the voices are overwhelming
I can hear so many conversations in my head a few good mostly not
all pointing to one subject
her
they talk about her life choices
making mentions of her checkered past.
Just another junkie, might as well throw her in the trash.
I'll say this line I just heard is classic
she is like problems you stuff in basements and attics.
An addict in an attic well that's a new play on words.
one voice cuts through all these conversations with three simple words
She has God.
He has seen every wrong and every wrong made right.
He walked with her in darkness and still brought her back to light.
He has watched every moment when she thought she was alone.
The nights she cried herself to sleep, in the car she called her home.
He seen all these things and still sees her for who she is.
All voices now stopped.
Thank you to the Father
my Savior, my Rock.
Isaiah 55:8-9
"For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the LORD. “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts."
Old age is
Legs made of crumbs, fingers becoming twigs
uneven floors and squeeze toys becoming hazardous
clusters of friends becoming spirits on the wing
all the others squat in attics or linger in the eaves.
If lucky enough, you get to hug a loved one once a week.
Old age is
a favorite hymn fleeing one note at a time
playground giggles skipping youth back into the light...
Chasing a sunrise after shuffling from the chains of night.
old age is a star and firefly slowly becoming one.
Old age is
pretending there's a piece of this world that still cares.
Reaching for a bowlegged tabby that's no longer there.
It's a silver-haired orphan opening another cold can of alone...
A universe of humanity becoming a Hawkins black hole.
Memories like lemon drops slipping from life's crystal bowl.
A trickster stripping away grace and tact long before you're gone.
Grandma Wisdom once said, "Old age isn't for sissies".
A cold rain is coming; I can feel it deep in my bones."
Tiny train...tiny memories...
how toys bring us back,
travel great distances
without actually moving --
how replicas resurrect
the plastic solders and tanks
in an attic trunk, my favorite
gun -- dry, bet the caps still
bang...?
Should these shaky old hands
pass them on? Or let them
desire their own -- to see what
future dusty attics will hold
after a fresh settling of years?
Spears, arrows, muskets, laser
blasters -- does anything really
change? Christ has not returned
despite our subsequent crucifixions....
Yet, love gives me hope....
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
We are the ones who settle
when no one is watching~
golden motes in slanting light,
the quiet archivists of attics.
We remember fingerprints
on forgotten glass, the sigh
of pages foxing and turning to amber.
We know how heavy stillness is~
how it clings to clocks stopped
at the same wrong hour.
We drift across rooms
like unfinished sentences,
marking the steady collapse
of monuments into memory.
No matter how clean your hands,
you cannot erase us forever.
We are patient.
We are waiting.
You will join us,
sooner
or later.
Ghosts that haunt empty spaces
Like objects in cabinets
that drift on window pains
As light out places the things
left in the corners of
attics and In-between
the walls and hidden faces,
memories like objects
that linger as bookmarks
to someone's history,
yellowing pages,
trinkets and toys,
old books and broken vases
sit like old photos faded,
memories of something
best left untouched or forgotten,
never stated, between the moments of memory
Like things left in shadows last and fated,
ghosts linger here and there,
pale movements in the Either,
objects of history,
a fall of light, a twist of shadow,
objects that haunt
like old souls in empty spaces…
Searching
for his palette
the painter
wanders on
Dreaming
of each color
to visualize
his song
Tubes of paint
lie scattered
unsqueezed
their caps remain
In attics
of blank canvasses
with images
— unframed
(Dreamsleep: July, 2025)
I write of fragments in my life
things written in diaries for attics
of memories- now just bones and dust
for those lost loves that still shatter my heart
of the people who sailed in gliding ships and left
and those who turned against me and left me broken
You want for the crawls and climbs,
sublimes and lemons.
Let the kid run, helplessly,
so he or she strives
for the unreachable star.
“Stop growing!” a mother hollers.
A father has their bags packed.
Shikata Ga Nai, the wise say.
Mother must cry when separated
by the wibble-wabble of time.
Dad must harumph over remnants,
tricycles and toys in garage and attics,
shed tears behind dry eyes.
Most children fall
into another’s arms
and mother must cry.
Shikata Ga Nai cannot be denied.
The silence of empty nest and eventual death.
The middle years of hugs from kids of kids.
Kids calling through the ether,
wondering why their kid must keep growing taller.
You want to tell the secret, but must hint
at the eventuality -
reality it seems,
Shikata Ga Nai -
don’t deny the truth.
Shikata Ga Nai - It cannot be helped.
Journals, diaries, and old love letters,
recollections from a long ago me,
Pulled form dusty bins hidden in attics,
springing into life through fond memory.
Read through misty eyes, those words of passion,
of desires, worries, joy, death, and sorrow,
Expressing our lust and undying love
yearning to face what hides in tomorrow.
Our eagerness of youth knew no boundaries,
as we prepared for love’s journey to start.
Though our minds were innocent and naive,
you and I have forever shared one heart.
Whisper
words of your love
into my soul's psyche,
etching into my memories
echoes
of times
now stored inside dusty attics;
forgotten in the end,
a summer spent
with you.
Whisper
echoes
of times
with you.
Beat Poets
We're cool and we're hip.
We're writing everything
you wish you wrote before.
We live in attics smoke weed
and drink cheap wine. We bleed
Howl and Ginsberg's other tears.
'math'...them
attics...
they be
'knot'...buzzing
without quest-shuns...
of
being...as some phi-loss-of-phi
contradict-shun in itself as just...
'a knot'...until-actually seen as an
no-there meant-all ab's track of mind...
stans sand
a poe-at-trees po-attics
means...
rhymes rye-me wry
and...
to add-verse adverses
with...
shortened short-end
messages...
as a mature amateurs
care-act-sure...
stan sand
What Is It
1.
The man who was my father sits
Wearing the face that will be mine,
Brooding in a place I cannot reach
In a time and space I'll never know
Speaks,when he does, as he never did before.
And so it comes to this, in the end
At least for far too many;
Live long enough,
The mind wearies of its ceaseless
Chasing after things,
Turns in, settles into the greyish No-Mans' Land
Of its Long-Ago,
The attics where the past lives on,
Where the fond and familiar reside.
Not so bad to settle there, I suppose,
Where everything moves through a better light,
Where the rough and uncertain
Goes smoothed and simplified;
The familiar rules, the strange is banned.
The price though, the loss, the erasure
Of so much of the Now;
All that which has travelled with you
Faded to obscurity
And you live among the unknown ghosts.
number addicts unfreeze the itch
in their number attics where-in
a'top any...
"logic-call" be
counts in/of...
all four directions as
imaginary number concepts
that be just...
multiples of square roots
of a minus-one...
yielding imaginary pictures giving a
shape/form to illustrate some space-time
that's unseen and so then given...
a number-mask by the mind that's
not of numbing-brrrrrs...
stan sand
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