(Footsteps Within The Mind No More Than Shadows)

Footsteps within the mind

No more than shadows

Of a thought that fades

Through a moon-lit passage way heard by memory.

Footsteps within the mind

That pass without walking

But leave behind footprints within the mind

Moving along a path

Of mere shadows

Inside an artery of mirrors 

Reflecting the pulsations of dying candles,

The blue smoke that travels and disperses

Toward vanished places that turn to dazzling air,

Wisping into emptiness 

As if they never stood.

Memory a hall of stretching mirrors

That gaze expectantly themselves,

Reflecting dreams and time

Of which so little is remembered.

A blue moon passes

Through the loss of what I am saying,

Through the loss of what I am forgetting today

Of what happened yesterday

Only the moon remembers.

Something must be written down.  

The blue moon slips through this page,

Slips through the old buildings of my mind

As the rooftop of my skull 

Shelters teetering memory

I sail away from the world, from myself, 

Every word I write a gallant ship

Like the one I see moving closer toward the horizon, 

Toward invisibility.

Drifting away toward a sea of emptiness,

Drifting after this phrase that drifts from me through time,

That drifts through the past that is engulfed in the future,

That drifts through the future engulfed in the past as if

On a crest of a towering wave each ship   

And each word stood on fluid precipices

In the vast seas of time,

Drifting on the edge

As precarious and bewildering as the one previous.

From the patio of my forehead

I take a step forward into the future once more

Inside an evening whose hollowness will be of vaster magnitude

Than last night or the night before that were vaster 

Than the night before that. This is the womb of death.

This verse is more born than I. 

With every day I become more unborn.

These vagrant words are splashing waves 

On a page of the ocean 

That carves cliffs into nothingness, 

Leaving monumental seascapes behind in its wake.  

Words glitter like wave spume in the moonlight. 

I breath syllables that dissolve behind each new syllable

Into the ocean of writing in which I am buried at sea, my ashes

Spread to the tide that reaches from Hawaii to San Francisco

And from San Francisco to San Shi, Taiwan. 

Places along the Pacific I have been in my journey 

In which I left myself behind,

Never to be found again in that melding of past and future

Which only the moon recalls.  I have vague memories

Of having left myself behind at the Gulf of Cortez,  the Taiwan Straits,
The Yellow Sea, the Red Sea, and the Sea of Japan

And the Atlantic ocean off of the coast of Boston by plane. 

I have seen the tundra of Alaska

And the tundra of Manchuria by plane. But it's all so small

And vague now. Just a smoking ember of memory.  
Just blue smoke curling around and around...

A thought splits into a new thought the way lightning forks

And another day gives birth to memories that will become lost,

Just a flash of lightning,

And the fountain of mind and time never cease storming, 

Nestling into the garden

Billowing, arcing and spraying into the breeze of space

That feeds the fire of being.

Into the far provinces of being
We all move between birth and death,

Vagrant and exiled to the moment.  
Memory simply glimmers away

As if it  were sea spume or the shadow of a bird.  
Lost territories of huge mirrors

To be filled with life which our memory can’t fully contain.