A Crystal Ballroom

It's a spectacularly mesmerizing
sight to watch in silence
as the night sky releases
countless specks of frozen
moisture, gleaming white and
phosphorescent, as though the
Universe has suddenly decided
it will no longer suspend
the infinity of stars that
brightly sequence its cold, dark
vastness. There they drift, in
an endless dance of lamplight-
enhanced glory outside my 
window as I prepare for bed. 
And when I awaken briefly in
time's wee hours, there they are,
still gently tumbling, casting an
otherwordly glow of warm peach
light to illuminate my bedroom, 
as in a dream. No dream, the 
morning affirms, as I, fresh from
sleep, view my world transformed
to a blazing crystal ballroom.

Ephemera

The uncertainty, she moans
with the impressively full
experience of her seventeen years,
is miserable. The self-assured young
woman who scoffs at her grandmother's
quaint but bothersome nudging
concerns and incessant reminders
which have never stopped the dark-haired
scholar from seeking advice from the
grey-haired lover of literature
now laments this waiting game
she incurred by studying which
centres of higher learning offered
the best academic courses in her chosen
field, guaranteeing future employment
and a satisfying life of goals achieved,
meticulously selecting minors and majors,
anxiously making application, unprepared
to live on the tenterhook of aspirations
in limbo. To the granddaughter's sigh
of exasperation, wishing to get on
with life, the grandmother reminds
how hers and her daughter's lives will
be diminished by the absence of the
aspiring scholar, studying far from home,
and they too must submit to a
longer-term agony of expectation.

Settling In

Cold, damp and ghastly grey,
the fog has made itself
comfortable for two days of
utter opacity settling over farms
and forests, towns, villages and
the city where night-time lights
pierce the noon-day's unsettling
gloom. Vehicles pass silently on
darkly-glazed highways whose
grassy medians begin to welcome
the frigid atmosphere transitioning
to sleet and snow, casting a brief
illuminating effect as light
standards bounce briefly bright
off the freshly flickering flakes.
Tiny stars briefly flaring then
dying an extinguished life in
this dank local micro-universe.
The burnt-charcoal clouds billowing
above and beyond admitting to no
escape when nature suddenly urges
an upper gale to nudge them aside
and the sun appears, a wan disk
searching release to scorch the fog
rising from the river beyond into
reluctant exile. And for one short
miraculous moment that splendid 
orb of gold gains traction and beams
its glory as darkness flees and a
flaming path of light paves its way
across the river. Gone as swiftly
as it appeared, the fog ferociously
returns to once again dominate
the winter-in-motion arras.

Evolving Tradition

Can it be so readily possible
to create the small drama of a culture
of dependent response on wild 
creatures that a tradition can ensue,
passed on and inherited through
some arcane osmosis of memory?
A wide forested area teeming
with birds and small furry animals
alert to the daily arrival of an
elderly couple dispensing and 
caching peanuts has developed a
woodland celebrity status, a 
devout following of creatures
clamouring for attention with
direct dispensing of edible treats,
and who are they, in response,
not to accede and bask in the
satisfaction achieved in contact
and exchange of pleasantries with
an alien planetary species not 
entirely unlike their very own?

Comprehending Nature

A nature lover, the bicycle paths
running through the woods of a
popular family hiking area
represented her joyously preferred
route to expressing her pleasure
in nature and being comfortably
within nature's precincts. She
assumed the smiling stranger
asking directions was someone
whose values and sensibilities
reflected her own. But they were
opposites. She, light-boned, blond 
and femininely eager to please,
and he, bulky and darkly hirsute,
nursed a deadly pathology of hatred
and a destructive penchant for 
committing vile acts of psychopathy.
A very short time after giving
her eager directions to the stranger
her sightless blue eyes remained
open to the green woods surrounding
the creek in which her rigid body
lay, her brain no longer alert and
happily comprehending nature.

The Dripping Fog

A moody day, a big sulk.
Incessant, creeping rain,
the droplets slightly shy of
light, yet constant and sneakily
penetrating laying down a slick
dark shine on every surface
and all living things.
Not a pretty day by 
any means; dripplingly mean.
And the thing of it is
we groped about in the dark
to reach that conclusion, at
morning, midday and dusk;
a dense, pervasive fog greyed
the atmosphere, a perfectly
unsplendid creation of nature's
typically unmeasured devising.

Overdue

Finally, and at long last
it comes to me, it has fully
penetrated my reluctant
consciousness that there is
nothing, no thing whatever
that it is possible, even 
plausible I might conceivably
do, to placate the demons
that maliciously inhabit the
skull of your unconscious
cranium. They have always
nestled there, when you were
young and small, so too were
they, yet puzzlingly evident and
I, in my hopeful innocence
looked toward the future when
they would vanish as your mind
matured and discarded their
discordant presence. It has taken
a half-century for the demons
to mature to absolute authority
and form to fully realize I fed
their appetite for fear and 
appeasement, nurturing their
triumph and producing the
product that is now you, 
fully formed, trampling my psyche,
raging, indefatigably spiteful.