If Everything Is Maria Always something that needs to bekept from someone, and soI stay quiet Always a truth I would tell youthat might feel like a lie A room filled with enemies orex-lovers, a boat on fire in the … Continue reading
walk away/like a fool someone telling you it’salmost too late your entire life,and then it is, and is thiscomedy or is ittragedy? do you outlive your children orbury them all one at a time? and maybe i’m part ofthis particular … Continue reading
st elena speaks with the voice of a carrion bird the almost and thealways and the never and theneverything in between close yr eyes do you see now? let the map take youfrom here to there let the desert be … Continue reading
owego poem, from a great distance or all of us fucked like dogs in the rain or maybe just some of us beaten with the myth of god or of us raped but all of us left for dead and … Continue reading
the distant past, approaching standing in the sunlit spaces of late-afternoon shadows, he is talking to pollock who is dead but the truth is something else altogether warm for november but not … Continue reading
The night is an endless frustrating vast empty well into which I am continually falling but never reaching the bottom, never drawing closer to the malicious water. At 2 am, I wake up, my body electric, my eyes watchful and … Continue reading
The Red Line clitters and clatters and clutters along from Howard Avenue with its genuinely frightening demeanour and dark dangerous corners. The train clumps along through Rogers Park to the Loop and then to the terminus at 95th Street, A … Continue reading
I Age Arthritis and aging make it hard,I walk gingerly, with a cane, and walkslow, bent forward, fear threats,falls, fear denouement-I turn pages, my family albumsbecome a task.But I can still bake and shake,sugar cookies, sweet potato,lemon meringue pies.Alone, most … Continue reading
Bare trees stand like black cadavers outside my window in the darkest dreariest days ofMarch in Chicago.A whole row of them, without hope, with tangled teasing tumescent limbs and branchespointing everywhichway without insane order,Creating a beauty-reft thick dense woods of … Continue reading
The water enraptures my body, which feels like forest-shrouded silkAs I clip and clop my awkward way through the waterAnd then suddenly feel like a dolphin.The underneath of Walden Pond is riven by rivers of currents birthed from mysterious sources.As I swim, the current changes from foot to foot, now alienating cold, now feathery warmThe currents caress my body like eels that brush their liquid bodies against my chest, torso, groin, legs, tingling and tangling all up and down my skin, shagging me, changing me, freeing me.I slow down, feel the water like echoes of the past,Know that Thoreau swam and fished and walked and lived here.I feel the sensuous caress of history, of self-reflection, of rebellion against the ordinary.The electric call of infinite Walden seduces me with its sweet and subterranean melody,Like the trapezer who paints the last act.I swim past the why current,Feel the fins of curious fish brushing me.None knows really how deep Walden is,Or what the source of the pond is.It was born eons ago in the distant primordial past of the past of the earth,Born in the majestic ruptures of the earth,Born in the thousand-yard-deep chaos of water and stars,Lifeless at first, then slowly emerging in the slow movement of unforgiving atoms and aimless instinctsAnd meandering, sensuous being. Christopher Johnson is a writer based in the Chicago area. He was a merchant seaman, a high school English teacher, a corporate communications writer, a textbook editor, an educational consultant, and a free-lance writer. Published short stories, articles, … Continue reading