Photo credit: Paul Wenzel  

Present Tense

We are constantly

In conversations

You live inside me

We talk about our impatience

With realities that don’t compromise

With our ideas of places

We want to live

So I’ve built a sacred icon

Carved into cedar

With a torch and metal tip rod

The surface was first stained

And after the drawing was completed

I varnished your

Silhouette so it holds its glow

I’ve compiled a playlist of songs

Like Chances With Wolves

For us to hear while we talk

Writing about you isn’t enough

So I’m writing to you

In a file folder named you

Because there is so much

To say and there isn’t time

I’m multiplying by talking in text

As well as in person

This is my saga about

Escaping from a foxhole

To love in peace

And live free of anxiety

We have agreed we are

Unable to lie 

Afraid to utter truth

And everything cost too much

These problems we ponder

While on our way to somewhere else

Some place we’d sweat blood to survive in

Some other-where-ness

That doesn’t smash dreams

And bubbles float freely without danger of

Pin popped explosions

In conversation we

Wonder how to start from nowhere

When there is no such place

How to move forward

When every direction is up or down

Full moon sluices through a broken dam

Spilling light all over the sky

Satellites dictate time without ticks

No second hand is swift enough

To keep up  

We’re moving in place and finding

Ghosts in what’s happening now

To be as menacing as history

Descendants of our recent future

Predict backwards and

Long-term plans interrupt sleep

Rattle caged dreams and hamper

Imagination

What we actually see is blurry

Due to the prescription in the lenses

We choose to wear

Cataracts cloud everything

Our eyes hide like mollusks 

From a predator reality

We are running out of time

Like it’s a house afire

But the exits aren’t clearly marked

And there is no such place as out

So we live through time’s nightmare

Hoping to wake up elsewhere

Amnesia doesn’t cure our allergy to

Time but it allows brief repast

From ennui and oppression

We pleach branches of illusions

Like you braid your vines of hair

Interweaving infinity into

Something we can twirl