Underground Turtles

This morning my shoes took off without me.
Across the floor they clomped and clattered,
then,
one kick of the door
and they were gone.

Gardenias yearn from stems
moonward; I stop to stretch,
just a pause–
no more, no less;
no time to obsess
or linger dissectingly,
but to instead
preserve artlessness.

1

Time quivers from an empty bridge,
Whooo,
The evening train steams grade-challenged,
Wheels squawk,
Engine moans

Like every bone in my body broken,
Like my joints, like my couplings
Car to car to caboose, loose.

Whooo,
The owl whisks from the barn: whoosh!

2

Dusk,
A red feather floats
Under a grey cover,
Floats judiciously, nearly, seemingly,

Floats ubiquitously purpose-drawn
Or again so seems;
In actuality in acquiescence
To the wind.

The hem of the universe
Is borderline mad,
Now struggles
To maintain semblance.

Time quivers
From a bottle.

3

The red feather neither thinks nor looks
Nor deciphers nor calculates
—a red feather from a hat
Or from this or that—

It does not contemplate
Any form of reality via existence.
But it is.

One comes to rest
Upon a green stem. It has an identical twin.

A train of clouds form
Skyward.

It is a world with no airbrakes.

4

Two shadows like hands,
Two crossroads
Split in the night,
Two shadows like long arms
Reach out t’ward fathomless vistas.

An ass brays from a barn.
A class says an alphabet as per
Instructions from a marm.
Mankind is biased, is blasé
Is blessed.

Hollow, they strain into the nude dawn
In an epic power struggle
To be heard. Their king is their shadow
Is their image, is that glint off the brook
Off the rifle.

They are like
The greens having heroically endured
All the early frosts of fall

Mid-frost is upon them.

5

Frivolous all the mounting moments,
Frivolous all the ascending
Roman numerals
Around the circle
Called the clock: logjam time.

The winning smile,
The eyes,
The man in the nervous tie,
Say: “frivolous!”

While counting time like money like time.

6

The chicken stirs.
Coffee spoons clink
In cafeterias.

The sunset coexists in the sunrise
The sunrise coexists in the sunset

The latch catches the gate
The gate catches the latch

I stab myself on a thorn
While trying to pick a rose

The green stem shouts from a bed
Of eternal noiseless “nonexistence”:
“Finite!”

. . . .
Drawn conclusions baa
From hollows;
Drawn inferences along with suppositions
Bay from steamy brooks;
As yellow clouds,
As hound dog breath,
As some reduced form of soundless death,

Certainly they scream in uncertainty,
Ring hollow and resonant
(and resident) in the brown fog.

A red bead
Drips down
On the green stem

7

Like death
The red feather touches
Down in the water
Next to the brown one

The owl, the rooster,
Wing in wing,
Two sets of ripples ripple out,
Two, but merging as one.

Church bells ring;
Rain descends,
Clicks like coffee spoons.

The moon and the sun
Begin to seem as one
Yet are separate.

8

Facsimiles
Yawn from broken valleys,
Sun pours
Where moon should have been

Silver alleys are only gray
Where the gleam has washed away,

Exfoliate rose
Of rich men ghettos

Spider web:
Cobwebs

And down certain cobbled streets
The hobbler hobbles—
History is cobbled together by the adept revisionist
And replete with repeats—

The flow ebbs,
The open door closes,

The evening dew is on the roses.

©Sept 29, 2012 by UT2