Some of my books

are freeing themselves

of me

as they travel the night trains

south & north,

and no longer can be veraciously located

geographically

in the table of contents I keep

This goes for Jalal al-din Rumi, Claude Lévi-Strauss,

Gary Snyder, Douglas Hofstadter and Chögyam Trungpa;

important fellow travellers,

who've regularly been part of my luggage

on planes long ago and on trains nowadays,

but sometimes haven't registered their move

in the indexes

In my dreams,

irrespective of whether north or south,

I'm dislocated too

- or perhaps spread like quantum waves

across time and space,

beyond my control

This morning, as I lay

in The Great Ship of Dreams,

my mother was off to se about my father,

who lived somewhere else,

though Mom died in 2007 and Dad in 1992,

and my son – 39 years old now -

poured a full pitcher of cold water over me,

to prove some point, at dream age circa 8,

leaving me quite devastated

when I woke in my northern bed,

as summer was obviously turning slowly into fall

(to paraphrase Dylan's Idiot Wind),

my realization being that time's too short

and the wounds too many

(to paraphrase my own On Time & Death)

for me to ever heal even a fraction

of them

before I cease

- so part of death

will be spent

under the black light

of evil stars,

in the backwash of dreary deeds

and uncontrolled rage