How many days
have drawn you past
without your tears
the set grid’s lapse.
How many days
have felt skin strained
and locked your spine
the mind’s reach pained.
How many days
till deep you lay
release the bones
let force decay.
Category: Overarching
The pretence of preliminary knowing
I think
I know
but whether I know
I shall know
only when I know.
Fall scattered, folding contained
Trickles build floods
dripping tears being
drifting up close
besides wayside scattered.
Filling that
self feeling
pouring in not all in one day
holding dripping together,
self-shattered contained.
Fall-inward slowing
curling the center tender
wrapping the body by folding the mind
– in cradling feeling, inviting the bind.
Open Surrender
Where beyond do words lie
to grasp open meaning;
scattered past
fractured
beat in bluff visions
where singular truth was thought to prevail?
From literal bonds breathing relief –
minds breaking thoughts in open surrender
cradled eternal, by symbol beheld
Unnamable Fullness
– expanse rounded felt.
Paul-Linke-Ufer, Spring ’21
Traffic of humans and ducks
by the water
filling, bulging the buds
hanging in strings,
pearls
off branches of willows
weeping for friends long unseen
and lovers unlived.
Smiles from strangers
and laughs at the dogs;
life in the air of a city
losing, lost
longing
to leap in the arms of those strangers
and return to admissions of lust.
The surface in shine,
sun and friends there no longer unseen
emerging desire and welling up spring
in traffic down by the water.
Love unobserved
I found myself in the love you
would not give me;
like the smallest bird on the branch
which only sings its vast song
if left unobserved.
The Felt Unseen no Longer Unseen
Deeper still
(snakes shedding their skin)
restricted, no longer
existence through spring
expansion demanding from
(inward to outward)
the self,
my-self,
your-self,
breadth it-self.
Childlike, I fear
the unknown
ubiquitous vastness;
all the knowledge not known
all the prior unfelt
all the felt unseen
no longer unseen.
The arms of my fear cradle me
surrendered
to swelling,
(it all starts from the base)
free in the fire that burns in that base
which life begins and existence contains,
raising the world, vision and might
child to child, the cycle passed through
forces prior unfelt
now felt unseen
no longer unseen.
How may reality turn so palpable?
How may it have been not so before?
How may we live through it all
expanding in spirit,
bathing in light,
like nature in spring
existence by fire so bright
permitting it swell past fear’s shell
wound ’round it so tight?
Solitude at Ease
Can you be at ease
with the smell of withered grass
that spring to summer silently transforms;
with the untold heated rays,
that so luminous your fears and hopes do render;
with the oneness of existing merely as a one
that solitude upon your being forcefully affects?
Hearts of Love Forgotten
We walk and
we talk and
we cycle and
we flock
after months where we rested and
we waited and
we laid and
we missed.
Suddenly emerge and
we gather and
we bud;
ready to embrace and
to kiss one another and
to dance in the day and
in the night.
Forth with all the color and
the light and
coming thunder as
our hearts of love forgotten
to the early rays besotten
lustily we offer.
Rain / Deliverance
The rain of today
brings winds before of yesterday
and where the sun tomorrow may lie
strikes but a moment
as your touch upon mine
seldom in future and past may lay.
Tomorrow may shine on yesterday’s flurry,
but, embrace me, love!
Drink me, never but today forever,
those temporal torrents diluting
as through you I flow
and in us deliverance sustain.
Notes From Afar 