Each night is a change
bringing longer darkness
down from the mountains
east of home.

Nights follow shorter days
with angled sunlight.
Little bats flutter up
like troubled thoughts
into the twilight sky.

I stand up at 9 o’clock
and go out alone.
Night after night
we are together
then I’m alone.

Every night is longer
by degrees of solitude
and grief until I stop,
look back before I drive away.

God knows what might
be gone when I return,
when nights are forever
and lonely, and January bitter
toward the end of time.

J. Kyle Kimberlin
3rd Draft, 10.11.2017

Creative Commons Licensed

When we are ghosts
we will float gentle as light
through panes of glass
and slip into bottles of wine
or perfume and wait to be
poured out. That will be like
being born again or at least
remembered and we will
laugh for many years.

When we are ghosts
we will hide in the cold fireplace
through spring and summer
until the sky turns the color
of a dove’s wing and the trees
call back water to their trunks.
Then when the logs are lit
we’ll make the flames burn gold
and blue and dance into the ashes
of morning.

When we are ghosts
we will pose briefly in the smile
of every dog and wait
to be photographed and alight
in the face of every flower.
No one will recognize us
but we will not be sad, only
wishing forever for the kindness
of sleep.

J. Kyle Kimberlin
9.25.2017

Creative Commons Licensed

The world is raging through space,
turning and turning as the consciousness
of it struggles to comprehend, to come
to terms with itself. A house divided,
spinning away from creation.

I have declared myself non-combatant,
a conscientious objector in the battle
of awareness with the infinite abyss.
I have retired to my digs, to contemplation
of conflict in abstraction.

Wishing on a falling star, we have wished
for all of them to fall, to die in a fusion
with our hostile mind and time.
Maybe they were happy to explore
the cold and meaningless Void.

Conflict is attachment and sorrow
and we hold each other here, where
we fight over everything except
the Nothing that matters. We can
give our siblings no relief from shame.

Contemplation makes the room in summer
stuffy and warm. The dust, sifted by fans,
appears like snow on the furniture, until
no one comes to challenge my redemption
through the old screen door.

I am winding down to corruption
but have considered many battles,
daydreams of boredom and horror and glory
and now I find myself at peace.

J. Kyle Kimberlin

Creative Commons Licensed