Homeless Man and Buddy Wakefield Poem snippet

Suicide and Gravity - POEM

Suicide and Gravity

I’m sitting here at Powells Books on a rainy night in January

It’s ground zero for suicide talk
Only Juneau is worse (or maybe Utah)
Everyone has one foot in the grave here
And they all know
It’s gonna be
A damned vacation
When they get there

I’m smoking pot in the store

Through my electric vaporizer
I got a condition, after all
I just don’t remember
What it is
So I hope
He don’t ask

The cars driving by in front of the window from left to right

Make me believe I am traveling backwards in time
A croak/us folding up
The people that come and go in the chair next to me
Make me feel like I am moving in a donut sky
And I start to wonder why
I want to kiss the grizzled face of the man that plops down next to me
Smelling of whiskey and road and so much sAinT
That gravity just works differently on him 

And I wonder why I am alone and unhappy

And why I am in a crowd and crying

And why I can’t make her stay
And why I cut myself and think it’s good
And why I feel sorry for all the wrong people
And why I’m a middle-aged white man asking all these
Motherfucking
Questions
And I look up and the cars have stopped
And I see the face in the glass
And it’s me
And grizzled
And tired
And afflicted by gravity.

--Eric Marley

January 2013

Halo Light and You - For April (Poem)

Halo-Light and You

I’d like to be like…

The light that bounces off your halo

Always with you

Just observing

Admiring

Reflecting back your glow from the ether star

I would be content

Just seeing the way you interact

With a tomato

Deep and red and round and perfect

At the market.

I would not be silent

(Halo-light seldom is)

Instead I would be especially boisterous

Attracting others to you, saying,

Hey! You gotta see her!

Isn’t she beautiful?

I would be like your personal electron

Orbiting the nucleus of You

Never too far

Happy to be

At your service.

--Eric Marley

November 2012

Waiting - Updated Poem

Waiting

I'm lonely

Standing here at the same crossroads

Where you promised me redemption

Almost fifty years ago
Suitcase packed
Hopeful glance
Sunburned face
Windswept hair

My watch doesn't work any more
It always says it's noon and midnight
But I look at it anyway
And my heart clicks in my wrist
For a while yet

And I have to wonder
Do you stay away

So you can say

I never played

By your rules?

But what promises did you give me
Except that you'd arrive?

I look down both still roads today
And all I see are two dirt paths
Empty
Blowing dust
Tumble weed
Expansive blue
The definition of empty
Waiting for redemption
For new grass to grow
Where the roads
Move slow
Then stop
So stillness can catch up

Now the rotting clay of my stale belief
Molders under the weight of your inadequacy
In this place
You're always late;
I always wait.

But still…

Somewhere under all the words
The latent promises

There is something.

I know there is…

Somewhere.

There is something under what is taught

Something older than the words that are used to

Spread lies about You

There is the airless air

The lightless light

The soundless mirth

And more than anything else

I want to be there

I want us to be here
I want you to arrive
Finally
With excuses and promises I can believe

I want to drop my heavy soul

And float into you again

Merging far beyond mere words

Between the June strawberry  

And her red coat

Between the nucleus and the electron

Within the vastness of space

And the empty sockets of a prehistoric skull

In the first breath of death

And the last strife of life

Between the water and the fish

Within the realization of love

Outside the boundaries of movement

Within the home of the ancients

Until the night reverses itself

And the eastern star blooms,

I want to be reabsorbed.

I miss you.

I feel forsaken by you.

I want to love you.
I wish I understood you.

Please
Please
Please
Let me

Someday.

--Eric Marley

December 2012

I Love You (Prose)

I love you.
Let’s look at this, shall we?
First we have:

I....

It’s named after the things we see with.
It is a designation meaning “self”
It’s what we call our-Selves.
Self – apart from You
Self – with its needs
Self – with its wants
Self – with its beliefs
Self – the first syllable in the word “selfish”.
Self – with its caustic cauldron of feelings that keep many I’s closed
Self – the first thing that was and the last thing that will be
At least to the Self.

Next we have:
Love.
A moniker we use for the feeling we give everything from “strong like” to,
On the other end,
A motivation to
Sacrifice things like
Bodies
Time
Money
Lives
Life
Love is what brings.
Love is the conduit from the eternal to the mortal
(And as importantly)
The mortal to the eternal
Love blurs boundaries
Love blinds I’s.
Love seeps to the lowest point, filling it up
Making the same sound as pure water running across smooth stones
In the magic moments
When it does so.

You.
Separate from I
It’s named after the things that we are made to see with.
It is a designation meaning “apart”
It’s what we call (y)our Selves.
You – apart from my Self
You – with its needs
You – with its wants
You – with its beliefs
You – the first syllable in the word “universe”
You – with its caustic cauldron of feelings that keep many I’s closed
You – the first think that was and the last think there will be.
At least to the Self.

Is it any wonder that there is war?

You and I
Separated by the
One
Word
That could save us both.
We could see
With our true I’s
That there is no Self.
Ultimately
There is only
Love.

I will be satisfied
When I can look into your eyes
And instead of saying,
I love you
I will say only
Love.

--Eric Marley
November 2012

Leaves / Return (Poem)

Leaves/Return

I see brown leaves running down the highway.

They look terrified.

They dodge, jump and skip

This way and that
As they try to avoid the cars.

With a drowned-out crunch and a cloud of dust

Molecules of leaf-skin are released
To the throbbing pavement
And the complicated air

What is left of the leaf, smaller now

Continues to run
But another
And then another
And then another car
Dismembers them
Until finally…

With a great heave
And a simple sigh

The leaf soul returns

To the clouds in the sky.

At first they complain

To the great green god
Who simply smiles a rainbow hue
Until they laugh
And forget the fast cars
And the dark strip of crushed rocks
And remember other things:

Like unexpected warmth

On a wet mother limb

And their first peek from dark bark
At springtime blue sky and
Stern but smiling clouds;

And the young couple that sat in their shade

Looking at one another
In the same way that the great green god
Looks at them now,
Their eyes smiling rainbows; 

They recall the pleasant change

That made them into translucent light
And the peace they felt
As they released
To the sweet earth
That they had always admired
From a distance.

The great green god, knowing the answer

Then asks the leaf spirits
If they would like to visit again
To the place of the
Incomprehensible Dichotomy of Peace and Terror.

When they look back with some trepidation

The great green god smiles
And says, 

“How about you try once again

But this time, as a raindrop?”

When the leaf spirits look back with wonder

Considering this
The great green god adds,

“You can reflect my light back in many colors
Like you did as mature leaves
Except it will be in the sky
And you will give the people hope
And a reason to slow down
And pause, and wonder.”

 Leaf hands then raise.

 And raindrops fall down.

--Eric Marley

November 2012

Dream: August 24, 2012 (Dream)

DREAM, AUGUST 24, 2012 430am

I’m up before dawn because of a dream again.

In it, April and I were walking along a railroad track towards a station. We had just come off some adventure and were talking about it as we walked. I don’t know why we were walking the way we were; only that we were walking away from the streets, cars and grocery stores behind us. The adventure we had just come from had involved them all, and the experience was fresh in our minds.

As we walked – it seemed to be in the late morning – I saw someone approaching. It was a woman, dressed in a black overcoat. As she approached, I could tell she was a larger woman, with white hair. As she was about to pass, I jumped in front of her and looked hard at her face.

“Gramma Marley?” I almost yelled at her in surprise and happiness.

She looked at me as if she had almost hoped to walk by without saying anything. Nor did she smile at first. She did not look very flourishing; her skin had an almost grey pallor, and her eyes were likewise nowhere near their normal sparkle. However, she hugged me back when I hugged her. I introduced her to April and she said something about “lovely girl”. The three of us began to walk back to the train station to where I had been inexplicably walking with April.

“How have you been, Gramma? What have you been up to?”

I remember more the feeling of the conversation than the conversation itself, but we talked of her life, and how she was now back here looking around, for lack of a better term. She was looking in on her relatives. In the process of speaking about her life, she spoke of a song she had listened to during what she called “her divorce”, and how this song had cheered her. She spoke of friends and experiences she had had in her life. As she spoke, her skin got lighter, and her eyes began to sparkle like I remember them doing when I knew her here. She looked like herself again as we sat in that lonely train stop (it looked like a bus stop, really). The feeling was light and cheery.

April was sitting next to me, commenting and asking questions from time to time. Suddenly I saw something move in the near distance behind Gramma, about 30 yards away.   

I was addressing Gramma and was in mid-sentence, but I suddenly shouted, “Grampa!”

He was peering at us from a ways behind Gramma Marley. Only his head was visible because he had walked up an embankment on the other side of the station and the tracks from where we sat.

I ran over there, feeling badly and, to an extent, feeling Grandma’s own feelings about cutting our conversation short so abruptly and leaving here there alone with April. Her feelings were that it was expected because it was Grandpa, and that is indicative of how it always was in her life with him; always seeming to play second fiddle, never getting the attention she probably deserved as the strong personality she was. However, she had ultimately made a measure of peace with it, understood it, and was beginning to forgive it easily.

Grandpa looked fantastic. He was young as I had never seen him. He wore his black-rimmed glasses, and I think a leather jacket. His blue jeans were rolled up at the cuffs. We hugged each other and I smelled tobacco, as I remember smelling on him as a child. We spoke fondly, smiling and laughing regularly in our conversation. I don’t remember the specifics of it. He was not “with” Grandma, not at this point, but they kind of travelled together. We smiled at one another with the utmost familiarity and regard.

I saw that he had a cigarette in his hand, still smoking. “Grandpa, I always knew you as a smoker,” I had said in an observational, matter-of-fact tone. I had said it off the cuff, and I realized that it could be taken as an accusation as soon as I said it. It was not meant to be, nor was it taken by Grandpa as one, I could tell. However, all he did in response was make a very funny face, flick the cigarette off the tracks we had been standing upon, and turn and start jogging away down the tracks. I watched him go, smiling.

Returning to Gramma and April in the bus/train stop booth, we continued our conversation. Gramma affirmed that she and Grandpa were not as they had been in life, but that they were never too far apart. I got the impression that this was more Gramma’s doing than Grampa’s, but that there was some peace around the arrangement, for now.

We continued talking about Gramma’s life, remembering this and that, talking about people she had known and people we had both known. As we spoke, a few others gathered; the ones about whom we spoke. None of them looked especially familiar to me, but their countenances were all smiles, like old friends at a reunion.

Eventually it was time to go. I looked at Gramma. She fairly glowed, so different from when I first saw her. She thanked me, and I said we’d have to do it again sometime, talk about her life. She demurred, as Grandma always did when faced with a compliment, saying something like she wasn’t that important. I insisted, and we parted with a hug. And then she was gone.

As April and I stood there, I saw a crowd of people approach, almost innumerable. We were no longer in a bus/train station, but in something like an airport. They were coming down escalators on both sides of us. Some of the people looked familiar as they filed past, but most did not. But what came to me as I watched them pass was significant. The thought was, and I expressed it as absolute truth to April, “Every relationship we have in this life will be accounted for. How we treat every single person we run across matters somehow in the end. And a relationship can be something as simple as a nod and a wave on the freeway as we pass someone, or as complex as family ties. They all matter. And it’s important to talk about our relationships, particularly those of our family who have passed on,” I explained. “When they hear their names, they always come around to hear what is said. It is part of their work as a progressing soul, part of their judgment and glory, to hear stories of their mortal existence from the perspective of those that interacted with them here.” This felt like an important message I was to take away from this experience.

I awoke not long after this realization, and felt that both Grandpa and Grandma were near. I felt them standing just to the west of me. Humorously enough, in the Native American tradition I currently follow, this is the direction of “The Ancestors”. It seems we get communication in the voices we can understand.