Time
I hear the sounds of muddy soldiers
Awakened I am at night
Under a silent moon and sleeping star, they march
The empty eyes
The white skeletons walking, the smoky battle of fury behind
What of these clean streets of time, emptied by a sweeping breeze?
These answered soldiers marching to that young man's call
Under the silent moon and sleeping star,
The deathly bones of skinless men
Awake I see what's left in time: their muddy sweeping lives

Dream Ache

Zigman Zibanski awoke with twigs grown out of his ears. He pulled at them in fear. He pulled harder and harder but the pain was too great and he let go in exhaustion. He awoke once more. For this wasn't reality at all; it had been another dream gone crazy.

That night he went to the One Lucky to drink. He kept secret from his friends, these strange dreams. But beneath his laughter he was afraid he could never let them go.

Scorn
I beg in haste sometimes,
Too fast for this world
I beg in haste for forgiveness
For food to fill a belly worn inside out,
This repentant soul, threadbare by guilt and scorn
Unfasten me in slowness, it heals all wounds in the end
So they say?
I know I beg in haste sometimes,
But I'm bleeding deep inside
Nourish me with a gilded hand
Gentleness in sweet caress
Brush me aside and I'll beg no more
But a repentant soul I'll never have
An ex-beggar's grief will weigh on me in guilt and scorn

Low
It's round midnight
I got a headache, cuz I'm all alone
I'll call Julie, but she's married now
I'd only wake the kids
There's my old friend Charlie Little,
But Drink killed him long ago
I guess when you're all alone, you're alone
When your head hurts like broken aspirin, you're alone
Lay down in pain, I will, and sleep in the space between the years

Ikiru
I hold an old picture that turns into sand
It sifts as Kodachrome to a bucket below
The photo is gone,but the reds remain
I take the bucket and tilt it into a children's playground,
sorry for the things I've never done

The Turn
I walk a long long walk on a desert avenue
In dreamless vision I spin 'roun. This is what I see:
Square Corner as mirage,
Shrouded in mystery
This misty rising, touching me inside,
like a silver key, tarnished I turn
A montage of souls break open as dark clouds on my dusty avenue
The cold rainfall drenching me for the return
Muddy steps weak and forlorn
Bedraggled I become
But the destination is not a journey
Square Corner is sweet, sweet home, I see an apparition's heart
A tarnished key, like this fallen life, will be turned

The Fallen
I was sitting on a hammock, just me and a broken arm. It said: I'm busted up inside, my elbow and wrist busted in two. I fell off a thirty foot wall and crashed on unconsecrated soil as hard as dried blood on desert ground.

That's no place to fall, I said.

You should know, Tortelli! he exclaimed. I saved your neck, your skull, your ribs from breaking into a thousand pieces.

I left the arm behind. Alone on the hammock I heard his baleful cry: Ingrate! Can't you feel, I'm too fractured to save your beaten soul!

What
What is the Square Corner?
The sun and stars at darkness's edge
Four walls like lonely men
What is the Square Corner?
An absence of time, of space, of wondrous sound
The Square Corner is blinding and light, sightless and unheard
The Square Corner is four walls
Oh, Square Corner, I say: sun and stars snake back from darkness's desperate edge