Author Archives: Mikels Skele

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About Mikels Skele

Poet. Explainer. Foreigner-at-large.

Impossible

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One soft-winded luck-drenched
Park bench afternoon
While dust motes drifted languidly
In and out of sunbeam streams
Eyelids too closed to bother

I dreamed of life
Of love-stained moons
Lake-bound loons and the stars
And a vastness so supreme
Only a poor cosmic ash of a
Barely dim spark
Could comprehend it

I dreamed of the gravity of gravity
Of the long loose distance
Between here and now
Of the slow dip of the long journey

The road moves easily within
And without the fortress skull
At a whim
At an ungrim wager
With vaporous fate

I dreamed of how in old age
The bones of our deciduous dreams
Absurdly seductive
Still nudge us toward the impossible

Having arrived at which
We stare longingly behind

The mantis king

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Long ago, the mantis was young and slender
As a new formed blade of grass,
And tipped and tumbled at the vaguest breeze.
Enormous food-bearing beasts abounded,
But his poor wee jaws could only open so far.
He could only eat mites (he favored red ones).

Then one day, something remarkable happened.
As he sat hungry, near a gargantuan useless breadcrumb,
A tiny ant appeared, ripped a piece from the crumb,
And carried it away.
Then another, and another came.

Tiny, yes, but many, many mites
Could not equal the weight of just one ant.
And there were hundreds,
For the trickle had become a stream,
Hour after hour.
The mantis ate like a fat king.

And fat and large he became, king of all
Within his hideous grasp.
No grasshopper, no June bug so boisterous
It escaped his perfected skill.
The little ants that nourished him were now ignored,
Out of favor against the panoply
Of hulking nutrients.

Then, for no apparent reason, the days grew
Shorter.  It was damned chilly.
Not so bad in itself, the mantis thought,
But food was getting harder to find.
There were those niggling little ants.
Not even a decent snack.

The Mantis was himself grown huge and ponderous.
He sat for hours, hands in position to pounce,
But no food presented itself.
Bye and bye, he fell from the twig,
Exhausted.

First, one tiny ant appeared, ripped a piece from the mantis,
And carried it away.
Then another, and another came.

Such refuge as that

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We grew in camps, the ghosts and I,
Like Queen Anne’s Lace, like purple thistle,
Climbed ruined stairways, solid as dreams,
Our unflinty eyes exploring, imploring.

There was futility in our swagger,
Impossible to distinguish purpose from pose,
No light so bright
It could reveal the soul of darkness

Rye grows in salted fields, but not well.
And so we grew to love life, but not too well.
Days follow days;
We imagine slights and victories to ponder.

Did you summon revolutions for your diversion?
A cure for the tedium of holding back?
That ponderous guilt is no substitute for passion.
We only need to breathe, only to love,
The ghosts and I.

Torn between worlds, I ask myself

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Torn between worlds, I ask myself,
What is it like, being me?

Nothing.  It requires nothing,
It’s as automatic as one-stop shopping,
Two in one, a conscious being
And me.  And yet..

If a different sperm, a different egg,
Would I still look out from these window sockets?
Inside another skull, would I still grasp
with other hands, step with other feet?

What if the doorbell had rung,
Unexpected, even ignored,
Yet altering time by a half second,
Or an eternity?

Would I not exist,
Or would I not-exist?

I have no problem with consciousness,
But why?

Achronicity

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I am listening to Brubeck in front of Starbucks
While latte frothy brain edges perception-wise
While cars pass in review sound merging
And twining through and beyond
Fading like fake sunset dioramas
Unable to bring Desmond down yet intruding
Like the voices calling double venti caramel
No whip sweet chai banana moo goo
Cappuccino si
Cappuccino no
Endless looping filmstrip Sunset Strip
Girls from school from work from home
With infants attached to cars or boyfriends
Gloomily
Backseating or in front posing for no mirror no camera
When suddenly along the street comes a hipster chick
All black tights and lashes attitude shades aloft
Pushing a four wheel off road warrior racing pram
A man in a tight too small iron suit whistles by
And two ankle painted boys hip hoppy smirking jerking
And all times all places all beings  converge
Hippies beats beggars bankers posers
Lunatics rockers private soundtracks dangling
On a warm sunny hashtag morning in January