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.

I’m drawing back the curtain

to see what lives behind

I’m sorting thru the webbies

from the spiders in my mind

I’m seeing new beginnings

in what-all I’ve left behind

I’m stronger for the memory

in the minders to re-mind.

All the monsters roam the hallways

None now linger under-bed

and the closet door is open

and there’s room inside my head

where the light has gone to linger

I’ll believe what’s up ahead

only when I see it dead.

I have given up decisions

which I thought I’d never do

I have answered all the questions

So all that’s left is New

i have fashioned me a headdress

of old feathers, ragged, blue

I could write my way forever

Given time & space & who

I have opened in the middle

my discov’ry is complete

there’s no room for ever-after

my invasion is replete.

I could walk away without me

scattered breadcrumbs in the street.

Take me here, who once was there

no begging or burning, just bliss

Cooly touching skin, each hair alive, enthroned upon the next

the leaping stars in my eyes focus all-at-once on everything

The carpet of red (that fabled entry)

Somehow, another morning

Dare I blink? The day so delicate

framed in momentary stillness

there is only where-to-go

No where-of-before nor whereof beyond

The mourning doves sing counterpoint to all there is

This hour, made of mist & wonder

each flower a star unique in potential

how to describe color laid upon light?

that 3D standout of beauty made tangible

on the thread of beginnings

a bead to the wear – first light of the day…

The tree spirals into the sky, hungry to touch

limitlessness; be-stilled by air & certain light

Solid in its earth yet momentous in potential

where growth unhindered trembles.

Carol Borsello – 1/19/25

So, what do I do, finding myself Here.

I did what they said, right?

Be Here Now.

I managed to get the juggle on

All three right.

I feel like I’m done waiting

For the Spiritual Bus.

I better start walking.

Right now, it seems only the animals have it right –

They’ve added Intelligence to that Instinct

While we’ve chosen the direct opposite.

Does anyone need a Crafter? Does anyone need a crow?

Or a crone? Or a crown?

I got applications out for all of the above.

Let bygones begone! Beware!

(Got no time for baggage

Put it in my ear, ‘k?)

My AI is in it for comic relief:

My phone regularly tells me

“Sorry, I don’t understand.”

That’s just wrong, on so many levels.

My Train of Thought

There are many endings to that one

• Got derailed?
• Became destiny?
• Switched tracks?
• Got onto a siding?
• Arrived?

How can one explain insanity from sanity?

Would not that be a marriage of opposites?

There’s much labor in running a train from here.

What’s legal might not be most convenient

But long-term pays off from my station.

There must be allowances for age

Which arrives with us at a pivotal place

That where it all started

  Once more figuring out how the body works

         Once more bringing senses “online,”

         Once more facing out to start all over again.

2/7/2024       Carol Borsello

WHY LOOK NOW?

Upon someone paying attention long after hanging us out to dry

except she doesn’t remember that part.

You positioned yourself so far away.

Was it blind trust?

We asked for help.

It was not forthcoming

Tho your later [false] memory said it was there – it

          Must be us, we careless fools.

It’s like playing Keep Away with the Truth.

A CHANGE I NOTICED

I am not silent,

Tho I learn its value every day.

It grows on me more largely

That my thinking has little to do with that of others.

I have less of a drive to ally with them now anyway.

I wouldn’t agree with myself if it weren’t for ego.

I feel like a unicorn, trotted out, patted on the horn

Set to my own observations, my own secrets,

Then set aside to think them.

I only asked to serve

Right?

I didn’t figure on the intrigue & infringement

And downright interference

My radiant soul would run into…

The reversals & revisions & uncomfortable revelations:

Who I am against the backdrop of someone with

Sucn a set of different Operating Instructions?

QUESTION MARKS

People seem surprised when I say I want my own way.

I don’t understand that. This pragmatic worldview

Should be everyone’s, IMHO, jus’ sayin’.

I expand myself by asking. I want to move in & out of thinking

In the Mosaic Present rather than past or future,

I outpace these, but it’s just I’m on another path

More timelessness appeals to me now.

I don’t recognize what passes for social justice

I am unplugged. I feel acoustic to God

The God of my being, no one else’s

I am busy here, being that One Drop Poised

Above An Infinite Ocean.

MY BIONIC EYE

Is what I call it.

I open a book to the page where there is an error.

In some arcane fashion I’ve yet to understand

My eye finds “mistake.”

Something rudimentary: any copy editor

Would have been fired for publishing this

Once upon That Time.

GIFT SIMPLE

It’s a gift, but less so when coupled with

Spontaneity & a quirky POV,

Not always palatable to outsiders.

This is how I live my life

My purview & my vision:

To be me.

I cannot be any Other.

I won’t deny trying that –

There were lots of personalities I wore before this one.

All distilled to this me.