We sit on our souls and suffer.

We sit on our souls and suffer.
The slings and arrows
of spring's lingering dreams
perturb our placid faces.
Through eyes blood red
from mourning tears forever
lost to the enveloping void.
The passing time that steals all meaning.
That drives man to vain attempts;
Facsimiles of all that we are,
or were, once, when still living.
Before reducing our infinite all down
to some damnable shorthand.
Our intimate Rosetta,
never truly to be deciphered.
Our all become mere mirror
while mute truth lies rotting, hollowly
echoing in the empty tomb within.

He was born the son of a sharecropper.
Heard the Devil's Dream played by blind fiddler Alf Kunkel at age 9.
His brother died bombing Tokyo.
He joined up to be a pilot like his brother, but they didn't take virgins, so he became a navigator.
Shot down over Germany.
Almost died from dysentery, his life was a gift from his German prison guard, "Popeye", who kept his prisoners alive despite the deaths of his family in allied bombings.
So his 6 children's lives were gifts of the German sergeant Popeye.
So his 3 grandchildren were likewise gifts.
Including myself.
Ran a convenience store, paying his way through college.
Became an engineer.
Invented a new kind of sprinkler.
Retired and divorced.
Travelled and seduced the world he loved.
He was a flame that lit all around him
with brilliant curiosity
and the generosity of his love.
A force of nature-a titan.
Now dead.

Time Entangled In My Beard

As a youth, I shaved sporadically and without significance at rough yearly intervals. The act I viewed as a kind of rebirth, a new beginning. A momentarily glimpse at the face I'd hidden beneath my homegrown mask. I saw it as a recurring point on a wheel outside of time. At a certain age I began the shave each day, and time became for me entangled in my beard, as if by my ever-thinner slicing of the time-like strands I might delay, or in fact defer forever, the inevitable end of hair/time.