POETRY PAGE 6
ALL MATERIAL COPYRIGHTED: ROY EISENSTEIN.
EPITAPH
Small things gather
Pieces of nothing in drawers
Odds and ends that some part of our soul thinks we’ll someday need
Fragments of things
Paperclips and rubber bands
Nuts without bolts
Screws and nails that will never touch a tool again but still they wait
Plastic bags from the grocery just in case
We keep socks who’ve lost their mates because we believe someday they’ll come back
Old letters accumulate in boxes to be read again never someday
And photos fade in unopened albums where memories only make us melancholy
Where the past lives frozen in a gesture or a facial expression
Postcards from somewhere with places someone has gone and thought of us
Books we’ll never read again stand at the ready on crowded shelves along with little curios we can’t recall who gave them to us
We are this collection of debris and delight that leave a trail of who we are beneath all the grand things like furniture or cars
We’re merely shards of some ancient pottery of the soul
Flicks of flashbulbs
Notes on paper turned yellow by time
We come and we go and someone eventually will have to go through all this and decide what is worth keeping
CROWS
Through the x-rays I saw the crows in my heart
The sad secrets they held
Whispering as they wept
They spoke to each other of rained on sidewalks and photographs with white borders
Old movie houses converted into furniture stores
And of broken promises that no glue on Earth could hold all the fragments together again
Their dark wings collecting all the light
Eyes so moist and deep with pain
So full of questions there was no more room for answers to be stored
The terrain
The landscape of memories had no horizon
Endlessly etched into the maps in their minds
A timelessness that is only true in lies
A solitude in that crowded cage
The knowledge that they knew nothing
So finally I blew out that one small candle so my dreams could rest
So the sweep of night might consume me
And let morning bring her reprieve
MIRAGE
We are the ghosts
The reflections of some dreamer
Echoes of things yet to be spoken
We drift through this circus
Imagining we are spectators when in fact we are the acts
And when the tents collapse
The Clowns have the last laugh
NEKHBET
The extended black wing of my inner condor is blocking any light from entering my mind.
And tonight sleep is a fugitive concept so the hours of night scrape cruelly through the clock until the dawn is but a terrain of pure exhaustion.
I’m frayed edges of old parchment.
Dry wood on fire.
Weathered leather wrapped around an electric wire.
Like a corpse on a vibrating bed.
So damn tired yet rumbling square wheeled down a potholed boulevard.
Some days I can’t even find the ground without a compass.
My head dense with a jungle growth of misgivings and regrets.
Or my thoughts, like collapsed ancient mines where memories leak out like toxic gases.
All the canaries of hope lie dead in their cages.
But I need to cover some ground.
Get things done like a human being.
Function or appear to function in the real world where the mannequins of society necktie and handshake their way through the daylight.
In the cocktail smiles of deals and lies.
It’s my fault.
I lack the tools of the trade.
The masks of civility and commerce that get the actors through the scenes.
I’m raw.
The truth of my disapproval bleeds through any attempt at the social lubricant.
I don’t know how to hide my scaly tail and razorblade opinions.
I’m transparent even on my best days.
Tattooed with the billboard of my truths.
No diplomatic tact can cover the tracks of my raptor disapproval.
So perhaps I should remain in the cloak of solitude.
Doing no harm in my cloistered redoubt.
Keeping my thoughts chained in the cryptic basement of my unspoken disdain.
Embracing the black wing of my inner condor.
Nekhbet’s secret loneliness.
LABYRINTH
Life is so very short
And the days rush by in a storm
We look around and see shadows of friends
And loved ones in the corners of our dreams
We fill our time with the small things of living
The chores of survival
The details of efficiency
And we lose sight of our passions
We get buried in the dense foliage of our mind’s jungle
No maps to guide us we grope about
We lose our way
We feel that aching
The longing
The hunger for mystery and meaning
So we pay our parking tickets
Do our laundry
And vacuum the living rooms of our lovely prisons
Punch the clock
Do the dishes
And go to bed
Until the alarm jolts us back
And we enter the maze again
LOST ECHO RETURNING
I know you
We were lovers once
You were soft and sweet
I lost a part of me inside you
And here I am
Once again breathing your flesh in my thoughts
Touching you
Knowing those moments in some strange dream of memory
I feel my maleness awaken with its heat
The pulse of desire rouses some sleeping giant
A wild animal I love as a brother
A phantom creature that cannot be defined
How do I deal with these graying years
How does one accept the fading sun
The advancing darkness that has no end
In my mind I kiss your flesh
I hold your body against mine
Reaching for the eternal that exists in this connection
But I am but a flicker of light
A small candle in a very large night
A comet in the sky that only passes through
And all the ghosts I’ve loved exist only in photographs
The long line of epitaphs
Poetic eulogies that cling to memories
Those who have moved on
And you come to the light
A visitor
Agitating the ethers
Storming my redoubt
Walls tremble and fall to the earth
And I am vulnerable again
SPIDER WEB
I was outside and I saw this spider web. And I became fixated with it. The great intricacies of this construction. The utter beauty of it. A design so perfectly geometric and the way, while being almost invisible it also caught the light and lit the fire in me. A work of art on an almost celestial level in miniature.
And yet, it was a trap. A death trap that snared the unsuspecting. The trusting. The unseeing. And I thought to myself. This is what love is. It’s a fatal snare in which there is no return.
You’re buzzing along in life and then out of nowhere you’re caught. Snagged in some glorious prison from which there is no escape. No parole.
So we are captured because the web is love, the spider is love and the poison sting that paralyzes is also love. It’s the heroin of the heart. The terror of loneliness. The cold truth of our need that keeps us struggling and that just makes the binding tighter.
Even if through some wild miracle you somehow break loose, the scars of where you’ve been touched follow you. Echoes that never fade. Memories of that near miss. That emotional reminder of something wonderful you came in contact with and is gone.
ALL MATERIAL COPYRIGHTED: ROY EISENSTEIN.
EPITAPH
Small things gather
Pieces of nothing in drawers
Odds and ends that some part of our soul thinks we’ll someday need
Fragments of things
Paperclips and rubber bands
Nuts without bolts
Screws and nails that will never touch a tool again but still they wait
Plastic bags from the grocery just in case
We keep socks who’ve lost their mates because we believe someday they’ll come back
Old letters accumulate in boxes to be read again never someday
And photos fade in unopened albums where memories only make us melancholy
Where the past lives frozen in a gesture or a facial expression
Postcards from somewhere with places someone has gone and thought of us
Books we’ll never read again stand at the ready on crowded shelves along with little curios we can’t recall who gave them to us
We are this collection of debris and delight that leave a trail of who we are beneath all the grand things like furniture or cars
We’re merely shards of some ancient pottery of the soul
Flicks of flashbulbs
Notes on paper turned yellow by time
We come and we go and someone eventually will have to go through all this and decide what is worth keeping
CROWS
Through the x-rays I saw the crows in my heart
The sad secrets they held
Whispering as they wept
They spoke to each other of rained on sidewalks and photographs with white borders
Old movie houses converted into furniture stores
And of broken promises that no glue on Earth could hold all the fragments together again
Their dark wings collecting all the light
Eyes so moist and deep with pain
So full of questions there was no more room for answers to be stored
The terrain
The landscape of memories had no horizon
Endlessly etched into the maps in their minds
A timelessness that is only true in lies
A solitude in that crowded cage
The knowledge that they knew nothing
So finally I blew out that one small candle so my dreams could rest
So the sweep of night might consume me
And let morning bring her reprieve
MIRAGE
We are the ghosts
The reflections of some dreamer
Echoes of things yet to be spoken
We drift through this circus
Imagining we are spectators when in fact we are the acts
And when the tents collapse
The Clowns have the last laugh
NEKHBET
The extended black wing of my inner condor is blocking any light from entering my mind.
And tonight sleep is a fugitive concept so the hours of night scrape cruelly through the clock until the dawn is but a terrain of pure exhaustion.
I’m frayed edges of old parchment.
Dry wood on fire.
Weathered leather wrapped around an electric wire.
Like a corpse on a vibrating bed.
So damn tired yet rumbling square wheeled down a potholed boulevard.
Some days I can’t even find the ground without a compass.
My head dense with a jungle growth of misgivings and regrets.
Or my thoughts, like collapsed ancient mines where memories leak out like toxic gases.
All the canaries of hope lie dead in their cages.
But I need to cover some ground.
Get things done like a human being.
Function or appear to function in the real world where the mannequins of society necktie and handshake their way through the daylight.
In the cocktail smiles of deals and lies.
It’s my fault.
I lack the tools of the trade.
The masks of civility and commerce that get the actors through the scenes.
I’m raw.
The truth of my disapproval bleeds through any attempt at the social lubricant.
I don’t know how to hide my scaly tail and razorblade opinions.
I’m transparent even on my best days.
Tattooed with the billboard of my truths.
No diplomatic tact can cover the tracks of my raptor disapproval.
So perhaps I should remain in the cloak of solitude.
Doing no harm in my cloistered redoubt.
Keeping my thoughts chained in the cryptic basement of my unspoken disdain.
Embracing the black wing of my inner condor.
Nekhbet’s secret loneliness.
LABYRINTH
Life is so very short
And the days rush by in a storm
We look around and see shadows of friends
And loved ones in the corners of our dreams
We fill our time with the small things of living
The chores of survival
The details of efficiency
And we lose sight of our passions
We get buried in the dense foliage of our mind’s jungle
No maps to guide us we grope about
We lose our way
We feel that aching
The longing
The hunger for mystery and meaning
So we pay our parking tickets
Do our laundry
And vacuum the living rooms of our lovely prisons
Punch the clock
Do the dishes
And go to bed
Until the alarm jolts us back
And we enter the maze again
LOST ECHO RETURNING
I know you
We were lovers once
You were soft and sweet
I lost a part of me inside you
And here I am
Once again breathing your flesh in my thoughts
Touching you
Knowing those moments in some strange dream of memory
I feel my maleness awaken with its heat
The pulse of desire rouses some sleeping giant
A wild animal I love as a brother
A phantom creature that cannot be defined
How do I deal with these graying years
How does one accept the fading sun
The advancing darkness that has no end
In my mind I kiss your flesh
I hold your body against mine
Reaching for the eternal that exists in this connection
But I am but a flicker of light
A small candle in a very large night
A comet in the sky that only passes through
And all the ghosts I’ve loved exist only in photographs
The long line of epitaphs
Poetic eulogies that cling to memories
Those who have moved on
And you come to the light
A visitor
Agitating the ethers
Storming my redoubt
Walls tremble and fall to the earth
And I am vulnerable again
SPIDER WEB
I was outside and I saw this spider web. And I became fixated with it. The great intricacies of this construction. The utter beauty of it. A design so perfectly geometric and the way, while being almost invisible it also caught the light and lit the fire in me. A work of art on an almost celestial level in miniature.
And yet, it was a trap. A death trap that snared the unsuspecting. The trusting. The unseeing. And I thought to myself. This is what love is. It’s a fatal snare in which there is no return.
You’re buzzing along in life and then out of nowhere you’re caught. Snagged in some glorious prison from which there is no escape. No parole.
So we are captured because the web is love, the spider is love and the poison sting that paralyzes is also love. It’s the heroin of the heart. The terror of loneliness. The cold truth of our need that keeps us struggling and that just makes the binding tighter.
Even if through some wild miracle you somehow break loose, the scars of where you’ve been touched follow you. Echoes that never fade. Memories of that near miss. That emotional reminder of something wonderful you came in contact with and is gone.