The Bookends of Experience

As far as East is from the West,

and near to worst as to the best,

I have wandered lonely as a cloud

as we travel from some swaddle to the shroud.

Once we drove a stake in the ground and called it home;

now this morning wakes me here as sun is shone.

Situated now on continental sunrise heights

while recalling vivid island sunset sights,

and noticing here our stark and spindly leaves, these trees,

I recollect the wide and warm of ocean breeze.

Experience goes as far as mountains are from sand,

then circles back around to water, air and land.

Sometimes life is hard, you know;

at other times it's soft as autumn leaves make show.

As days turn dark,

so light doth continually toss out some spark

of hope or happiness or flexibility

that is yet assailed by despair or dearth or rigidity.

Experience comes as vividly as rising sun;

then memory renders it precious when day is done.

Doors of perception

open into windows of reflection

as present slips into the past

and future finds a fleeting foothold fast.

We amble here and there and everywhere;

we ramble now and then without care.

When reality and reflection mingle in the sands of time

imagination splurges into rhythm, sometimes in rhyme

when myself is beached upon the rock of time,

and our family finds itself with God and universe in line.

Glass half-Full

People are Looking

People are looking for something,

where east meets west,

when bright west is best

and light from east

is least.

People are looking for something

where dark meets light,

oh what an amazing sight

when waning spark

wanes to dark.

People are looking for something

where light meets dark,

maybe go to a park

and watch set of sun,

night begun.

People are looking for something

where west meets east;

east was a brightening feast;

until west becomes best

for the day's rest.

Glass half-Full

Crawling onto the sands of Time

If I had a pair of ragged claws
scuttling through surf-tossed sands,
I'd crawl up on this shellshorn beach.
I'd raise my thorny head
to see what I could see
to survey this continental conglomerate
that rises before me
like something big and fixed in time.
Whatever this is,
it is not akin to my ocean, no,
not in constant motion,
but something solid is it
something accumulated in time
something sedimented
into one big thing:

If I could drag me crusty self
upon that stony shore
I would find me windblown
wood grown structure there to rest
beneath its boney covering crest
and call meself at home.

But wait! What's this?
A thorny beast arrests me quest!
This spiny splort to thwart my sport!
Who goes there?

Declare yourself if ye be man or beast!
Shucks. 'T'was what I wanted least,
to share me beach with such a quilly guy,
to see me thorny self within his eye.
Pshaw! to put it politely,
'though I could use another word,
one that you have prob'ly heard.

Glass Chimera

shifting on the sands of rhyme

Here's a line in the sand:

surf breaking there, here shifting strand.

Out there swells planetary ocean;

it rolls in with universal motion.

This continent begins here, between my toes

with little grains that stretch to grandiose shows:

mountains untamed beyond cultivated grass,

miniscule creatures in habitats vast.



Who formed this strand I think I know;

It wasn't Michelangelo. No,

it wasn't Newton or Sagan or Copernicus.

'Though they played their part to show us

the dynamics of this present shifting locus,

it's no result of human focus.

Nor do our carbon-laden spewings

amount to any significant doings.



Our refuse is but momentary trash

sliding up on shores of civilizations past;

it comes, it goes, but no one knows

what bosons do beneath atomic shows.

If we think it's in our power

to determine planet emissions of any given hour,

then I've got some beachfront land to sell you

in Arizona; here, let me tell you.



CR, with new novel, Smoke, soon

Mauka/Makai

Where earth has poured out its magma heart
onto ocean's sphere, things begin to happen
differently.
Then stony solidity challenges watery
dominance,
and blocked kinesis thrusts
interference
patterns onto the wavy deep.
'Tis then the great fluid finds its
fury,
and the waves their wobbly wanderings.
'Tis then
the splashy sea find its unsettled voice,
lending boisterous mayhem to the world:
Islands become frontiers of landed life, and
continents become monuments of tectonic
discontent,
and mankind finds itself at home therein.
This is a fair place to spend eternity,
if it were so,
but if not, there is a better world
to which we go.
Don't ask me how I know;
it is the substance of things unseen
to which our faith doth flow.

Glass half-Full

Kauai kai

First is the sunshine, everywhere
bright on this deep Pacific blue; way out there
Puff blows up his silver-whites
and pushes them into distant cumulus piles
onto absolutely flat
horizon.
From there afar sapphire stretches at me
rolling into nearer aquamarine
then clearer azure.
The ocean surfs in, tossing frothy white
o'er brown-gold beach, sloshing
sparkles
everywhere, all the way up
into micro wavelets of universal energy;
they flatten
in sine shadow lines that skitter across the cosine sand.
Eons away from any continent
and far far far from any heckled world
in a land called Hanalei,
Hawaii and Thee
I see.

Glass half-Full