Clock Man and the Infinity Witch

Inspired by Elias's story The Clock Man

They had met before,
Clock Man and
the Infinity Witch,
several times, in fact.
The struggle was real
and it was intense,
waged through all
space and time.
He was into dividing and
she was into multiplying.
Her powers made
his clock face spin,
an attack of timefulness
resembling timelessness
in a way that frustrated
his need to assert limits.
He tried to capture her
in a net of days, even
an explosion of years,
but she off-stepped them
in the time it takes
to say "Death has died."
Clock Man's days were numbered.

***

Dair Mar Elia has Fallen

I stood in the monastery courtyard on the outskirts of Mosul
and watched the blackbirds fly silently over my head,
the war quickly forgotten, like a bad dream upon awakening.
They did not bring me bits of bread as they did St. Elias,
but instead dropped morsels of memory, missing my
two year old son and his mother many a thousand miles away.
Like a sentry, I wandered the high walls and looked out upon
a graveyard of military vehicles rusting in a nearby field.
I visited the cells where prayers could be felt echoing down
the centuries despite cycles of violence and destruction.
Ten years later I learn it has been utterly destroyed
with no stone left to sit upon another, like a piece of
lunar landscape dropped from the sky, devoid of grass
for grazing, the blackbirds gone to find another place to rest.


***

The Tether

It felt like his luck was running out,
tether let out inch by inch, year by year,
anchored in the bedrock of the remote past
when his beliefs were unshakeable.

If things got rough he would give it a tug
to feel the familiar tension and sigh deeply,
content that, if nothing else, he was secure.
Until, mid-journey, his life began to unravel.

The rope lay limp in his white knuckled fist,
heart sinking like a stone, eyes wet and weary,
his attempts to control his destiny waylaid
by Grace burning with a white hot fire.


***

I am GI Joe

Some time in the mid-seventies I had a GI Joe doll that I loved like the little brother I'd never had.  And by little, I mean ten inches tall with a Kung fu grip.  He symbolized the fullest degree of manhood to my small brain with his khaki military attire, beard, and shiny cut muscles.  I also had one of those small square booklets with a 45 record that you could follow with a *ding* for each turn of the page.  In this highly abbreviated adventure, GI Joe infiltrates an island on a rubber raft and battles a giant cobra guarding the thing he'd come to get which escapes my memory.  He wore his black skull cap that was visually contiguous with his black beard and mustache.  In my feverish imagination I saw myself as attaining this ideal when I reached full adulthood.

It snowed today and I had to take Elias to his tutoring session.  I grabbed a coat and a hat with little thought to any fashion ramifications that might come from what was at hand.  I dropped him off and then drove to a nearby Barnes & Noble to hang out and wait for him.  As I walked past the plate glass windows I was confronted by a life sized GI Joe mimicking my every movement.  This man was older, skinnier, and with glasses, but otherwise shockingly similar in appearance to that long forgotten doll.  Yes, more than forty years later and I have attained the appearance of that man who lassoed a giant cobra with an electrified cable to kill it and gain his prize.  My prize is in attaining the vision of a five year old's dream in whatever feeble form.  You're welcome, little 1975 version of Aaron Haney.


***

Diner Dreams

***

The planets align
in the diner lights
A litmus test of
days and nights
An inner flow of
musts and mights
Mapping a 'scape
of unseen sights

***