Morning Musings

Emerald crystals and
Ruby pearls
scattered on the tarmac.
- Splints of glass,
Glistening in the morning sun.

A dampness- cool earth- is
all that's left
To mark the spot
Where a soul had just took flight.

The Lord's Angels

Have you but seen in the eye of the storm

The fury, the wrath, the chaos of the Lord?

He created, sprung from him-

the chasms of the oceans

the spitting fire of the deeps

the cold, bleak mountains,

the arid deserts of the east

As the serpent whispered its words of sin

Was it not a mere device,

A slave to the Lord's whim

As it slithered and squirmed in the dusts of Paradise?

Are we not what the Lord hath destined?

Cast upon us, chosen, cursed,

Etched in us the path of fate?

A bead in a rosary

A brick in a wall

A bullet in a gun? 

Excerpt from future project

The rising sun cast long shadows against the towering walls of the housing complexes that lined the alley. Candles still flickered in a few dark windows. Where the walls were crumbling away, gaping dark holes revealed the hollowness of lives left behind. The red brick walls were sooty and dark moss clung desperately to where the moisture was.

Anne walked briskly this morning. Something about the cool morning air, its peaceful silence, seemed to cheer her on. She could sing if she dared to.

A few yards ahead she saw a mother and her two children come out of their house, closing the entrance with a heavy wooden plank that stood for a door, and descend a steep flight of stairs onto the road. Their faces were white in the morning cold. They wrapped their arms around each other. They were walking ahead of her now. She could hear their chatter but couldn't make out the words. The youngest child, a girl of five or so, chattered excitedly, her voice rising and falling like that of a bird.

Something about the morning air, something about its youthful freshness, was absorbed in that creature, fluttering about in her white frock with her blue headscarf flying in the wind. Anne wanted to take her in her arms.

Soon she began to run ahead along the street and back to her mother, laughing, urging her brother to join her. Her giggles echoed against the high walls and reached Anne like voices in a dream. She watched the little girl dance along the alley, hopping over potholes and kicking pebbles into the air.

Anne was overcome by a strange yearning, a deep desire to join her, to dance with her, right here, on this very street. She felt a lightness in her feet, her heart exhilarated. Was she too old or the child too young to know not better? Dancing is for fools, she told herself, for happy fools, but was that not what she was? Living here, under this sky, walking down this alley, for what?

A few blocks ahead the alley opens onto the square, where the gates of the factory are waiting for her and another day.

Words

Words seem to linger, close, almost touching, but when one reaches out for them, they fall apart, breaking like a wave at the touch of the shore, cascading down a cliff into the nothingness beyond.

Humming the tune of a familiar song you sit in the corner seat of a rattling bus. The shutter being wide open, the wind blows you hair wild and brings the taste of dust and sea breeze to your lips. In a sudden moment of motion blur all seems possible, the world small, conceivable, life’s instructions clear, and words, they start forming, dodging there within your mind, waving in the wind about you. A voice within whispers- phrases incomplete, with a preposition missing -oblique yet profound. You repeat those words, they echo in your mind, fragments of divinity. The applause thickens in the background as people shove forward to shake your hand, to congratulate you on your achievement, the victory of a generation, you, the messiah of a world. Laurel upon laurel. As the arena vibrates with the roar of the engine, the melancholy whisper, in a bout of desperation, forms a shout, but the words fall, like shards of porcelain, annihilated by the trod of the masses, ground to dust by the foot of a thousand men. And as sudden as lightening, a blackness seeps in, the ink in your eyes, blinding you. Groping around in the darkness you reach out for the fragments of meaning that lie scattered in the sand. And there, in that moment, your voice is lost, buried in the wastelands of time.