Presence in Absence

There is desolation in the space

An openness to the darkness

Ache like a picked lock

Flopping the curvature of mechanism

Vulnerable metallic shepherd’s crook

Flailed bent like a neck gazing to an opposing horizon

Set sun swallowed charcoal singed to no longer stoked embers

Cinders flushed in the gray crush

Tepid to bare feet muted to the fiery pincher of orange devils

Manically thrusting blunted forks at the soil’s roof

Incapable of managing the numb foot pads to muster notice

A festival of tales raucous and dismissed in the wizened maw of acceptance

The normality of the parade

The cracked mirror of vanity

The glistening shards of rejection

Chopped cock head after cock head

The dumb tongue rooster crows of dawn

For suns that no longer rise

Belief in the belly of stars distant and cataclysmic

To alter the shadow of a gargantuan amalgamation of figures

Banshees of the sky wailing an atonal blanket nil pitch

Incapable of managing register in the deaf ears to hearing

The hammer, anvil and stirrup, malleus, incus, and stapes, auditory ossicle vibrating 

In a triad of wood and flesh and iron pinned for a scream that echoes

The built-in puzzle of a shadow box pantomime theater of hand movements

In cosmetic pale wan smiles saying what is not and doing what is not

The fist rant pummel walloping puffed cheeks and dice teeth rattling like craps rolls

The indifferent randomness in the symphony of the universe

Cagey and mathematical, algebraic and calculated rates of change relative to time

Where one hour here is seven years out there

The intensity of gravity stretching reality of how one can endure the illusion of now

The presence in absence the totality of being in the moment

When there is nothing to hear or say or see

Only the feeling of this is