6: Eight Intrusions: Displacement

Originally written on July 16, 2017. “Dreaming of Derailing” is the sixth part in a series of eight. All images in the sequence originally captured at Yosemite National Park.

Tahoma

The mind which wanders off like a ghostly marmot’s screech
winds up consuming the spice of dirt from a nearby crevasse’s shadow.
This is the space that keeps me from feeling connected to humanity.
These are the jeers of shit spilling out of the opened, volcanic rear.
Life as the head with a buck to the mouth, a wad down the throat.
A consumption of the self’s value in bacteria-laden currency.
Outside I can hear the entertainment systems of neighbors blasting.
And beyond I can hear the Buddhist Temple revelatory and celebratory
and blasting the way the mind blasts when I stand beside myself
dreaming of being damned and committed to the cold wastes of hell,
a personal hell I’ve situated and constructed perfectly for myself,
beyond the need of the language’s intent, beyond the bony structures,
a padding or cocoon with the rotten failings compact and pressed,
ooze dripping out like Maine cobblestone, Rhode Island traffic,
the wretched Caucasian maw mincing words of man as doom,
a failure uninterrupted for decades with comets above and radiation below,
the breath one long string of disease and malcontent and why spread it,
why bring it upon this place and this place alone when I could be gone?
Take me the soul screams take me to the rupture of there from here.
Allow peace and some bountiful stability to exist in this place.
Vanquish the potential corruption held in the fatalistic eyes purple as foxglove,
the tendered sword ferns nearby slicing open the cages of shadow.
After the glacial melt and the wavering stance of a failing aged boy
there is the breathlessness that keeps the sunlight arched and sullen,
while spiritual agony and the resulting deadening is contracted through alga,
kept like a protected riddle behind the banishment of chilled lines of cloud,
sinking like pearl smother across a smear of paradisiacal remnants.
In search of the wild there is the wildest hunger hidden and mad
beyond reach of paintbrush and bear grass and dead heathers.
The wearied fawn-lily and grass-widow and mock-orange, even still
the last glimpse of the baldhip rose before the hunger is driven to death.
Displacement is the banishment that time demands before the boulder,
a push forth from erratic to static where peace may finally be excised.
Lingering across like a lumbering buffoon before the weathered trail,
and the breeze bathes the sweating spine in a cool, reassuring grasp.