What about Space Then?

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‘It was Time,’ they said at the front desk. They were right.
Time had come down, turned in the room key, and gone out.
‘What about Space then?’ they said at the front desk. Second sight
would have helped them understand what was about
to happen, or had happened, as the thin red line
between conflicting realities unravelled.

In the mirror-filled hotel restaurant, Death took a shine
to his own reflection marvelling how he’d travelled
from a There to a Here in a fraction of a Now.
Waitresses turned grey. The head waiter waived
the wait-to-be-seated rule and gave a bow
to Death. ‘They all do,’ Death thought, ‘as if it saved

them answering when I call.’ He ordered toast
and wondered which – Time or Space? – missed him the most.

Categorically Mistaking

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‘What colour is the duck’s quack?’ ‘Which questions are untrue?’
Poetically appealing, these are examples
of the error of ascribing characteristics
to categories which can’t harbour them.

A question can be neither true nor false.
A sound cannot have colour as long as words
mean anything. Mistakes of category
misrepresent reality which is elusive

enough without a versifier’s abusive
insistence that the drake’s spring quack is green
and that in itself a question must be false
if it asks him what he’s doing or where he’s been.

Flameout

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Agitated dreams pursue the night
then it is turnabout and night consumes lost daydreams
that stayed out too late and stumbled into darkness.
Thoughts of benediction snap and crackle
as they give their all and more to the dark flame.
We walk in trepidation hand in hand
in circles that seem larger as they shrink.

Morpheus Himself is Restive

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It’s 3 AM. The therapy: hold a book
that I can read but won’t if I turn on the light
is working, is that therapy, although it took
at 2:45 all of my will and might
to keep the room too dark to read or write.
I ride loose thoughts that float to where it’s day,
to Tokyo, Seoul, Rangoon, Bombay:
so many places and people, a gazillion flies.
It’s 3:45. Morpheus tells me it’s okay,
and that he can’t sleep no matter what he tries.

Un hombre con una sombra dorada

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Érase una vez un hombre con una sombra dorada. No tenía yo ninguna idea de dónde vino esa oración. Afuera estaba oscuro y oía la llegada de la tormenta llamada ‘Dorus’ – el viento fuerte, la lluvia intensa. Otra vez oía la frase en mi mente: ‘Érase una vez un hombre con una sombra dorada.’

¿Era la frase inicial de una historia? ¿Debería leerlo? ¿Escribirlo yo mismo? ¿Cómo es posible una cosa así – una sombra dorada?

No lo sabía. Pero sabía dónde estaba yo. Estaba en mi cama al amanecer del día en una de mis seis favoritas temporadas. Me sentí rico teniendo tantas estaciones favoritas, seis de las ocho. Las cuatro tradicionales – primavera, verano, otoño e invierno – y también sus cuatro sombras para las cuales no hay nombres en todas las lenguas humanas. Incluida ésta estación, mi favorita.

Él empezó a llamarme, ese hombre con la sombra dorada. Quería contarme su historia, para que yo la escribiera para que todos la leyeron. Pero luego me desperté.

Park Bench Perplexion

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musing on a park bench in Valencia’s Placa Dels Pinazo

12:35
Oh the edge of death not sure which side is safer
I partake of wine and juju, chew a wafer.
The titles of a million books to read,
the half not written yet, pass in review.
The half of those, their authors being dead,
won’t ever be. I try to buy a few.
The cold that passes understanding calls.
I hope my bold not answering to it stalls
the inexorableness of history so far.
I am wishing on a nonexistent star.

12:47
In pointy shoes, the smiling dancing mother
and her husband and her mother praise her baby.
They are happy as they should be. Life is blooming.
The baby’s laughter lights the universe.

12:58
Where are we? I don’t know. I have no map.
I buy a map. I learn that I am lost.
An urgent call to action makes me nap.
I dream about the chances I have tossed
aside so often they have scars embossed
on every surface. Centuries elapse.
I warn heroic actors, ‘Mind the gaps’
but no one listens. All of them ignore
advice from ancients letting loose their clasp
on everything. The way I did. Before.

Madness Lies

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Much madness lies behind what lurks ahead:
the truth looms worse than madness ever was.
Most times truth lies obscured by nature’s grace,
but now I am accursed and forced to gaze
into the final private place of soul.

There’s nothing there, repeated into screams
that resonate like nothing I have heard.
Words flail me, and blanched neurones bait my ghost.
I’d sacrifice my years to come for signs
that this has any purpose.

A line too short to grasp escapes my head.
I say, to stay my fear, it was an answer.
Someday I will find meaning that I seek.
I pray for that: to capture truth, and read
the reason for the chaos we call facts.

The clouds of grace draw veils across the sun,
and the rain comes down like prayers while I sleep.