A Reflex
Your eyes go white—they look backwards to see
The inside of your skull. Is it empty?
Your head caves into your neck—it's spinning,
Floating away simultaneously.
You blink, breathing little—the air's thinning.
A cold wind blows your body—then trembling—
And sweat freezes to your raw, thawing skin.
The ice will crack. Fractures are impending.
Fractal auras of scotoma sink it,
Blotching patches of sight. Shadows begin
To flash as your bones melt and drop. You've left
Yourself, so your chest clenches to open.
The soul and the self split into a cleft—
With amnesiac thoughts—and you're bereft
Of voluntary movements. You're not deft
With your hands—gestures stolen from their theft.
poem by Tim Stensloff
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Thirty Minutes
I sit in my car with the heater turned all the way up
On a cold winter's day.
I'm watching the snow fall on my windshield.
It obscures me from the other people in the parking lot.
I disappear in it.
The air is hot and stuffy.
It seems to crisp my bedroom eyes
And drain the sagging purple bags that make them heavy.
I'm just slowly sipping my coffee.
From a Styrofoam cup—
Hoping to make the moment last.
John Coltrane's playing "Ogunde"
From acd-r of mixed tracks playing
In my car stereo.
There's no words in it,
But I know he's saying.
Right now, I know what things mean.
I drift off.
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poem by Tim Stensloff
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In Effigy
Life no longer lacks meaning. We are surrounded by it.
We are engorged by reality, by understanding—
So much so that we as a species refuse to admit
That the truth as we know it is constantly demanding.
Day by day, our paradigms are in flux and expanding,
Forcing us to abolish our previous traditions.
All our empathy and intelligence notwithstanding,
We challenge the truisms of the human condition.
We need to renegotiate our prior positions,
Dismantling the wisdoms that we held in effigy.
Yet, despite our progresses, we thrive through our suspicions,
Afraid to embrace or disregard our identity.
We choose to live by process of social obfuscation
Rather than through the clarity of elucidation.
poem by Tim Stensloff
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Through a Slit in the Nuclear Blue
The exhilarating rush
of excitement approaches
in the rumbles of oncoming
death, the stochastic forecast
of tearing wings
and screeching
metal ripping in the troposphere
as our airplane lands in
the careless toss of a rampant
whirlwind—
the gleaming corona
reverberating in the stratus
of terrible thrushes
overtakes us, spiraling
us in truncated
a n d
ectopic traces of heaven—
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poem by Tim Stensloff
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Love and Boredom
I'm falling in love with you
Out of boredom
And dejection,
And out of being tired of myself.
I don't want to think anymore—
Take the thoughts away,
Though right now I'm only thinking about you
And thinking about how creepy it is
That I'm only thinking about you…
I wonder if I'm wasting my time,
But it's ok because time is a good thing to waste.
After all, we build our entire lives out of our obsessions,
Whether it's our jobs or our diet,
Or our sleep schedule or our family,
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poem by Tim Stensloff
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Funnel
A dog walks around the yard
With a funnel around its neck.
Its tongue drapes out from
Below his upper lip,
Daubing the plastic cone
With his ever-draining saliva,
Crusting it with his spit.
Yet,
He grins,
Smiling stupid,
In a moron's way,
Grimacing at the sunlight
As it sifts through the pellucid film
That protects him,
And into his bicolor eyes.
The monochromatic sight of his
Glows in all its early 1930's
Stock-nitrate glory,
Time burning out around the edges.
All the while,
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poem by Tim Stensloff
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An Opinion
An opinion can obliterate
So much more than Earth can devastate.
No trembling and monstrous, shattering quake
Can smash buildings like thoughts a mind can make.
Rash decisions will cause cities to break,
Crumbling by a heavy idea's weight.
The cracking whips, the gashing from thunder
Cannot beat down as hard as the plunder
That deviates all into a sunder.
The mind makes a disaster seem sedate.
Whirlwinds and tropical, gale-force breezes
Halt their wreckage, the destruction ceases,
When a thought is free as it pleases.
No swirling vortex can swell as irate.
Even if our world were to torch its lush land
In explosive paroxysms so grand
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poem by Tim Stensloff
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The Tiger
Like Durga with eighteen arms equipped,
Saddled on the back of a roaring tiger,
Slaying Mahishasura,
You strike terror in my heart
By your ways of virtue and power.
What invisible hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful syzygy?
I am more like the tiger,
But not the one your rode—
Rather, the tiger that sought
His humanity by roaming in a cave's darkness,
To eat nothing for one hundred days,
Unable to restrain my desire to wander
And explore what was enshrouded to me.
If I could be your tiger,
I wonder if I would no longer stray,
Learning to grasp ferociously
For the swelter that lies ahead,
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poem by Tim Stensloff
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Folds of Time
Wrap me up in the folds of time
Beneath these old blankets of snow.
Tuck my sides and pack my body
Tightly inside my dark shadow
Which disappears like clarity
In the depths of nocturnal space.
This dream seems like reality—
One I can readily embrace
Were it not deeply distorted
And amplified into static
Or if its behavior did seem
Slightly less than so erratic.
The velvet sheet of memories
Covers me, cocooned in its cloak.
I'm so tired upon waking,
Exhausted by what sense evokes
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poem by Tim Stensloff
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A Fixed Line
If happiness were a fixed line,
It would be contorted in the form
Of a circle,
Endlessly cycling
Toward itself,
And always a repeating motion
That ceases to amaze.
It would not be within that line
That we would experience the shattered
Fragments of joy
That gleam through the bloodshed—
The amaranthine bruising
That makes our skin heavy
From the gashes of sorrow—
That gleam like the glimmers of broken glass
Misted over the cool, dewy grass
In the moonlight.
The center of that circle would evade us
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poem by Tim Stensloff
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