Raw Material

There remain unedited spaces in my soul

Where I have not scratched out words & written others in,

Spaces where erasures don’t occur & bold lettering of

Initial thought stand like trees in a forest –

Some broken off halfway & left in splintered hope

Some hyphens with no matches in balance

(the dashes where anything can yet be brought to play.)

There are whole nurseries of thought seeded in good soil

Awaiting the nourishment of attention, the light of consciousness

To life the greening leaves & show the shoots.

I’ll get there, if not now, then When.

Beginnings are rugged. From where I sit, so many seem

Truncated by circumstance & limitation.

With the advent of the future’s imminent arrival,

I wonder about setting off with good shoes on an

Untrodden path.

I sit on the edge of the bed, tying them on,

Adjusting the tongue,s couching the heels, breathing

Through more beginnings.

I keep thinking I’m at the end of the roads

So many rolled up to this place

I walked them all in my mind if not in real space.

Good thing thoughts are good as deeds!

The locus of my discontent is blurred over

By satisfactions well-achieved & homespun,

Sometimes homely, somewhat overlong in arriving.

I have stopped shrinking, telling others I am instead

Condensing.

Potentials gone awry

I could call my biography,

“The Road Never Traveled”,

The Gospel of Carol, rounded

Upon itself, stuffed into a clay jar

Out in a desert cave

Of some interplanetary space.

Such dreams I have had, such adventures,

Such scenery I have seen, such white waters skimmed

On a slippery raft where I clutched

The edges with broken nails &

A grin, one eye closed to face that

Future rushing up & around –

I have blasted & blurred through

My life & savored & slept its reality

Wholehearted.

It’s been one epic poem that has not ended,

This time on Earth – one Norse saga after a

Shakespearean couplet pretense at closure

(but more commentary.)

The words I cast nets into the starred universe for

My Milky Way of rhyme, meter, song & story

Always aglow out there in the where.

So many tools I did not pick up to learn their function

So many clouds I did not call a shape to

So many stars unseen, but burning in their planetary way…

I am an old woman now, at a campfire once blazing,

Now a steady warming ring, keeping company,

Distorting light into what I wish to see.

Though diurnal, my senses blur with coming daylight,

Quiver into the energy of a society where I earn my way.

It is at the 4 a.m. hour where my whiskers twitch awake

The words come like some rogue wave

Washing away the ordinary, flooding the town

Where I learned to build my world on stilts

Or be flooded off in splinters.

I blink, therefore I am.

The world of my perception changes with each

Open/close of these tired eyes.

Just when I think the  horizon on approach

A bell rings – like the old typewriter margin bells –

The lines shift & withdraw as I cast the words

To draw it back again, one tug after another

While towing all else behind.