You can walk through the cemeteries, feel grass whisper against your ankles, and understand that everyone you knew for most or all of your life, are gone from this earth.

Their voices, their laughter once sounds that elated all, gave you special moments to anticipate, but will fade as memories do, or pass into yesterday when you close your eyes in the final blink.

I think life will become too quiet, somber moments of reflection will then fill the niches where new memories might have formed with new tomorrows if you were not alone.

Wondering where time went, why life is fleeting even though you survived wars, depression, and poverty, and now you look at the calendar and see ninety years passed since your birth. Astonishing, grievous, time swallowed your life completely, perhaps even unexpectedly.

A fallen shadow may waver across the mown lawn under your hesitant step. There may be moonlight to illuminate the way, crawling up the side of headstones, buildings, blocking grief with the knowledge that once years past, that same light lit her face on the first night you sat together.

You held hands, leaning close, a gentle kiss marked the promise, planning in your hearts for the future, which would be yours, knowing that all of life lay spread out before you, a feast of time and experiences yet to be enjoyed.

Your life filled with thousands of events, failures and joys, hellos and goodbyes. Living was like tripping up a flight of stairs, sliding down an ice-coated hill on the toboggan of preparation.

Early in life each day seemed endless, the clock glacial. Three decades passed and time began a peculiar rush forward, one that seemed never to delay but to speed up.

Children became adults, had children, who then became adults, and then time quietly, clicked doors shut behind which friends and family once resided. Until now, you stand alone in a cemetery, walking through ankle high grass hoping the new moon overhead meant that life had meaning, fulfillment, but never knowing with certainty as you lower yourself to your knees and pray alongside her resting place.

If I strolled along the crest of a hill overlooking sand dunes hiding the beach from view you would not see my passing. Yet if I walked where you saw me as you had long in the past you would not know me. Memories are cellophane wrappers carefully applied to preserve what we experienced.

They rattle when we touch them, as if in warning, telling us that if we peeled away their protection, what we discovered once exposed to the light of present day might not reveal the knowledge we anticipated so anxiously.

Instead, if knowledge was not our desire but a comparison between then and now we might learn that what we left behind was a tenuous crystal eggshell of time. Within it lies trapped the fragile innocence of youth we then believed to be filled with the wisdom reserved for those who lived long enough to understand the true definition of tolerance upon which wisdom roots itself most securely.

Moreover, if we sought fondness along with those echoed whispers promises of joy and forever we might discover that promises were a moment’s gift and that forever ended a moment later.

Haunted by the why of yesterday we might learn that the why of today is but the precursor. Perhaps every why goes unanswered when definition is proven unnecessary? Asking may be a delay but not a query.

The sand across the top of the dunes swirled under a stiff breeze’s persuasion rattling across my feet as I moved forward. I will not walk where you might see me. I do not want to see you. Let the rustling cellophane of memory fade as a hawk’s feathers shivering the air does when she folds wings and drops to strike prey.

Copyright 2011 all rights reserved.

Distressing thoughts don’t burn brightly when I step into the night. It’s welcoming embrace with blank grays and deep shadows surrounding.

Once I walked the night with no more attention than a commuter riding a train with an iPhone’s emotional extension between his hands, thumbs dancing their absurd irrelevancy, meaningful to none but he.

Yet after daylight extinguishes where is the commuter? Still tapping clicking, still searching for connectedness, meaning perhaps where such are brief wisps of moments passed.

The day belongs to him. The night is mine as I rise from my daily slumber. Few who are out when I walk the city cares whether I exist as I pass without acknowledgement. So much pleasure gained by pure anonymity.

The urge of hunger comes slowly as I welcome its return after days without a presence I’ve live with for so very long. The hunters took her. Now my hunt begins.

Anger’s path seared the tranquil lake. Steam quivered rising to cloud hushed ideals of freedom.

Leaning forward each of us reached to touch the riled surface its tension then shattered by gentleness. The cavern echoed sorrow like a plague that filled each heart.

I whispered the raven’s song. With its silk-black feathers stretched to comb the air the creature swept back against what thrust it forward. The near silent brushing of wings drawn and feathered with curved tips lifted never yielding, but you were not there.

The raven flew.

The anguish you cannot speak. The anguish I cannot hear twisted your spirit tormented your life and walked across fragile surfaces crushing spring’s new sprouts now never growing.

I felt a languid stirring, heard melodic laughter hushed and shy. The channel’s flow opened not resisting any vessel’s passage. Overhead wings beat pulsating petting warm air rising lifting the feathered body to glimmer iridescent beneath the setting sun.

I opened my eyes after seeing you stand before me. A blink too slow you were gone.

The earth where I trod is where you never walked yet your steps go before me leading, to a place I have yet to visit.

Your thoughts now ethereal send images too vivid to ignore too vague to be dimensional. Like footprints through pelting snow your memory was mine alone passing through this reality of life like a blurred chameleon of time.

The secret was not in remembering but in remembrance. The thought not solid existence but woven fragments of past, juxtaposed crafting scenes to be recalled later as events lived through and beyond. If the listener cannot fathom the words approaching him fends off all but what was pleasant to hear the present shrivels into a past devoid of life.

Overhead hear the ancient Raven’s call

echoes spiraling its blackened plummet

each quill heart-beaten into a maul

its anger glistening death’s surfeit.

The raven sang unrecognized song. Black liquid feathers melted beneath the arc of sun ran red into brown dripping off ebon down liquefied yesterdays into the solitude of today, and then you are lost.

“I remember that name,”

he said to me,

“From the man who wore his shame,

and kept it company.”

And you my friend, are otherwise gone having left nothing behind to build memories nothing to cherish but what will never be.

And then too late you listened to the raven’s song.

Leaning against the tree carefully avoiding an angry burl I allowed my eyelids to drift down slowly closing out the green the ebony and the memory.

If I whisper, will she hear?

If I brush a fingertip across its surface

Will she feel my touch?

If I sit where last I saw her

Will she know I am there?

If I welcome the silence she once enjoyed

Will she brush against my shoulder?

We expect too much she said

And I could only wonder why we might

Strong wind carried scents of Queen Anne’s Lace layered over freshly cut Rosemary. I was then a boy in search, but not aware if I would discover something worthy. I just knew the search was my quest.

Each day I asked myself why, but could not always put words behind the query so why hung as a suspended moment that enticed the need to search further.

Wandering through forests not yet tamed by metal dozers of economic promise, a falling leaf, a rustled branch, or sparkling water in a small pond I felt certain lay as an undiscovered find. Yet why remained elusive, like a shadow seen at noon not at midnight. I knew it would reappear at sunrise.

Silent examination, patience’s companion, rode my shoulder when I left nature’s protection as if it knew I needed advise, or guidance when passing along trails trod by many people before me.

There was deep meaninglessness to their civilized hast, a confusion of chatter fired out like static lines of invisible whys. I was not sure they cared for the answers, but rather sought a definition for escape. The people around me seemed to cling to the refuge their questions wove around them like a garden spider’s five-foot web.

The search walked me through childhood, carried me into manhood until confronted with an answer I did not anticipate.

In war, I expended ammunition at an often-unseen enemy while we both responded to the call of life. Why never left me, yet again never resolved, but the, silence after conclusion rang with repercussions. The why of war bridges reality and passes into severed spirit. The unseen blood left dripping is like the breeze bearing gifts of Queen Anne’s Lace and freshly cut Rosemary, impossible to recapture and hold on the palm of peace, but balances perfectly on a blade of thorn.

Copyright 2011 All Rights Reserved.

Social media is more and more a means to a ruthlessly cruel end. Anyone with the slightest grudge against anyone else, including people they’ve never met personally can destroy anywhere from somewhat to totally another’s reputation and even their life.

Social media is a buffer protecting the attacker from the consequences of their decisions instead of forcing the attacker to verify their acquisitions. It denies the victim the ability to either retaliate in person or in civil court. Until corporations like Facebook, Twitter, and Google put in place the tools needed to assist the accused, those corporations are as guilty as the attacker.

The notion that humanity is the only intelligent species in the galaxy or universe is irrational.

First it assumes that other intelligent life forms are the same as humanity or close to it.

Second it assumes that other intelligent life forms want to leave their home world and travel to meet, well us. Or since humans love killing each other another sentient species would arrive with the intention of starting a war of conquest. You know travel umteen hundred light years passing millions of habitable world just to do what humans would do to them if we could.

Third it assumes that an intelligent life form would by nature seek the knowledge of space travel.

Fourth it assumes that a sign of intelligence is the wanton destruction of a species home world brought on by severe overpopulation, since that’s what we’re doing.

It does seem that some humans are actually arrogant enough to feel certain we’re it when ‘it’ is an intelligent life form. Humans as an example of an intelligent life form is one that is destroying its home world. By the end of this century it is quite possible that life on this planet will not be possible due to the extreme lack of resources such as clean drinking water and food. The oceans (Baltic Sea for starters) are showing signs of dying. No oceans, no life.

How’s that for signs of intelligence? Elected officials make every effort to ignore scientific truth so in the end they add a large quantity to their personal fortune. Life be damned. The future can go to hell.

Because we are ignorant enough to disbelieve the factual evidence of our planet wide destruction, surely can we be certain every other intelligent life form that might exist on another planet was, is, or will be the same.

Two examples show that as incorrect. Elephants and dolphins.

If another planet’s sentient species is aquatic, would that care about space flight? If it was avian, would it care about intergalactic travel? Traveling to find a species like us? Seriously?

Living as we do is not necessarily the only sign of intelligence or any kind of indication of intelligence. In fact it may be a sign of a species longing for the end of it all. We’ve included that scenario into most religions as a ‘just in case’.

Believing we are the only sentient species in the galaxy, the universe is ignorance wrapped in a candy coating of arrogance. Period.

I felt fortunate to meet Anne McCaffery in Hollywood, California several years ago. I had, of course created an image of her in my mind that made her into a person greater than most.

Instead the Dragon Creator was as ordinary as me and you. We talked about cats. I had a ginger Main Coon cat and she had a variety including Maine Coons. I wasn’t sure my cat could be a Maine Coon since he was orange. She assured me that color did not determine his designation as a Maine Coon cat.

I did comment on her dragon stories and she told me a movie may be in the works. Nothing to date but hope springs eternal.

More than most things fictional or real, I love the concept of dragons doing what I need them to accomplish. Think of a dozen that do your bidding. Traffic jam? A half dozen dragons led by a red swoop down and clear the way.

Bully pushing you to the brink of doing the unthinkable? A pair of reds should clear up the bully’s misguided thinking.

But it’s equally interesting to know how the idea of dragons came to be part of popular mythology.

Imagine you’re living about a thousand years ago. You discover the skull of a triceratops. No one then knew of dinosaurs as we do now, or at all. You carry the skull back to your village after a long and difficult effort to drag it up an on your mule drawn cart using say two logs as a ramp.

Everyone you meet are stunned by your discovery. Yet no one including local aristocracy can explain its existence. More bone are located and little by little they are assembled into a massive creature. Not all bone were triceratops, but who knew? Or who cared?

Finally it was decided, possibly by the prince, count, Duke, or whoever was in charge that the beast could fly. That would’ve proved frightening to the masses who lacked any real education. Who believed superstition as a way to understand the natural world outside the limits of their existence.

Of course, it’s possible even the noblemen and women believed it. Superstition guided most lives then even as it does quite a few now. Either way the man in charge now needed to be know as the man who skew dragons. Such power!

Time developed the discovery into serious mythology. Enough so even religions included dragons into their stories. During the Middle Ages dragons came to represent the devil. And the Christian Saint George was depicted as a dragon slayer. Although he was not known for that that in his lifetime.

Occasionally I love the innocence of ignorance. The creation of dragons is one of those occasions. And no, I’m not implying that any religion was or is founded on ignorance of any kind. Sigh. Sad how these days a disclaimer is more often than not, absolutely necessary.

However, Dragons should live forever.

Yahoo news and perhaps all online media new sources are the digital replacement of supermarket tabloids. Nothing but either the worst of humanity, politicians and their self-serving babble, or animals/pets acting as they do but interpreted as behaving in a way humans like just because humans want them to.

If you want to be depressed or sleepless read it all.

Before digital life people got involved in the physical reality of life and honestly did not care about the idiotic and often insane behavior of the scattered few we now focus on as if they represent us all.

Life was lived in a place controlled by each person that encompassed necessity, friends, and family. The hell with the rest of the world. If it didn’t trespass on an individual or their rights the individual ignored it.

Now we act as if individuality takes second place to everyone and thing else.

I suggest you Shut it all off and take a walk in the woods. And remember the only bear in the woods is the fear of a bear in the woods. Unless you’re in the Washington DC. There, creating fear is the lifeblood of denial.