Have you ever watched the moon rise on the ocean

on a bright summer night

when all the stars are out

and by their light alone, you see your shadow?

When the whole world pretends to sleep,

and the air is thick with waves,

and rhythm,

and the smell of salt and seaweed?

When the sand is cold beneath your feet,

and the breeze brings a shiver,

and you startle when you accidentally walk past the water line

into a different substance

you can’t see

but which warns you

you wandered into a no-man’s-land between the worlds?

If you did, what did the moon whisper to you, my kindred lunatic?

It’d be awkward if it spoke to me alone.

I woke up one day, and I was someone else.

Or used to be someone else,

it’s hard to tell.

I woke up as someone I don’t know,

perched on a high stack of stills

depicting who I was yesterday,

last week,

the month before,

a stack I’ve been watching grow taller

and more wobbly

ever since.

I watch the sunset fill the room with the same eyes,

but different feeling.

I touch the ground with the same feet,

but different meaning.

I have this strangest feeling

I’m not me,

and never really was,

because that me I’m talking about

was just a fairy tale.

It didn’t exist.

“Ms. Jensen,” the young boy asked tentatively, and then a long pause followed, during which he kept wondering whether he should try to draw her attention some other way.

She was looking straight at him, or rather through him, with that stare which had become her trademark, grazing the top of her reading glasses as if she didn’t want the outside world to intrude upon her inner realm for too long.

She focused on him suddenly, as if she’d just dropped back into her body from God knows where, and smiled.

“Yes, Jimmy.”

“I brought back the game, Ms. Jensen,”…

I may yet be forgotten by the wind in its perpetual unrest,

as I stand here,

small and quiet,

watching the waves,

touching the breeze.

I am the inconspicuous navel of existence

and proof that I was born of it.

And as the bard once said,

I am the wind.

I sit inside my silence, not even awake, maybe, waiting patiently for the cocoon to open, not eager, not afraid.

I wait.

What is tomorrow, if not another today, or yesterday, just one more random access memory?

Life is that silence, and that waiting, and there is no now or later, only a continuum of time, woven with your soul.

See?

Now is already gone.

Slumbering in my cocoon, I dream of all the things that merit living, and that dream, that slumber, is life itself.

Somewhere in the interstitial space, in the crevices between the tiniest matter unseen, there is a thin dark substance, as elusive as waves on the water, as unsettling as an unexplainable gust of hot wind at the height of noon on a summer day.

It tries to seep into the clean with amoeba-like fingers, an evil smell whose source you can’t identify and which bounces about its containment, frustrated and ugly, the stench from the armpits of hatred.

I’m watching it with curiosity and detachment, seems like from very far away, seems like from another world where it no longer exists, the worthless artifact of an obsolete struggle.

(Excerpt from Francis Rosenfeld’s new book of poetry Don’t Look Down)

How do you tell old from older? If you can find references about it in ancient Greek mythology, there is no contest there. Welcome to the palace of the Minotaur, the strange labyrinth made of thirteen hundred rooms whose functions remain a mystery, a place that must have been very animated and colorful in its day, back in 1700BC, baked as it was by the tropical sun and surrounded by a blue sea.

The sun shines as brightly today as it did then, bouncing off the smooth white surfaces, making the details sharper and revealing strange mason marks carved in…

The soft breeze that touched me

has opened the sky

and sun dappled brightness like honey,

but who has the time for the birds in the trees

and genially watching the bunnies?

The grass looks alive

from the touch of the rain

and smells like a bright summer morning,

though summer is slowly approaching its end

and colorful leaves started falling.

I…is there an I where I stand,

or only the memory humming,

of all the past mornings collected before

the sun of this day started shining?

So total the feeling it is of this now,

that wraps so much comfort around me,

it draws all my soul to the being around,

the larger still me I’m becoming.

And voices insist that I come back to Earth,

they chide me for being absentminded.

But wait for a second,

you don’t understand!

I’m paying attention to it,

finally!