I just have to say this real quick-like…

As I sometimes do, I was writing poems while waiting for tonight’s open mic to start. After one or two ‘ regular’ poems, I thought I would do something different: I filled a whole page of my ginormous sketchbook/journal with a single poem.

But here’s how I did it: I wrote alternate lines from the top down and bottom up of the page—and alternated sides of the page as well. The result is that some ‘stanzas’ as they appear on the page make sense, while others make no sense at all. I have noooooo idea how I am going to arrange this one when I transfer it to my present Word file…

(24 April 2017)

Veiled Faces, Moving Shadows (a scene from the past)

Imagine a corridor lined with thirty-foot statues. A bright light shines off in the distance. As you walk along through alternating shadow and light, gazing up at the stone figures that tower above you, the shadows move across their faces, occasionally teasing your eyes with moving figures that quickly disappear the moment your glance shifts.

As these shadows dance across your field of vision, a shimmering blanket of sound slowly emerges from the silence. The air around you charges with energy, and momentarily glitters in a fine mist of moving particles before once again merging with the surrounding darkness.

The distant light that dimly illuminates your path begins to move across the unseen sky. The ebb and flow of the sound grows alternately more intense and more subdued. Heavy atmosphere and near silence envelop you in quick succession; time simultaneously moves forward and stands still.

Drops of light fall through the silence. Calm, like a cloudless sky at night.

You once had a dream like this…

(Originally written in early 1996 for the one sheet I used to promote one of my cassette releases.)