Binary Enigma

I see the elusive dead in you.

I see it when your left eyelid starts to jitter 

because you haven't slept a full night in weeks,

or when you lower your eyes and gaze at nothing in particular

"Yea...", you say. Just, "Yea".

When you stare out on the lawn in the afternoon, what do you see?

The wrinkles in their shirts, the stains on their jeans?

And when you look at me,

do you truly see me as the sum of all my parts?

And then, I wonder what you're hiding.

What lies in those unvisited corners in the cellar of your heart?

Is this shell of yours a wall to keep us out

or a cell to keep you in?

Entzünden

"Your kingdom come, your will be done..."
I had to pause at becoming aware of the dull murmurs around me,
and the flatness of the bricks borrowing the voices of centuries past.

This is what great things are built of, I thought.
Thousands of people united in their misery
with a deep sense of the same hope
inspired by someone so miserable
that they spent an entire lifetime
creating something that would make this all worth it and sensible.

To the ones who embraced the chaos:
I long to be as brave as you.

Twenty Two Fourteen

The bombastic symphonies of the market square 

ignite the last drops of my youth.

I yearn for this generation

who takes chaos to the streets

fomenting anarchy against oligarchy.

The greatest experiment of our time goes horribly wrong,

wishes to off itself.

More at 11.

Peace, Freedom, Justice, Free will.

These expired ideas are forever engraved

as words of soldiers freshly forgotten.

Mediterranean metropolis- Catalonia

A thoroughfare, flat and narrow

shoots across the horizon, 

dividing everything in its path

into two.

To be with you has now become an ordered sort of thing.

We no longer bend our backs together, we bend our time apart.

'Til crooked and manicured, our lifelines fit together for just one moment of the year.

But it never fits quite right.

Taroko

The Earth before me,

I ask, "what are we here for?"

There is no answer

From fated love to us imbued

your fill in me, and mine in you.

And in our unclothed skin we feast

Our bloodlines flowing from the East.

I did not find for what I'd come

No loose ends tied, no setting sun.

Instead our love rose from the ash,

binding future to the past.

I let this festered pain in me

spiral out as ecstasy

It twisted through your shattered husk

and stole away my breath to dusk.

The Jiyu Tree

    I wished my old tree good morning as I rustled my way through its branches and set my back down on the slope that its trunk had been building. The sunlight had just begun to lift the dewdrops, slowly making room for the songleaves around them to transform the new morning breeze into the music of the spirits.

   You cannot hear the first note of a jiyu's song. There is no grand entrance or catchy hook. It's more like a choir of thousands of distant voices all entering and exiting at different times with their pre-ordained notes. When you start to hear the song, you realize that it's been singing for a while, only your mind was not clear enough to focus on it. No mind has been or will ever be clear enough to know which of a jiyu's leaves sang first. Only the tree can know, and it will forever keep it secret.