Sleep Recitation

January 26, 2023 ~ Kenneth P. Gurney ~ Leave a comment

It is nighttime.
I leave my body while it sleeps
and sit on the bed beside myself.

The digital clock’s red numbers display 12:53.
The motion sensor flips on an outside light.
The light comes through the blinds to brighten the walls.

There is the temptation to walk away from myself.
To go to the drawers and pack.
To take a trip.

My dreaming mind hikes Mount Wheeler under starlight.
My body remains in bed in Albuquerque.
My separate self is frozen in indecision.

I nod my head, consider the importance of remaining.
How I and this snoring body are a team.
Teamwork generates contentment.

I keep nodding.
The dream walk reaches Williams Lake.
I recite poems to night owls.

Meeting Engagement

September 18, 2022 ~ Kenneth P. Gurney ~ Leave a comment

Lori never knew me.
I made her up for poems.
For men to fight over like the Greek Helen.

Sometimes in the dark of night
she walks around
seeking a bridge over the canyon.

Lori does not understand
the rift in her earth
or that it mirrors the Taos gorge.

To date no men have fought over her.
Though, the ones she dates
fight with her regularly.

It has something to do with her
calling them cowards
for not appreciating her independence.

Lori sits at the edge of the rift
and looks down nine hundred feet
to the silvery strand of river.

Instead of a thousand ships launched
she would prefer a thousand engineers
building her that bridge.

Taos Ski Valley

September 1, 2022 ~ Kenneth P. Gurney ~ 1 Comment

Paul remembered his first kiss.
It was their fifth date.

He did not know they were dating.
He did not see the kiss coming.

It happened in the afternoon.
In the aspens on a familiar trail.

Paul noticed she behaved oddly that day.
On that walk to Williams Lake.

He expected a difficult story
that he was to listen to and not problem solve.

Then the wonder of the kiss under the aspen glow.
The first that became the first of many.

They held hands all the way back
walking on air to the trailhead.

Snow is not Necessary

April 5, 2022 ~ Kenneth P. Gurney ~ Leave a comment

Paul waited at Taos Gorge.
Snow fell blurring the edge.

The trail along the edge
became a bit more treacherous.

I mean the footing
became less sure for the unwary.

Paul did not move.
He felt each foot connect with stone.

Snow collected on the sage
on the ground and on his head and shoulders.

He wore a coat with a hood.
He wore hiking boots.

Standing looking out over the gorge
somehow has the power

to clean something up inside Paul.
It wicks away all his human problems.

He remained hours
and looked into the deep crack in the earth.

The snow swirled on odd air currents
affected by the rift.

Death Dropped By for Tea

January 29, 2022 ~ Kenneth P. Gurney ~ Leave a comment

Death’s face and body kept shifting
man to woman—woman to man.

There was something of Van Gogh
in his vestments.

She brought her own sunlight
to illuminate her face.

It was late afternoon Taos light—
honey colored and thick.

There was not much conversation.
Death listened through ear buds to Marie Baptiste.

When the song ended Death asked
if I would play a game of chess.

I thought how Seventh Seal of him
and a second later she opened the Queen’s gambit.

As the turns move pieces across the board
I wonder how Death had time for this leisure.

As he moved his knight
to capture my bishop, she said

The four apocalypse riders
saddle their horses.

Overnight Excursion

November 19, 2021 ~ Kenneth P. Gurney ~ Leave a comment

Paul leaves.
He drives away between two incidences.

One is in the open.
The other is underground.

He drives to Taos to take a room.
He drives to Taos Mountain.

On its flanks he expects to walk
the two incidences into understanding.

He does not expect the aspens or ponderosas to help.
Often they do in silent ways.

He does not expect the rocky ground to help.
Often it does with painful insight.

When he walks Taos Mountain
he walks that place that is half dream half real.

He takes himself to the shadow world.
The mountain does not lead him or lead him astray.

It is a place in his mind where pink
and indigo stripe the sky.

It is a place of thought and not-thought.
Where walking merges everything together.

The open incident speaks for itself.
The underground incident emerges in pictures.

Pictures borrowed from memory to create metaphor.
It requires time to learn language to describe itself.

Paul walks into a new vocabulary by the time
he reaches the lake.

He walks until light is wrung from the sky.
He returns to Taos for sleep.

He returns to us the next day.
He goes into his studio and writes.

Aspen Glow

October 28, 2021 ~ Kenneth P. Gurney ~ Leave a comment

Paul writes nature poems
on top of nature
in an act of literary graffiti.

The wind dismembers his poems quickly.
It mistakes the black ink
as industrial soot from all over the world.

Some days Paul writes city poems
on the natural landscape
to prepare it for urban sprawl.

The wind moves those poems around too
but more like paper litter
that flutters like dropped leaves.

He has lived in Taos New Mexico
for three years
and has no friends

from the Taos Pueblo
the Land Grant hispanic community
or the 60’s hippy generation.

He knows he moved to Taos
to stroke the mountain flanks
with his eyes.

To meet the ethereal beings
that live off of the hum
and draw rainbows down from the clouds.

A magpie lifts him out of this thinking
with a long sentence of magpie words.
He has not yet mastered magpie.

He begins writing a spirit poem
on the air in front of him
in a slanted sun script.

The magpie snatches the first line
flies with it up into an aspen
and drapes it on a branch like tinsel.

Away

October 27, 2021 ~ Kenneth P. Gurney ~ Leave a comment

Paul sits in nature.
He does not write a nature poem.

He sees a burger wrapper
rolled by the wind across his field of vision.

He gets up
removes the wrapper from this nature scene

and sits back down on brown pine needles
at the base of a ponderosa.

Paul recognizes he sits in nature
and the burger wrapper sits wadded up

in his left hip pocket
and wonders if that is separation enough?

He recognizes his father
would not think about such things.

His father would enjoy the mountain
and probably would not have picked up

the burger wrapper
figuring some very small animal would not starve

because it found the cheese and ketchup
stuck on the wrapper.

Annoyed Paul gets up and starts down the mountain
out of nature and back to the trailhead.

There might as well be a red line
at the edge of the trailhead parking lot.

One side would be marked nature.
The other side would be labeled not-nature.

Paul recognizes it is an artificial line
that he places on the trailhead parking lot.

It delineates where the feeling of Away enters his body.
Away from Taos New Mexico.

Away from traffic. From mechanical noises.
Away from cultural differences and local politics.

Away from trash littering the street.
Away from everything he needs to get away from.

Not A Fairy Tale

September 28, 2021 ~ Kenneth P. Gurney ~ Leave a comment

Paul wrote a love story.
It was a hate story too.

Overall on the imagined scales of justice
love outweighed hate a hundred to one.

The problem was a linear story
weighs things at different times.

There was a plot point two-thirds of the way
through the story

that hate in the fictional wife’s mind
tipped the scale against her husband

on the day she learned
he had an affair with her sister.

Although both Leviticus and Deuteronomy
prescribe death for adulterers

the wife chose leaving
the house that was not a home anymore—

to not be a wife anymore
and to find another hand to hold her hand.

Being in her thirties she was not afraid
of dying of loneliness.

She packed her few things and left
on a great American road trip.

She discovered in her third hotel room
that she did not miss

the sound of manly feet on the floor at night
or picking up his socks from around the house.

The day she was in Taos New Mexico
she saw a triple rainbow against the mountains.

She declared it a sign.
A new life fell into place as if waiting for her.

The man who once was her husband
married the woman who remained her sister.

She did not attend the wedding.

Arrival

January 5, 2021 ~ Kenneth P. Gurney ~ Leave a comment

Paul stands alone
in the crowded town square.

Market day and he
just stepped off the bus

duffel bag in hand
a blue kepi on his head.

Pendleton wool jacket
over blue jeans, over boots.

New town. New Job.
New friends to be made.

A tarot reader insists on
an eight hour minimum wage day

to hint at fortune
and future.

Paul notes the market’s attendants
from bejeweled upper class

to grimy huddles
of the homeless.

A girl smokes a cigarette.
It clouds her beauty.

A Christmas tree blinks
adjacent to a gazebo

where a mariachi band
plays Christian holiday standards.

He types an address
into his smart phone—

two point three mile walk
to an empty apartment

and, being Sunday,
no heat or electric

until tomorrow
after his first day on the job.