While Waiting for Thunder

Sitting in exile, looking in the mirror

in the next room, she lies
to me, I want to see sunshine
I want to feel rain
but all I see is shadows
and mud
Speaking with angels can be a lonely pursuit
First there is the finding of them
then there is the translation to
here and now, that place I am
Then I go back to her
and tell her what I see
there is, in her eyes a fog
and that fog is me
Perhaps today that cloud will angry up itself
Grow dark with moisture
and flash
so brightly that everyone will see
remarking at its brilliance
they will hold ears ready
for what boom may be
She says
you are my sunshine, you are my rain
nothing more, nothing else
will be

©Frank Coughlin May 2011

Pictures of WCW (William Carlos Williams)

Stage One - They Come

Smiling happy voices toning
Something utterly unique
In terms of harmony
The same and more of it
They do not dance, no more than I can
Yet they make me look
and sound good too.
I do not know whether to thank them
or ignore them.

Stage Two - They Linger

Potatoes warm in the skillet
Refusing to mingle with onion bits
yet the aroma calls across
several rooms - I relent
I need this
I waited for you, but not for long

Stage Three - They Become Blind

In the hours I have lived,
so very few they are,
Someone has learned
faster is better, easy is even more
and work is what you do.
I feel old yet my thoughts are new.

How To Change the World (in four steps)

The mourning is where we start, smartly black,
Heading northward on the medicine wheel,
winter cold, and stunningly silent,  saving our grief
for some other time, Perhaps - definitely not now
when there is too many eyes, I do not trust them.
No matter, dust has changed to dust, what has gone
will not come back, positive attitude or not.
It is not this moment that has closed my heart,
this moment is the public moment, when you can
tell me anything - how you are sorry, how you know
what I feel - all the proper civilized saying one says
in front of the place where we are to let go of what has left.

They say one goes through shock and disbelieve
when emotional knives are thrust into the heart
Caesar's worst pain was seeing who had set upon him
Et tu - you brutal ones - whom I once called family.
Upon sight of my heart's essence flowing outward
in an unhealthy way, I died a death of disbelief,
and a blanket of emotions was buried deep
in my cocoon, my hibernating coma of numbness.
And I slept a good long sleep, dreaming of heaven.

Medicine wheel turns, this time to the east,
the place of beginnings, the place of birth,
bear wakes hungry, disoriented by the long dream.
I long to move to the south, the place of growth,
but I must sow the seeds that I have gathered from my dreams.
I must brake ground, unwilling ground, I must fight for these dreams.
The birds hunger for my failed dreams, harpies waiting for the earth,
the physical world to say - no way Jose - you are not good enough.
Your dreams must die - we live for your failure once again.
I must keep sowing these seeds - I must keep hope alive.

The forth step, of course, is the future - a place never reached
But we will ourselves there nonetheless, undaunted, dreams
intact, thriving in the glowing light know as love. It is a place
beyond Eden - for nothing grows in Eden - they only stay the same.
We have bigger dreams - dreams so bright they light the world at night.
And the only hunger is the hunger for more.

(©Frank Coughlin - April 2011)