Stories That We Should Tell

.“We didn’t become humans when we invented tools,”  “We became human when we looked at the person sitting across the fire and began to tell stories.”

-Guthrie Stafford

Flames burn and wrap around the darkness between us,

the light of the tree that once lived is re-igniting in its renewed since of purpose.

A single word is carried over the blue-grey smoke,

over the fragile distance,

something shifts in evolutions curve.

The heart is given a voice, a new song-

to then tell the stories that should be told.

-Joshua Fleming

 

 

Follow The Road

Travel well my friend, do not worry with the signs, of which way to go. The shoulders of the mountain, the teeth of the sea; they will teach the wanderer when to bend, when to bow, when to stay and when to move along.

-Joshua Fleming

 

 

 

 

 

Tracks and Images

Over the calm,

like an arctic fox.

Suddenly aware,

one could create everything.

Our train began to move,

in memory-somewhere else.

The green touched with grey,

pressing our faces on the cold glass of things past.

Children of wind and shadow,

we are older now

few words

something is beginning in our ending.

The train began to move.

-Joshua Fleming Remixed from various lines of; A Book Of Luminous Things, Czeslaw Milosz

^

the moon sleeps with grief

a white turtle without shadow

behind the aisles of bamboo

there is a knife and a wound

-Joshua Fleming; words recycled from random poetry

 

Music Of Spheres

He was walking a frozen road

in his pocket iron keys were jingling

and with his pointed shoe absent-mindedly

he kicked the cylinder

of an old can

which for a few seconds rolled its cold emptiness

wobbled for a while and stopped

under a sky studded with stars.

-Jean Follain

Translated from French by Czeslaw Milosz and Robert Hass

 

 

 

Pollenated

Bees, wind, pollen, cigarette butts, rain, gravity and gravel, a sliver of green washed over in yellow, demonstrations of world(s) colliding, transmuting suffering and sacrifice, for yield and yielding, Citrinitas.

-Joshua Fleming

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Learning

A firm line is drawn,

the Ocean – she smiles

turns into a patient wave.

Always arriving, never departing.

Removes the arrow, teaching the scar how to swim

and about her relations with the wind.

-Joshua Fleming

 

“Every time we walk along a beach some ancient urge disturbs us
so that we find ourselves shedding shoes and garments or scavenging

among seaweed and whitened timbers like the homesick refugees of a

long war…

Mostly the animals understand their roles, but man,
by comparison, seems troubled by a message that, it is often said,
he cannot quite remember or has gotten wrong… Bereft of instinct,
he must search continually for meanings… Man was a reader
before he became a writer, a reader of what Coleridge once called
the mighty alphabet of the universe.”

-Loren Eiseley

Image by: Joshua Fleming

What We Know For Sure

I know you…

maybe,    maybe I knew you,

what parts of you / you would allow me to hold in relief

without anxiety or disbelief,

an abstract painting to distribute your personage into an identity I could rely upon.

A door frame I could enter and exit without questioning

the house that is ruined,

or on fire,

or so delicately arranged as to mirror the heavens.

What do we know, who do we really know?

The stones seem the same

holding their positions like guardians of an unknown kingdom,

yet they too shift their shadows in relation to ground

reaffirming its position.

Uncertainty that is what we know or what can be actually known,

a infinitesimally small potential particle of glass,

shattered in the rearview of language, perception and belief.

As we are the passengers and drivers of reality

reaffirming itself in conversations about who we are and where we are going…

-Joshua Fleming

Inspired by: Michael D. Jackson, Lifeworlds

Image by: Yamasaki Ko-Ji

http://www.yamasakiko-ji.com

 

 

 

 

 

I saw it,

life…

emerge from the frame

the papyrus saturated in heavy dew—rubedo—the redding dawn.

before it was none,

now a face is appearing smiling-in a memory left unsettled.

removed from time,

a ghost appearing to welcome remembrance into a reflective mind.

the image stays on the square—although it is drawn into the dream,

the circle,

where past and present collide

exposed in the darkness of regret and loss,

the future has now arrived in the golden light of dusk,

I miss you dearly, until the dawn.

-Joshua Fleming