Mountaindale

Set alight by the setting sun
The sky burned red above the clouds
Like tinder touched off in the air
In a fire not seen since
Moses spoke to a burning bush
Three thousand years ago

It singed the branches of the trees
They burned - not yellow, but amarillo
Dripping leaves like lava to the ground below
And all the things they touched, ablaze-
The tractor and the split rail fence
Were melted with the firestorm above

I plucked an apple from the tree, the seasons last
Shined it to my jeans and savored
The acridity that stings my jaw

And unseen crickets sing
That they can also feel the sting
Of what is and is to come

Choices

To us, the mind was mystery
Where deep inside the depths collide
Two galaxies at apogee,
Exploding to the perigee
Where light and darkness do abide.

Be careful of the things you take -
It's just the choices people make,
And in the place where we reside
Our good and galaxies collide.

We stared into the awful haze
Where seconds felt like countless hours
And hours turned to untold days.
In sleep, the suns emit their rays,
And pools of blood grow into flowers.

One day you'll look into the wake -
It's just the chances people take,
But in the depths where we confide
A darkness silently abides.

Dogwoods

Surrounded by his inability
The dogwoods never felt so far away
As when the dual-panes separated day
From the humming din of sterility

And such was that cold incivility

Forgotten to ponder his own decay
Beneath petaled skies of more red than gray
With a certain macabre tranquility

Far easier it is to kill a man
Than subjugate a living man a slave
His soul cannot be checked, his mind not chained
His mind, the bud analogous began
The petal flourished, but his body drained
Leaving a cruciform to mark his grave

Foothills

There is a certain penetrating cold
Felt only in your bones,
Felt only in the foothills
And in the shells of souls.

We walk into the foothills
Searching for the cold, and
For that chill which may reveal
Why bones are warmed by souls.

Goodbye

My friend, these days it seems
you're not all here.
And so I'm left to say goodbye
as bit by bit you disappear.

Doctors talk and nurses shrew:
sugar is sweet, and so are you.
Half a man, but full of hell,
Progressively I say farewell.

Goodbye, goodbye.
My friend, I say goodbye.
Soon, it seems, you will be gone,
So piece by piece goodbye.