Hannah

Hannah,
I remember your wild, hazel eyes
Iridescently ignited all those
Sweltering summer nights.
I saw happiness in you
And you saw happiness in ev'rything.

Hannah,
I remember your wind tattered hair
As it blew back and forth
In the breeze, swiftly swaying
By the rhythm of the swing set
In my back yard where we'd play.

Hannah,
I remember your small, slender frame
And the mousy laugh that would emanate from it.
I remember how your skin soaked up sun beams,
Leaving you golden,
Glowing like the fireflies we'd catch.

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poem by Tim Stensloff
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Advanced Calculus

Life is a series of reflex responses
That become learned patterns the more we do them
That become equations the more we interpret what we are doing,
And everything in our life can be boiled down to a matrix
Of numbers, coded as experience and stimuli,
And all I want to know is what the last digit is,
What that fraction of numerical meaning might pose,
How I could interpret it and extricate some sort of purpose from it,
But the numbers don't exactly add up to me,
And I was never so good at advanced calculus,
So maybe a chunk of this universal dialect doesn't make sense to me,
Doesn't formulate a language I can readily understand,
But maybe, just maybe, I hope that I might proselytize the date,
And that it might inform me, though so far it hasn't,
Making me more fearful, in fact, afraid of the possibility
That there is no reason to anything at all.

poem by Tim Stensloff
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Eclipse

I watch the moon eclipse the sun,
Curving over it in half-light,
Draining its dazzling beams into obscurity.
The moon looks like a king,
Hoisting the dead-sun's crown above its head
The corona latticing over the sky.
It takes dominion—for a brief period—
Of the astral realms that were once warmed
By the explosive temper of an imposing star.
I can look up to the sky,
Unaided by filters or indirect projection,
And admire its curious vastness and vacuity.
I can notice the well painted colors and balance
Of all things—
How spaces defines what I see.
Just then,
As my eyes relax to the diminished, cooling shade,
The sun pushes the moon to the side,
Recapturing control of the day-time
And golden flows cascade down into each open orifice.

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poem by Tim Stensloff
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The Fear of Returning to Life

I hear your voice,
Buzzing and humming in the distance,
Distorted though you're in front of me.
I hear you as a water-marked copy—
Separated by a barrier of letters and numbers,
Realization becoming fainter and fainter,
Fading.
My hand severs into multiple dimensions,
Splintering before my eyes in assorted colors,
Shifting like a holofoil card when tilted.
The light echoes against the ceiling—
Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth
Until I can no longer collect the signal,
Until the signal bleeds out
Into the air—against a wreck of disoriented thoughts
That sink the worry of trouble.
Fading
Is, in this moment, a sense of solace,
An uninhibited freedom—
A percolating swell of ecstasy.

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poem by Tim Stensloff
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Tell Me

Tell me, tell me, tell me what hides behind my skin—
Like whatever's in a window when you're in a room
Watching the curtains flutter in the wind.

Tell me how the weather is
When you're looking outside to somewhere open
With cloudless skies and blue space covering.

Tell me if it's warm where you come from
Or where my thoughts of you come from,
And tell me if the sun drapes over the horizon
And deep into the orange, dusted canyons.

Tell me if there is something
Like a garden, blooming with the spring
Of my youth, next to something sort of like an ocean,
Or something relaxing, with the waves parting,
And something I like, though I don't know what that is.

Tell me about the white nowhere

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poem by Tim Stensloff
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The Coffee Stain

The coffee stain imprinted on the page
of notebook paper I'm writing on right now
reminds me of your eyes—
dark, brown spirals cycling around
the pale blue lines that separate
my thoughts; the spacious white
that causes me to recall the downy
purity of the god[ess] I'd
forgotten somewhere. Though
it's just a fragment of a circle,
the roundness dissipating as it lifts,
the image remains, and the imperfections
that sink down beside the words I jot into the
sheets go far deeper than
these scribbles, discoloring the emptiness
further than I know how to admit. And I—
remembering your shape, the way you see, looking
through it— am happy, am awake—
by a jolt of reminiscent caffeine and an embrace that
kindles all tomorrow's pages— and I

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poem by Tim Stensloff
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Fresh Harvests

Neuroleptic liquids
Are dripping from the pipes,
Watering veg'tables
‘Til they're healthy and ripe.
The tranquilizing streams
Rushing in on the crops
Irrigate ceaselessly—
Flowing, never to stop.

All of the fresh harvests
Are kept under control.
Nature has been harnessed—
It's kept under control.

The land is fertilized
With processed compost soil.
The disinfected dirt
Should prevent any spoils.
Sublimated climates—
The seasons are sedate—

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poem by Tim Stensloff
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No False Veil

'Q'zi no vano thzina walizz.'

No false veil of time or space may intervene…

A red sky spreads like shingles under a rib,
and orange sunbursts beneath the leathery skin,
and somewhere a cirrhotic constellation
looms, speckling where figmentary,
invisible lines supersede the crossroads of
Misdirection.

The colors beam forth, klieg-light-esque,
after an interval of darkness, the sounds—
oscillating in the antennae
of our consciousness—

Cause me to receive life for a moment.

My reflexes twitch in yugen to hear
the thoracic auscultations that cross-cut

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poem by Tim Stensloff
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For Atheists on Christmas Day

It is my goal to find every spiritual experience I can,
So I became curious about what an atheist church might be like.
I sought out a place where I could go
To test myself, and question whether or not anything holistic
Could exist, challenging all my metaphysical quandaries
To find if I could, for that moment, believe in no deity—
Whether or not I actually do is irrelevant to understanding—
Or anything supernatural.
When I found that temple of doubt,
I realized what they were talking about,
Or at least became convinced that God had gone blind
Or has an astigmatism or needs glasses or something.
I lost my faith in all things right there.
I even lost my faith in my species,
Hoping that Descartes was completely wrong with
Cogito Ergo Sum, and that I wasn't real,
And only an illusion to something else
That makes no sense to me,
If me is what I am.
That's when I decided that I'm never going to Wal-Mart ever again.

poem by Tim Stensloff
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An Island

I've been drifting out, stranded and alone.
I'm an island uncharted on the map.
The whole time I've been secluded and lost
Watching washing water ripple and lap.
My heart breaks as waves do on the shore
While I think of how I once held your hand.
The tide of your love began to ebb then
My dreams crumbled like castles of sand.

I wasn't always desolate as this,
A nervous wreck surfing from emotion,
But in my attempts to desert the past,
I've abandoned all forms of devotion.
I'm drowning the distance here between us,
So no one can see it on the surface,
But memories of your caressing current
Flood and then the whole effort seems worthless.

I realize I'm living like a breeze,
Blown out from under my lost fantasies,

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poem by Tim Stensloff
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