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Scales and Balance

A swirl of dragon’s tail scales lights the night’s sky
Creating impossible stars, cold, impassive vacuums
Clearing away ephemeral dust
Like a book blown clean by wet lips.

Time falls and folds, chipped away
No one remembers the things forgotten by time
Right is replaced by innovation
And time stands still on a frozen computer.

The stone woman holds the scales, cradles them
The illusion of balance.
It is always this way, every time
Why would you expect any different?

One day they will build a railway to the sky
To the farthest disconnected star
Not to enlighten but to gawk,
And the ride will not be free.

This is the price of not looking around when you can
The television a one way mirror
Oceans swelling even in a storm
And the waves that beat back leering encroachments.

An illusion of balance
Would you expect anything different?

If you stop reading it, it will die.
And want, and plead for an audience
A resurrection.  A bird of ashes.
Perhaps just strong enough not to be blown away by the gentle wind
        Perhaps
You can’t expect anything different
        So it will never be

Pyramids stand and crumble beneath the sun and stars
Against vines that constrict rock
Of a foundation built on sand
Always on sand. The titanic mistake forgotten.
You remember a memory but don’t learn:

Balance is an illusion
You expect nothing different.

Solace

The green grew around us
Like archways or caressing finger tips,
As hoof beats twined our own hearts as we trudged,
A road of many paths, directions an unnecessary nuisance
The beauty of being truly lost
Is that when you are found
All is as it should be, in these moments
Leaves, branching outward, onward.
This is the reward for taking the time to listen
To yourself and to others, in this hideaway
Of solace found in mind
The greatest sprits always within.

Murals

Murals paint the way
Not the kind glimpsed in art museums
Or artist’s studios or even
Collector’s cellars.

No, they are half glimpsed
caught from the corner of the
eye while speeding seventy
beneath freeway overpasses.

Relics.  Remnants of a bygone
age when there was still some
semblance of an instruction manual.
Pictographs.  Hieroglyphs.

A man clothed in a loincloth
of tattered rags, begging
for change at the corner of Fountain & Vine
said once, “Life was simple then.”

Modern marvels: age of miracles
of cellular sheets pulled over
eyes that once saw simply
Now muted beneath a gray black shroud.

In the desert somewhere, an arch stands alone,
a bent finger that once pointed
toward the heavens above
now bent, burying its face in the sand
until the winds of change
once again sweep it clean
Until it can truly be seen.