Not an unknown to compose as the raft floats or the motor boat roars on water.
The surface tension keeps us afloat.
The swirls and eddies of the subconscious are but the wrinkles of time giving testament
To our movement, our living evidence in the shit.
The stuff of the world where the Freudians gave Vienna a metaphor of psyche and
Birthed therapy for the mind.

We make our alignments and adjustments, trying to know what we need to stay awake,
To feel good, to make something, man and woman.
The generations of “Y” and the orthodoxy of the category of otherness,
As if the mind were a mill for virgin fields.
The strange hides in the plain sight of abundance, so we seek more,
The aggrandizement of our consciousness,
The meek squeak of hearts, our own and others.

You bring up the grief latent in words and everyone grows tired -
Like four courses of ice cream, speaking to the energy, newness and vitality of words.
I don’t necessarily want to be the one who brings us back in the passage of pre-birth pasts
But clearly the dead have sway.

The table set, the boughs of trees out the window just motioning a groan in a breeze
With freedom trailing along as a child with a string.
A notion in motion of fulfillment in time.
Boddhisatva on the aid of others, the long path
Of seawater taking what we meant away in her incessant murmur of near and more distant
Waves connected of course by the same great body of water.
Pulling us as the allure of moon slivers that don’t quite draw blood
But leave us wounded all the same.

Born of mother. Sprung from father, wailing helpless,
Wrapped in the creeds, the words of material wellness and
Ethereal, eternal uncertainty.

By Rolf Stavig
Saturday 1-30-2021