Once upon a time
There was more than enough time
To pony up
To horse around
To leap frog

Once upon a time
You could chicken out
Or worm your way in
You could cook your goose
And eat it too

Once upon a time
You could cry wolf
Or clam up
You could count sheep
Or tell a whale of a tale

You could get the monkey
Off your back
Then live high on the hog

But time has outfoxed us all
Nowadays time is on the lamb

“I wrote it ...
I didn’t have to say it
I questioned  
when answers tried to run and hide
I served
what time became and what it didn’t
I died
the way I lived — with no goodbye”


(Buried In Walden: September, 2025)

never knew it,
never was I self-percepted,
that anything exceptional,
lay within, neither obvious
or dormant, was just an ordinary
if not, extra-ordinary pained
child by peers and my surrounders

and my own words yet today,
do not confer any distinction
when yours irradiate me into
a stunned and silenced reverie,
a reminder, a minder, that talent
recognizes no laws of equilibrium,
equality, and certainty not, equity

so I read with shocked, shocked, I tell you,

bemusement but comprehensive perception
when the young and extra~special confide,
their own misperceptions, overwhelmed by
the anxiety
of the billions of sky stars, and letters in their
twinkling orbs when forming identifiable comets with tagalong
dust trails^ of the debris of words that are formed by
their travels and travails on orbits
not necessarily predetermined
by gravitational adult pulleys, a gravity upon
their projected, sometimes directed,
sometimes not,
trajectory

"and yet, though an orbit is a type of trajectory,
not all trajectories are orbits"

nor are
"some comets, particularly
those from outside our solar system,
that move so fast that the Sun's gravity
is not strong enough to capture them
into a closed orbit

These comets follow an open, curved path
through the solar system and then
continue on into interstellar space,
never to be seen again"

so be advised,
as you reassemble the debris from the multi~universe,
when assembling your owned,
unique~verse,
create your tail
and trail,
the futurity
of you is to be both
silent and loud,
absorbing and disgorging,
to awed and to be humbled,
by all that and those who went before,
all once younger and talented,
and knew this self-same anxiety,
but never let the fearing of their
the mystery of plotting of their
path
deter them
from exploring the skies and deep mines of the
sea trenches where undiscovered mysteries
abide

<nml>

4:59am
in the city where one can never see the
light of the stars,
particularly
by their owners

.
The goods trains roll on by,
passing my window at night
and I wonder, wonder,
where are you going to?
May I come?
May I lay back slowly
and let you take me somewhere?
Anywhere.
Anywhere but now.
For here I lay
counting the rhythmic pulses
of iron wheels on iron rails.
As goods trains roll on by.

I need to feel in my bones
these rhythmic pulses
like temperate rain on tin roofs
soothing the beat of a heart.
I want to go and to expand,
to flow through the world
at an even metronomic pace,
to find a place of balance.

And my inner eye like a clipper
sails into the void of dreams,
yet, somehow, more real to me
as I watch myself explore.
Teasing out the dark corners,
bringing light to their inherent terrors
and exposing myself to fears.
But who's fears?

Individual pieces or the whole puzzle?
Pieces missing, the puzzle incomplete.
Its hidden away in my mind
disjointedly interlocking around holes.

I wrote about my sanctuary.
A special garden in a special forest,
providing me with safety
for when the holes become to large.
To this retreat I speed
when the sensory input overloads,
blows a fuse or severs a link
to the circuit of attachment
and fractures the edges of the puzzle,
scattering the composite pieces.
The further dislocation of logic
as I sit in my sanctuary and weep.

And through tears I can see
light flooding in to me,
the blush of morning sky
as goods trains roll on by.


© Pagan Paul (30/01/20)