Well, after all, Mel Torme did write the Christmas Song in July …
Fall came blowing in
Swept summer into yesterday
And all our dreams of reckoning with it.
Among these dead leaves
Wind-strewn and weary
Our footsteps fail to echo
The substance of our lives
Growing soft
Beneath the husk of a moon
Growing old
Too soon
Here I sit
Just a big lump of protoplasm
Encased in plant fiber and animal hide
No more purpose or meaning
Than a slime mold
No, a slime mold
Is at least interesting
Assembling and disassembling
To suit the moment
Bright yellow
Daring any living thing
To do something about it
Daring me
To be more than that
Or at least
That
Just before the final extinction
There were strange and wonderful creatures
Elusive slabs of silver
Darting through the water
Among shape-shifting bulbs
Trailing fierce limbs
And some barely-there whisps
Still deadly with near visible
Strands of poison
And the stone-clasping tendrils
Living dually beneath and above
The frothing rock wacked about
By unseen surrounds
Miniscule bits buzzing through the air
But strong enough to pierce the
Thick outards of others
To suck their vital fluids
Long bendy tails with no body
Slinking among roots and shoots
A mouth at one end and nothing at the other
Lumbering bellowing lumps
With long tusks
That dazzled white in the pristine sunlight
Oddest of all, a bipartite creature
Split nearly symmetrical
Nearly similar but cruelly not
Moving by alternating stilts
Spindly and unbecoming
The two halves bound in eternal embrace
Clutching each other’s throat
Desperate to let go
But trapped, trapped by fear of succeeding
I spoke in riddles
Indecipherable even to myself
Especially myself
All these words made real
Made manifest
In the beginning
–It said —
Was the word
Indefinable useless
A meaningless jumble of
Sound unless
That hunger not yours but mine
Is the meaning of all of it
Or the infinite cosmos
Of conscious beings
Until the face in the mirror
Sweeps past me into the distance
Unable at last
To recognize the original
I always thought I was some kind of Gypsy
Racing from edge to edge
Never stopping never asking
Weariness my goad and my goal
All will good or bad
Known and unknown
As deep and suspicious
As an autumn breeze in April
Where is it exactly you want to go?
Don’t you know all places are the same?
All contain your ghosts
The dead can’t help you
Any more than the living
You are yours alone
I lived riddles
Myself indecipherable
Especially myself
I think, I feel, therefore it seems
That the world turns only on
My constant spinning,
Only so far as my senses extend
My poor, mineral body, soft and pliable,
Prone to deflation;
That the universe exists solely
For my engagement, to be ingested
Piece by piece,
Or all a-gulp, wantonly;
That time is just the measure of
My preoccupation with one
Or another of my desires
Churned up in the small turmoil of being;
That all ends where I end,
And that all vastness is but an illusion
Of my impatient hunger,
That meaning stops here.
This, despite my earnest protests;
And all the infinite conscious beings
Of the infinite cosmos, too, protest
In vain.
exiles child 