I wait my turn
Impatient
For the opportunity
To challenge
The sky
Leave the storm sodden Earth
Rise into the promise
Of light
Breaking through the cloud
But why?
Why wait?
Is not the sky
Beckoning?
Are these not wings
To lift me?
There is no control tower
No queue for the runway
My hand rests
On the throttle
All that’s needed
Is the will to engage
The engines
Celebrate the joy
Shared with friends
On an adventure
Making a meal
Out of life
Smooth gravel
Through sparse country
Makes me happy
In a moment of sizzle
Humming fan blades
And the thrum of traffic
She waited
For some tasty tidbit
I couldn’t make out from the taxi
She thought about yesterday
And tomorrow
Last week and next month
She thought about everything
But this moment
And the tasty thing sizzling
Or the next moment
When the tasty thing would mercilessly
Burn her tongue oh so deliciously
But…
Who’s to say any of this is true?
I was just a photographer living in the frame
Capturing serendipitous moments from a moving taxi
And now I’m just a poet
Listening to the words as they come
Trying to give them their moment
So all of it is fiction
Or maybe some of it is the truth
Though, hopefully
I’ve created something
Which at least
Speaks truly
Even if
It only speaks truly
About the act of creation
Or maybe, the story
Is just saying something truthful
About the creator
A brittle star breaks
And within a few moments more
The 4 billion year legacy of life
That is my planet
Will be rendered to vapour and dust
As will I
And all I love
And all that loves me
Pity, that
But all I have in these final moments
Is love
Which I endeavour to take with me
Into eternity
I enter a cathedral
As if into warped space
Not warped as a physicist might think
But as in how a mystic might think
That is, a spiritual space or dimension
Bent, folded and manipulated
To conform to a specific configuration
Long ago transcribed into books
From collective memories
Predating written language
Aside from a certain wonder
At the passion and dedication
To the exquisite expression
Of humanity’s greater achievements
In art and architecture
A cathedral reminds me
Of the power of group thinking
For both good and ill
How this can become a tight leash
On an individual whose spirit
Simply refuses to conform
But it also reminds me
Of the exultant satisfaction
I experienced
When I finally broke the leash
Chose my own path
And found my way to a spiritual space
Which conformed to me
Not that I am without
My own warped sense of spiritual dimension
But the distortion is familiar to me
Has meaning for me
And brings me to a place of peace
Rule of Thirds tells me
Never place the horizon
In the middle of the frame
But I am often as enraptured
With the sky as the land
So break that rule without remorse
With my love I stand
On the brink of immensity
At once diminished to a speck
And raised up with a presence
I can only describe as divine
As immense as the canyon below me
My love takes my hand
Rests her head on my shoulder
Nothing is so grand as love
I stand upon this grandest rim
Try to imagine unthinkable time
Relent before too long such fruitless task
Instead I’ll contemplate this lazy little rhyme
Through the plateau
The Colorado pickaxe falls
Reveals sedimental sandstone rings
The eons marked on canyon walls
Rock bottom finds the hardest rock
Twelve hundred meters down below
There an ancient granite shield
No deeper can the river go
But wider still
The river’s reach
A force of will
The cliffs be breached
Upstream the river
Has not yet found
The basement rock
So burrows still into the ground
I love a landscape best
Which is not so self-conscious
As to fear the domination
Of a cloud-illumined sky
Pix to Words 