beneath the sun,
Somewhere among the universe of our forlorn things.

Then the rope slips and the knots come undone –
She lets us make our plunge back into the sea of fire.
Her watchful face wavers and then fades into the light.
Our lives vanish beneath the waves.

Aurora Pond

That evening three dead men were swimming
Under the sunset, silhouetted by where
The horizon waned to a warm black.
That evening their feet were wrapped
In milfoil and in muck, itchy from the
decomposing leaves and the sulfuric heaves.
The sun set and for for a moment there was twilight;
Their bodies sank beneath the wavering water and
As they descended, became shadowy, pallid, and quite
A grim sight.

That evening that the three dead men were swimming,
You and I could go skinny dipping without worry,
For the leeches were preoccupied by the reddening rush of fluids
And the buoying bubbles of postmortem exasperations.
And the lazy fish swam about in shifting circles,
Welcoming us to immerse ourselves within the cool liquid
Of their aquatic domain.

That evening that the three dead men were swimming in Little Pond,
We mistook it for the ocean, the blast of polluted air as the sea breeze,
And the toxic sky as the greenest Aurora Australis

We laid together on our bare backs and bottoms in the cold groggy sand,
And gazed up towards the milky way.
We made the radiant stars our lovely children;
Alpha Centuari had epilepsy, and Polaris was our little politician;
And then we laughed in a gaily way, and made the ethereal arms of
The far-off galaxies the boundaries of their cosmic playpens.