Life In An Hourglass...

The dust of my days descends in decay

as the sand slouches in the hourglass

leaving life so dizzied, dusty, diminished, & drained

I keep trying to turn time on its head

and reset these strained & stagnant sands

but each new today just trickles down

into another tepid tomorrow

and adds to a horrid heap of so many

yawning yesterdays

which forever fester 

in this interminable hourglass

All my dead and dying days depart

in betrayal of the same betrothed dream of life

which is repeatedly ravaged & raped

by a plethora of promiscuous nothing-nightmares

that seduce me every which way but well

and seed within me so many

sad and stillborn 

"somedays"

and all too many 

"maybe next times"

But all my unborn ambitions remain resilient

surviving this endless onslaught of abject abortions

They keep kicking at this hourglass-cage

trying to escape from this shattered sense of time

by sending shards of this cell to scar my soul

so I might see how the sand that turns to glass

is the same as the soul & skin which turns callous 

to harden and contain both life's-blood & pain

and in spite, they keep the dust to dust of days 

from being muddied & un-dried by all the

blood and tears in this refrain

Still the sand sifts through sand

as glass grates against glass

while my sandstorm of thumos

stirs the ever unsettled & stranded sands

and sends me into a rage of senseless circles

where I dizzily do unto my self

what's long been done to us all

grinding to the last grain

what could never, long remain

This is what passes for life in an hourglass

where no sand can return to any solitary shore

where wild winds & waves could carry them away forever

with all the unseen scripts of secret dreams

the castaways bottle up in desperate messages

they send like atheistic prayers, surging out to sea

to drown under the deepest tides of truth

which have swallowed whole the world

with all the unasked wishes

and wishless genies

which still wait for the wishes of others

to wake them from their dreamless slumber

in their cloistered, little lamps

Life in an hourglass

is the prisoner of measured, portioned time

Where the gridlines of a calendar

are like the bars of a cell

Where the spinning hands of a clock

point to nothing beyond the same repeated circle of numbers

that would make each day amount to the same innumerable nothing

Where dreams are defiled by alarms

scheduled to wake us with clocks which know no wonder

and steal the soul from needed slumber

-alarms that do not alert us of the true danger

of restless, dreamless, waking

that leads us 'round, & 'round, & down

with all the other delirious dust that drains

to the bottom of the the bottomless glass

as it forever takes away what's never there

the life inside an hourglass

The Word Only Comes To Those Who Leave The World Behind...

The Word only comes to those who leave the world behind

They won't be printed on any ad or street sign

You can read a million wordless pages & get the picture

Consume cover to cover of every literary flavor & mixture

Yet never find a single word to light the fire of your mind

Until you finally find the Word that leaves & left the world behind

Words stand stranded like corpses floating on oceans of ink

Where tides of tepid torments turn life's empty pages gently  a w  a   y

Words scrawled & slashed-out on countless unseen surfaces

Where muddled minds stretched souls too thin

And cast no spell before being crumpled-up & tossed back

With all that other rubbish & old receipts, which all lack value too

Words hide, silhouetted & disguised behind blackened pupils

That propped themselves unblinkingly open to study every lexical photon

Hoping to decipher some sign of that secret, shimmering light

See so many words like these, but never find the Word at all

Until you find the Word that was written in the immortal language

Which tattoos itself on exiled hearts & heads

Before it bleeds from those fewest fingers

Which extend themselves through sacred pens

Pointed sharply at empyreans of paper

To strike some tiny spark of the highest, divine light

Which shines enough to shame the tenebrific blight

That stains the span of the all-consuming abyss of all existence

Find the Word engraved in the wrinkles of sagging skin

that surrounds those eyes which stare at suns, unblinking & unblind

-knowing all this light is dimmer than the kind they've kindled deep inside

Hear the Word whispered on the unheard winds

that seem to cloud so many ears in fugues of mistaken silence

Feel the Word flooding through the tears

that forever fail to wash-away the stains & scars

which read like epitaphs, unetched above the tombs of unknown soldiers

whose secret wars are waged eternally, in every unspoken breath

Taste the Word in the blood of your own bitten tongue 

as it chomps down to mute the righteous rage

which seeps like poisoned vapor into the otherwise untainted silence

Smell the Word in the air which turns to ash

in the last lingering moment of somber stillness

before the nuclear annihilation allows our long invited end

These are the words which reach us

When we cease to reach for the ungraspable world

And leave behind all except the lessons

Which blind the eyes of every deliberate seeker

And deafen every unsilenced ear

And burn the tongue of every spoken syllable

And choke the scent from every nose sniffing for a trail

And numb the skin of every soul that touches soil 

as if it were but dirt to which their corpse should join

The Word only comes to those who leave the world behind

and allow themselves to find what lurks unhidden

in the senseless, deeper truth of the all unfathomable aether

which the world so desperately tries to disguise

-For the only word one triumphs to find

Is the Word that's found when we leave 

the vastest and emptiest world behind