Bound By No Passage of Time

Bound By No Passage of Time

(“It is like a mustard seed, which a man took and threw into his own garden; and it grew and became a tree, and the birds of the sky nested in its branches.” Luke 13:19)

Borne by diagonal blues
my heart often refuses the comfort of
sun or memories.
I do not delight in inner images,
mere ghosts cannot sit beside me in the afternoon.
I never know if it is chemicals, or misfiring synapses,
or base ungratefulness,
but the pressure pushes tears out past my cheeks again.

To believe the world is absurd at only
a third of your lifespan may be center ring
and second act clowning.
But in the final third it leaves the robin’s song
unheard until they rest for the nested night.

There are words I once knew like soul/breath,
multiple choice answers, true/false tests, clarity.
But I could not discount the unrest,
the whirlpools that unseated the certainties
of invisible habitations. There was no architecture
designed for my peace of mind.

But if you fall, if you are buried by time
bone by bone,
I will find the color yellow and focus toward you
until you bloom again.
I will sit, the saddened, and rehearse the stories we
only tell
until it is too late.
Or the stories we tell family they have heard dozens
of times before,
but coyly confess to never knowing.

But my muscles still strangle me like missing a trapeze
high above the circus tent. My memories sometimes displace
the shoveled dirt but
more often invade my dreams with caricatures, with
mongrels of my own making who have forgotten everything
about dew-cooled meadows midsummer.

I admit there should be more pastels here, portraits that
should have reminded me of your face. But I stub my toe
on sand,
trip myself again and again.
Though I still wave hello to the past,
I will flag down the next possible invitation
to a comfortable couch,
ice cold beer
and a room where the robins,
the rabbits,
the tie-dye shirts and
jangly bracelets
inhabit a house bound by no
passage of time at all.