Poems and Stories

little inner boy blues  October 23, 2024

The Return to Innocence November 14, 2024

Kintsugi December 9, 2024

Michael December 19, 2024

Ubuntu Bear Bear January 15, 2025

Schrödinger's cat January 18, 2025

back into the darkness again March 1, 2025

Youth and beauty in desperate flee March 20, 2025

Sudan, Uno and urchin July 19, 2025

little inner boy blues 

Snowy morning, in a dreary little town 

I break apart, watching her inner voice destroyed by Internet voices

Crushed by my death of nothing left to say

I… l… pack up and leave on that dreary ugly day

The lonesome miles are where the little boy shines,

Always hopeful, but cursed all the same

But if desire for home brings hope from the pain

He always loses his way in the shame

He's learned it so easily, let go

Yet Who sings those things you love are never yours

He so carefully carves his life apart

His dog, now hers breaks all their hearts

The darkness falls, as it always does

The world he knows will shut its doors

But ask he always will, 

against all hope he knows the abyss never lies still

The cold from out and in meet to shroud his soul

Protecting him from death and love he numbs 

The little boy is home

He doesn't know if he'll survive 

He doesn't really care

The abyss has claimed him

Familiar is this roam

White and dark turns to gray

no solace

He falls back in to troubled places

Imagining the joys of others and how painful it is to see, 

he disappears from the world 

And demands that no one see

This little boy and this old man

Now tangled and alone

Watch the world recede

He's fallen into this numbing darkness 

so many times before

The failing light extinguishes both hope and fear

Nothing dare come here

He surrenders time in the deal 

his soul will make again

Death he risks yet there is no cost 

all is gained or all is lost regardless of his pain

The pain is suffered on his own

As always, he will choose

Even if the other comes, he cannot hear or see

The shroud is so complete nothing enters here

Will I survive, I do not care 

Life is not my friend

Yet Death it's not the choice I make 

I no longer know what anything is for

Now, no thing is known

And the world is lost to me

Free fall, forward backward up or down

Waste their time, I see

The inner boy and outer man

Tangled, are now cut free

The gray fades to thickest fog

Darkness lightens I still can't feel

But I sense I might yet see

I crawl from under the abyssal shroud

Or maybe it just lets me be

little inner boy is tough as nails

And will never likely fail

The outer man falls back to life

little boy recedes

Wiser, smaller, younger 

Fog begins to lift

Hope returns and brings with it some light

Altered in some unknown way

he and I 

stop our well known flight

The abyss as teacher

Always dark and numbing cold

Seems to hold I'll ever need 

To explore my young and old

I have explored so many ways 

to find my way to home

I work so hard to make something light and warm

Yet, it's always taken from my hand and I give it up so easily

Knowing the abyss will come 

and I might yet again survive 

I wish it were so different 

but for the little boy inside

As we both look over what was there

My little boy and I

The landscape now so wide 

I see our stumbles, our losses

There's nothing meant to be

The darkness fades

Hope returns

Life unfolds, again

I see

The Return to Innocence (i)

So I've come to realize what it is we are after. We are after the return of and to innocence. I sense that people have predated upon my relationships because they see the possibility of innocence within it, and they want it desperately. So, coupled to the concept of problematics; of creating and resolving a problem that you continue to create and resolve and create and resolve I guess the universe, just as we are, is looking for a return to that innocent state of pre-separation from itself. We are trying to get to/get back to that place, to that visceral sense where we see the world, where we see our partner, in that innocent state of beginning and we want that for ourselves, that visceral experience of life starting anew, filled with hope, desire, uncertainty and joy. With age and experience we are trying to help ourselves avoid the pitfalls that we so continuously fall into as we try to get back to that innocent naivety, or failing that we just drift towards the dimming of the light…the coming of the end.

My recent ex partner got drunk and phoned my lawyer who has also been my friend for 30 years. The premise of trying to locate me my lawyer emailed a friend and said my ex was in her cups with her papers in hand. I asked my friend if these were divorce papers and he said yes. I contacted my ex to let her know just to send the papers to my friend. I would sign them and get them back to her. She responded with she was just trying to get information from my lawyer about my finances for the divorce papers. What came up was, this behavior has been repeated by both my soon to be ex-wife and my lawyer. My lawyer went after two of my ex-girlfriend's when we were all very young and he ended up living with both of them at separate times. My ex-wife knew this and seemed to feel it was OK to open this drunken dialogue with this lawyer friend of mine.

The first time this happened the woman I was originally with and I were so very young. We were inexperienced and naïve. She had such a lovely smile and was achingly beautiful. I left for a race in Europe and when I returned, I felt altered, more worldly and not interested in her in the same way that I was before. We parted. My lawyer friend moved in on her and they ended up living together. A few years later, with my next girlfriend, my lawyer friend, and the emailed friend mentioned above, we returned from a race to where my previous girlfriend and the lawyer were living. We all got a little drunk and he put on a piece of her clothing, returned to where we were and it had been ripped to shreds. The two of them fought. As I watched this, I felt bewildered and sorry for them. 

A few months later, well after they had broken up, I saw her walking towards me on the street and not wanting to engage with her, I went into a bank. She followed me in and as we talked for a very short time that lovely beauty and innocence returned to her. The two of us were that nervous naïve couple again. After a brief pause the bewilderment and age reestablished itself and we parted. 

My next relationship followed the same pattern. After we broke up the lawyer went after her and they were together for a short while until she left. I continued to see my lawyer friend and to use his services for 30 years.

More than 30 years later the same game is in play again. I wouldn’t have thought about that ancient past, yet it has been triggered by my recent ex and the lawyer. I feel the same pain and sorrow I felt all those years ago, again. I realize I need to work through this. The device is really a very deep cutting, double edge sword. I hoped the exploration of why my recent marriage had ended, noted within the previous poem, I thought I was on my path to recovery, yet the device has cut deeper down into the darker recesses and into the past evoking that old sense of loss and betrayal. I know this event is on the same pendulum swing as the recent marriage loss and I hope that this furthering pain is also about the return to innocence and the possibility of finding that naive and beautiful loveliness that seems so wondrous or maybe this is just coming to the realization of a life spent in pursuit of relief for the little boy inside.

The Return to Innocence (ii)

Her beauty and innocence ignited my soul

I left 

and returned 

Apart

Later

Seeing her predated upon

Sensing her and his entangled disgrace

Lost were her beauty and grace

Meeting again saw our souls

remember our state of Grace

Parting again, we resumed 

our diminishing lonely race

I allowed that predation to damage my soul

From then to my latest breath

So many decades later

still 

so harsh and achingly fresh

I see that game again

burned into their souls and our flesh

I wonder if possible this time 

to flense it to arrest

I know asking others to stop

Only darkens all in sight

And evokes my lost inner boy

To his familiar lonely flight

I know I must arrest this flesh

and soul eating disease

But what does the surgeon cut  

To return to that innocent peace

I am frightened for I know what is coming

Bearing down on them for their stray

Yet it seems almost impossible

To not watch and look away

Traveling through this labyrinth of the soul

I hope is my way to Home

Finding the light, the beauty, the grace

That has fueled my soul aching roam

I hope my innocence will reveal its warmth 

As I feel through the darkness again 

Shedding behind, the burden of time

And see her waving…my beautiful, graceful friend

I am feeling scared. For a week now I have been feeling frightened of something and yet I can’t tell what it might be. I am second guessing so many things. I am starting to suspect that I am close to rendering up and removing my little inner boy and I am possibly frightened of having to live without him. The cost of post human emergent transformation seems fatal to that which we are internally entangled with. Maybe it is something else. I do not know.

Kintsugi

The Warriors Way 

On this short winters’ day

bent…bashed 

yet not fully broken

I will find My say

Wet, slick, upward

I grasp

I fall

I get up 

Still out of reach

This day

Don’t think

Step 

Look…down

Look…up

Just Don’t Look Away

Keep moving

Rest after the fall

Not long

Get up

Not broken?

Keep going 

Don’t linger

That saturating, living darkness

That spirit in that dark lava

My false light helps me see

But nothing chases away 

That which is coming for me

If I can speak it

For an instant

I can move forward

For a bit longer…free

The sun is still up

Yet the mind is filled with fog

The cloud and rain drop into the valley

The river begins to speak

The mind clears 

Walk

Just below the precipice

stretching upward 

Grasping that crumbling rock

As I stretch upward

It reaches down to me

Up, over the Crest

and descend

STOP thoughts of time and failing light

Don’t look down

just…descend

Don’t think

Don’t feel

Move

This upper valley floor is won

Just try to hear

The sound begins its guide

Tired, wet, foolish

Thought is not a friend here

Past the valley floor

The next climb begins

STOP thinking STOP

Reflect

If you make it

The next precipice 

The feel is now from below moving me upward

Crest

I see so far away

Head down…next step

I descend again, yet I now know descent and rise

Breathe and forget

Let the sounds help

Descend and descend and descend

The day begins its descent

The landscape becomes familiar

I am guided downward and outward

The darkness descends, the lightness increases

I am released…from the past

This place is familiar,

I just don’t know what I am

Anymore

The Warriors Way  

Maui

December 9, 2024

Michael

Christmas Eve with my future wife  

I, older but still naïve

Her father's possessive

And obsessive need 

displayed its madness strife

Michael’s notice of our forlorn trap

Gifted me with a lovers map

His affection and curiosity

Saved me from her father’s screech

Michael’s heartfelt notice

and curiosity

Reduced her and my 

disparity

I loved him from that moment on

And reveled in our entangling song

Why he wasn't king of all

Seemed a crime to me of unforgivable gall

I fell in love with her and him

Our innocence seemed not as sin

How Michael knew decades through

She and I would come to rue

Strangled by her father's need

to see her as his only creed

Kept at bay by Michael's sight 

of her and I and Hana's plight

Confused by beauty

In my child like need

We proceeded until

Our heartache bleed

Her father’s jaundice

So deeply rot 

Laid all my efforts

To useless fought

When finally we were ripped asunder

And so gleefully torn apart

I fought myself away from her

In hopes of some distant start

In the years between her and our so infamous start 

I returned one wondrous day

And spending only time with Michael

She noted my spurious fray

I didn't intend

To not see her then

But Michael was in my heart

He noticed how changed I had become

In an instant upon our sight

Yet within a single heartbeat

We moved back to our light

After a single day together spent

I was inspired to soldier on

Yet I felt from deep within him

His wound from Hana’s long lost song

Decades later still

When my ex reached from love gone bad

I fell toward her outstretched need

In search of Michael's hand

She offered me a glorious start

From pursuit of a deadly disease

Nested me in a wondrous place

Michael and I found peace

I fought so hard to recover

Michael’s so peaceful nest

All had been ripped asunder

From all her tumultuous unrest

From torn up walls

And desecrated stalls

And garbage spread askew

Yet every piece 

that Michael touched

Renewed my faith in her

I tried as hard as I knew how

To restore our life to him

And for a very short and wondrous time

My happiness was to the brim

Michael's touch was in all I felt

In her, I hoped I knew

That all had passed

mattered not as we were now anew

I sensed from this beginning though

That something diminished our light

Maybe that her father's need

Shadowed us with blight

Blinded by the possibility 

Of a loving and wondrous home

I put my heart and soul

In the hope of no longer alone

It so quickly seemed to break

And I finally began to know

My heart took so very long

To reap what I did sow

Just because

Michael's love

Saved me way back then 

didn't mean all would feel 

He and I and kin

I, still distraught

From Michael’s Hana loss

Wonder how he made that space

For him and I and Grace

Now that she and I 

are separate once again

And I see her take from me, my world

Michael is here and still my friend

Her need to take from me

My very fickle friends

Reminded me of old

When betrayal was so prevalent

That hearts were turned to stone

At first I felt this icy snatch

Was a misguided slight

And I was responsible

For creating this ugly blight

Yet patiently I've watched

And felt my heart grow ever clear

That giving up my fickle friends

For Michael long gone, yet dear

Is by far my greatest chance

At letting go of

Life gone wrong

And finding new romance

That she would free

Michael and me

To explore 

a newfound life

While she grasps hold

Of what she needs

To eat her father’s strife

It seems such a beggars deal

To trade Michael’s love for my feckless friends 

That deep inside I knew 

She and I were never very real

I do not know why Michael

Came to me today

As I watched a perfect sunset

And helped me find my say

Why her world would give him up

Is beyond anything I know

Maybe he and Hana

Just felt my heart should grow

Ubuntu Bear Bear

I was seven. I didn't know what hunger was. I didn't know what poverty was. I didn't know what hatred was. I just knew what I felt and and what I mostly felt was numb. I spent my days with my little brother, searching for scraps. Scraps of food, scraps of paper, bits of clothing. But mostly we would spend the day staying away from the man that would hit us and hit my mom. I didn't know we were all starving. We all looked the same. I didn't know that feeling inside was starvation. I didn't know that I was supposed to look after my brother, but I did, until one day when I woke up and he was not there anymore. For some reason I knew what loss felt like, but not for long because there was just the numb. 

The most important thing I found during the day was wood. When we had enough wood my mother who kept a pot with her would find grain. We would add brown water and grain and cook it and on those days we would eat. I remember when the grain was cooked my brother and I would put our hands into that pot and it was so hot and we were told to wait for the grain to cool, but then everybody would take what was there and it was gone. Those days when we ate my stomach would hurt so much but that numbness I almost always felt would be gone for a while. 

When I found pieces of paper, I would see pictures of shiny things and people with no swollen bellies and clothes that weren't like my clothes. They didn't look like anything I had ever seen anywhere else. I didn't know what some of the pictures were sometimes. I would see pictures of really small ones of the people, but they weren't like my brother and me. They were made of rubber or plastic just like the pieces I would pick up sometimes. One time I saw a picture of an animal that I knew was not a dog. I knew dogs because they were skinny like us and they were scary and they would fight a lot like the man that would hit my mother and me. 

Shortly after my brother was gone, my mother and the man and me began a long walk. Day after day we walked and I would still look for wood and paper and other things but we mostly just walked. The man would still hit my mother and hit me but mostly we just walked. I would find wood and sometimes we would eat. Some days men with green clothes and hard black sticks would come past and we would get off the road. One day I saw a rooster and it ran away so quick from everybody even though they tried to catch it. One day those men with the black sticks came by in what I now know was a jeep and ran over a rooster. It ran away, but not as fast as it did before and the man who used to hit me caught it. We took wood and my mother's pot and we boiled the rooster. I was shown how to pull out the feathers and I pulled them all out. Those feathers were very shinny. The feathers were brown, like the water but shiny like the clothes that those people wore in the pictures on the scraps of paper I would find. The rooster didn't smell very good when it was cooking but when it came time to eat I had a little brown piece of it. I had never tasted anything like that before. It wasn't grain. My belly still hurt after, but I didn't feel the same inside. I wondered when the men with the black sticks would come by again and maybe we would have another rooster. We continued to walk day after day and I would continue to look for things and one day I found something soft and brown, and it had one leg and one arm and one eye and a fuzzy little head with two fuzzy little ears. It reminded me of my brother, but small and soft and it didn't cry. It was quite small and so I kept it under my shirt so nobody would take it from me. I think my mother knew but she didn't say anything and the man who hit us I don't think he really cared. 

After too many days with no grain, I was feeling a pain inside even worse than I had ever remembered and then I was told to find wood. We started the fire and my mother poured in some grain that she had found, and it disappeared into that brown water. The pain I felt and the hunger I felt was not the usual and I remembered, I remembered what that little piece of rooster tasted like. The grain always took a long time to cook, and my mother and the man who hit us went away for a while. I really wanted that piece of brown rooster. I took what I had found with the fuzzy little ears, and I put it into the pot. It didn't look like the rooster, but I knew it would taste as good as the rooster. My mother and the man came back. They looked into the pot and the man hit me many more times and he pulled out my little fuzzy brother and told me that we couldn't eat it and I didn't know why. Only later did I come to know that you can't eat a stuffed teddy bear. We couldn’t eat my Ubuntu Bear Bear.

Schrödinger's cat

You encased me in this horrific box

Torturing knowledge by clicking the lock

My companion a lonely .45

An hour of sentence I might yet survive

You think of me as both alive and dead

And sentence me to an hour of dread

Poisoning me to prove a point

With a false wisdom you self anoint

If only you could hear me meow

I would illuminate both quark and tau

Torturing me is your only thought

Obscured knowledge too painfully bought

You torture all you think and see

To render your view of natures creed

I do eat rat to sustain my life

but you torture them to horrific strife

Your very strange hypotheses

Forcing nature to its knees

You test the opposite of what might be true

And when it fails you're to the moon

To understand nature's light

You destroy it with your science might

Crushed for an instant that you might feel

What you demand is truth revealed

You eliminated my autonomy

As a variable possibility

I swipe your vial with my forepaw might

And extinguish me and all that’s right

If only you could hear me cry

by poison breath as I choose to die

You might yet come to understand

All is false when viewed by man

Going back into the darkness again…

I am stuck between lightness and gray

Drifting toward the climb or the fall

I will die…or worse…drift away 

I watch the world lost in sorrow

No one finding their way

Collectively lemming…

I guess some one

just has to pay

Traversing the abyss is not what I want

So scarred from travel each way

Yet waiting, watching and wanting

Is the fading of humanity’s day

I have never before

volunteered for this scourge

Yet I know there is a way through

Becoming bloodied and torn

Past humanity’s thorn

Has always been the cost

Of finding the path

Past the world so lost

And traversing its judgement day

I guess never having a choice

on my path through night and day

Maybe the only choice remaining 

is to risk all…and get on my way

Youth and beauty in desperate flee

Youth and beauty in desperate flee

from love, commitment and intimacy

all for fierce autonomy

What a sad and lonely card to play

All the while the days grow long

The years grow short

Till Death comes to take its pay

Sudan, Uno and urchin

Sudan

Majestic presence

Last of his kind

Mutilated, yet gentle giant

Forgiving of their crime

Horn cut off for horny men

Standing alone and never again

Sudan good-bye and hail

Last great northern white rhino male

Uno

Forced to sleep beside the dock 

of orphaned dogs who’s life is fraught

I thought I would be livid and lost 

With all their incessant bark

Not even drugged to arrest their grief

Could quiet their incessant wail

Yet, my anxious belief

was always doomed to fail

Uno with his missing hind leg

Out for a moments walk 

He eyed me with concern

As I leaned in to talk

Feeding him a morsel 

from a volunteers supply

He quickly changed from scared to friend

And I thought my heart would die

I knew I could not take him home

As home I have never known

Yet, I wished they all could come

To share what little I own

urchin

I do not know how the three of us 

Have ended in this plight

Maybe because we never knew 

How to fight or flight

As I find myself surrendering

My kinship with my kind

Except with these lonely creatures

Who never really knew

What friend or foe were capable of 

Until we were cast askew

Losing all relationship

to everyone I knew before

I cannot tell if this mortal wound

Brings a better or more battered shore

Or maybe only heartfelt affinity 

For those of us so scorned

Sudan, Uno and urchin

Never to be mourned

I guess we have to share

What life decreed as our plan

Lost, soon dead and fading

From the consciousness of man

Left with each other

Not understanding fate

Doomed to leave not even shadow

As we part from the presence of human hate 

It feels so odd to be so alone

Amongst everyone I knew

Only to sense that only those

torn asunder and left to die

Are now and have always been

My friends, my kin, my kind