"Spiral Staircase" by Paul Wright

Moon 

Descending 

a Staircase

“I am my own muse,

the subject I know best.” 

               ~Frida Kahlo

Eventually

all we’ve

learned will

have to

be forgotten.

Even you have

grown weary of 

passing the time

suspended in a sky 

of anonymous stars.

Don’t you fear appearing

hopelessly antediluvian?

You are

a paradox; 

an all-seeing pupil

as cloudy

as a cataract.

You could be

mistaken for

a balding judge

for want of

a powdered wig, 

when in fact

you make a

perfect muse.

In two weeks

you will be 

wall-eyed.

Your nightly progress

tracking our

whereabouts by

a homing device

buried within

every heart,

registering quakes

thump by thump

by thump.

Now

at last you

descend

from the safety 

of your vast ceiling

to perch in

the branches

of a yew tree;

silver oval owl

abandoning

the sky

for lesser climbs,

as if you knew 

Van Gogh

was right: 

starlight

spirals downward

toward what's lowly.

So why not 

replenish

yourself by

lying low?

You, who’ve

never needed

to take me 

(just another

spoke 

in your

revolving hub),

personally

have traveled

down

to see me

as I am.

My casual

nonchalance

hardly proving

us unrelated,

you will find 

us both

on a journey

towards

wholeness.

Seeing is 

believing you are

not too faraway

to follow 

me home,

let alone

hover over

every phase

of life,

even when 

you go

missing

you manage 

to go on

pulling the tides

toward 

your cheek

with a lover’s

abandon.

Thank heavens

you haven't 

any smile

because your

mouth could

never justify

curling upward

over so much

sorrow.

If nature

is ironic,

we have

no answers.

So why 

do I

still want to 

climb closer 

to your 

pale face

and scrawl

my name

on the

blameless

surface

of your

indifference?

In the end,

I may discover

it was

your distance

that kept

us close

all along.

That way

you could 

be sure

I would never

outgrow you.

March 22nd, 2021

 

The 

Hoarder 

Koan

You cannot solve me 

with your mind.

Nor have I 

any interest 

in being solved. 

My motto:

I will make everything mine.

I am ouroboros,

able to swallow

myself whole.

This is how

I keep my life

in place. 

I am Sphinx,

inscrutable God 

in perpetual hold.

I am koan.

You cannot fathom me.

Beneath and inside,

within and without;

my radius

is a burial ground 

for unearthed treasure.

I measure myself

by antiquities,

regardless of my trail

of unexceptional 

artifacts.

I need my sleep

to desire so much.

But I do

not sleep.

I am too hungry for

my next 

acquisition.

On the surface 

I appear as two orbs

but there is 

so much more 

to me.

I am both

above and below,

ascribing value

to everything

I see and touch.

My gaze

repeats a 

mother's promise:

I will watch

over you. 

I cocoon,

wrapping the world

in indiscriminate love

in order to

gently paralyze.

Quantum physics

tells me that

for every

anti-particle

there is a 

particle,

plus one. 

This imbalance is

ancient asymmetry

proving matter 

will outlast us.

So too

the elements,

stars, solar systems, 

planet Earth…

everything.

Now you know why

I must make 

the world

my own.

March 4th, 2021

 

Snow 

This furious snow

is a creation myth;

raw energy dancing 

in an animal eye,

milk thistle white

gone to seed,

blown by the breath

of a giddy God.

February 19th, 2021

 

                                         

    

Some Call It Sleep

Every night I fall asleep at the controls.

and that’s when I really go places.

Every night I’m kidnapped and taken

against my will to an undisclosed location.

Every night everything happens to me

when I can’t help but only do nothing.

Every night the paint flies off the canvas

leaving me to recollect it’s colors by heart.

Every night what happens at night stays

in the night like the negatives of lost photos. 

Every night I slip the bonds of my body

and head South of no North all alone.

Every night I take off my name

and leave my license on the nightstand.

Every night I find a moth in my shorts

beating its wings at the same rate as my heart.

Every night I close the book that is me

and read the history of what never happens.

Every night I toss and turn and in so doing

spark a flint beneath the kindling of my body.

Every night I pretend to die a good death

rehearsing by the light of fictional stars.

Every night I say a prayer but never say Amen

so that tomorrow will begin and end in devotion.

February 17, 2021

A Portrait of the Artist

As an Antibody

“There are no others.” 

                        ~Ramana Maharshi 

I don’t want to die

only to wake up 

and realize

I didn’t really know 

who I was

or where I 

left off.

Let alone

where I am

going.

Who among us

feels it would 

be impossible

to forget

such constructed

a reality,

or to never

have known

we were 

draftsmen, 

when 

every idea

begins it’s life

as a germ.

All that striving 

and wanting, 

and hunger,

then suddenly

the mirror

admits a

foreigner.

Couldn’t I have

just been glad 

to be alive?

What ever caused 

that feeling 

of nothing being

ever enough?

Had I 

thought to

lie still and listen 

to the machinations

of the world 

as it

simply happened

on it’s own accord

without re-making it 

into an image

for and of

 my own

design,

maybe I

could have

been

myself from

the beginning.

What did I 

not have that 

I felt 

so without,

and what if

in the end

that’s what

an illness was for;

to teach us how 

to stop needing 

to make things 

happen.

As if we had 

to behold a thing 

in order for 

it to be real;

that 

all becoming 

had needed us.

As Rumi wrote:

our looking

ripens things.

We all have neighbors 

who are pirates

and some who are 

predators.

I, who am 

a neighbor myself

and who

cannot find God

and have no idea 

who I am

in relation to Godliness

or where to look

to find you

have come to believe

we must look

straight into

each other.

What if I took 

to serving others,

whether as penance, 

or simply wanting

to make myself

useful?

Maybe God would

notice me if I 

were to do

one good thing 

for my neighbor 

if only

I could camouflage

my doing.

What if one day

I were to let 

the wind 

dictate my direction,

and dare to

be choice-less,

though that be

a choice in itself.

One sole day.

Not to choose. 

Not to shape 

what I give.

Not to cry 

for what I want. 

To put another first

whether I believe 

in them or not.

To witness 

without evaluating.

Then just maybe

I could

learn to live

at last

on a microbe

greater than

the circumference 

of myself.

February 15th, 2021

 

Vaccine 

After the vaccination I lay on the sofa

tracing the path of your injected germ 

planted like an insidious thought inside me.

I was Alicia Hubberman from Notorious 

languishing in a dark room waiting to die.

“They’re poisoning me,” I said to myself.

I know its foolish, but shots are triggering.

I had managed to avoid getting a flu shot

my entire adult life. Now I feel bitten, not

unlike the act of being raped in bright light,

fluorescents, in fact, and in front of others.

Couldn’t they see I was just a boy?

Snake bite, hornet sting, serrated dagger.

My castle has been penetrated and now

the enemy is within my walls plotting

my demise from behind every capillary.

So this is how I am to be gotten rid of. 

I was the boy that pleaded for a pill 

the size of a bullet, rather than be punctured.

I would swallow poison not to be stabbed

with so narrow a needle that my cells cry

out screaming in sheer expectation of it’s sting.

My blood stream flows everything toward my heart.

Even now I feel a sentence racing through my veins,

its cryptic message a fate my body must translate.

A sidewinder flicking its black tongue beneath my skin.

Now inside, I can’t fight you without fighting myself.

I have let the enemy in and have been

trespassed by a mercenary bullet-shaped worm

as if I ‘d been forced to eat a maggot

who’s mission is to multiply, swallowing me alive. 

I feel my skeleton ache like a despairing heart.

Why should this chaste duel have no love at stake?

There is no expelling you now,

no way to suck you out of my system. 

I am bit and slowly tainted by your genetics.

They tell me I will live past this attempted murder,

That something in me will find the will to rally.

With your offspring inside me programmed to kill,

my very own D-day may finally be at hand.

You who are the bite of a recluse spider 

whose sperm is aimed at my heart’s mandala,

how will I live with you as my captor?

No longer entirely myself, and at the mercy

of an unseen invader, we assemble our arsenals.

It’s not enough to know who will kill who.

Inside my heart my army gathers.

February 8th, 2021