Your Frown

Your Frown shines out like the rays of sun off a dead fish,

baking its putrid pink flesh and green scales

waterlogged as it floats at the surface of the salty sea water.

A pungent stench strikes the nose like a nailish shot of water into the sinuses

after a flip under water.

The face contraction that is your frown is like a dead and baking fish’s pungent odor

forcing my own face to frown,

like a yawn forces my own face to yawn.

Hope and Doubt

Different approaches to a particular situation, life in general, the near future, the possible, the probable. Hope and Doubt are inflections of an outcome that inevitably will reveal itself over time.

Hope and Doubt are two ways to view the world, a situation, a life, a moment, a dream, the future, a bet, a test, the possible, the unlikely, the miraculous, the probable, the would be, could be or should be. Two manners in which to extrapolate forward the you and the me, the us and the we.

Paradoxically, a hoped for or doubted possibility is substantially the same in either case; and only the spiritual tone, timber, flavor, shading, and register are different with respect to each inflected possibility

Two opposite charges on the same possible outcome, to Hope or to Doubt can shape an outcome before it happens. Hope and Doubt are like two different prayers about the same possibility, calling to our spirits, the Universe, God, and all Existence, accordingly.

Is not to hope that one will heal worlds apart from doubting that one will heal?

Is not to hope that one will overcome so diametrically opposed from doubting that one will?

Is not to hope to find love opposite to the doubting that love has touched one’s life?

Echo and Echoes

An echo can say a thousand words, Having no mouth, lungs, voice or will.

It has no choice, no volition , no freedom. It has no consciousness, being utterly unaware.

Having no thoughts, feelings or actions, no perceptions or sensations…

It has no past, present, nor future. No now and no then. No ever, no never, no could’ve or can.

Having no hope, no aspiration, no intention no motivation, it arises from nothing of substance, no past-life experience, nor memory.

An echo whispers faintly through the distance what has been said.

When non-vocal, it snappingly claps through the air as a wind shattered into sound.

It emerges from and fades back into nothing, the absence, the void of the silence.

Youngsters sometimes yell out – in order to hear echoes.

And children sometimes play with that voice of a seemingly similar self - the unseen child around some geographic corner. Would that nonbeing be of same age, height and profile?

Listening to children playing with echoes, the imagination longingly pines for a long lost child, a long lost cousin or sibling, or best friend. A missing twin brother or sister, mistakenly separated and taken mysteriously away.

Both would be yearning to talk, to converse face to face, and to do so together.

My mind feels these things when I recall a child playing with echoes.

Water

Gazing into the rippling surface of water, the mind is silenced, the self momentarily released: The uncountable crests the innumerable dips, the compounded chaos that can shine forth a million shards of sunlight, emerging and fading back into shadows - created as quickly as destroyed. The splendor of anything, a sunset, the moon—are ripped, bent, refracted into so many peices that the mind cannot remember or grasp the infinity of form, the uniformity of difference. Peering into this the mind is relaxed by the colors and textures of motion, by the movements of the water’s dynamic surface - a force of nature that rips thoughts away from minds and supplements in their place, meditations.

Fading Memorie

Like ocean waves, one fades as another overtakes it.
The first is wiped forever from the Earth.

Waves live in momentary glory; they are all to be consumed by the next
of their kind.

Small waves, Large Waves, Beautiful Waves, Weak Waves, Strong Waves,
Meek Waves, Fierce waves, Forceful waves --they each evaporate into
momentum dumped onto the sands and time.

When gone, no one remembers one of them that existed, and no one may;
for, there are too many for any one of them to be unique. They are
each too uniform in their difference, too similar in their chaotic
movement.

Waves are more numerous than the tiny grains of sand on a beach; yet,
however incredibly larger than the discreet granules, they are ever
more fleeting.

Beautiful while they exist, they retreat more quickly into obscurity;
dissovling back into the fabric of the ocean from whence the came;
losing all detail, all content, all individuality.

Waves are born. Waves journey, Waves die. It is the way; of ocean, of
memory, of life.

-Salvatore Labaro

The Queue

My piercing bladder informs me I have, at most, fifteen minutes. I am
in a line, I’ve been here for nearly an hour, making my way ever so
excruciatingly slowly to the counter. Everyone, the clerk, me, the
other patrons, we are all annoyed. Most of us try hard not to take it
out on one another. The middle aged white man in front of me, the one
who has been huffing and puffing for the last fifteen minutes, he is
not so kind. He has started to, what I call, “broadcast monologue.” My
mother used to do it when she cleaned up after my father and us around
the house. It is a kind of general rant directed at no one in
particular, but is conducted for everyone’s benefit indirectly. Very
passive aggressive. At first I thought that only the lady in front of
this man and myself behind were the only ones who could hear. But I
detect from the stiffening spines of those further ahead in line that
this is not the case. Others too are absorbing the spewed negativity.

Now he has started to look for support, he’s trying to build some kind
of a consensus. – Yes. It seems others are nodding as he monologues. I
feel sheepish when he turns to ask me some inane rhetorical question.
I wonder why my head is nodding as he arrogantly cajoles my assent.
What power has gripped my nerves and muscles and bones?

Why am I smiling at him?

We inch up in line, and I am informed by the bursting balloon in my
gut that I must soon find a bathroom, and quickly. Now the clerk can
hear the bitter man. He is offensive; she is offended. His degenerate
metamorphosis into an impatient eight year-old is completed.
It is so hot, and we are all soaked in our own perspiration.

It is exactly one minute until noon. As the man in front of me makes
it up to the window, the clock ticks. The clerk looks him up and down
as he is unloading negativity like a storm cloud discharging
electricity. She locks eyes with this man stands up and lifts her arm-
and all at once I can see and agree that he deserves to be smacked for
being both immature and obnoxious. Right at the moment that the swing
comes, a window is quickly, but elegantly, lowered over the counter
and snapped into place. A stock message saying something about county
offices closing each day for a one hour lunch break fades into the
background.

I cannot hear the angry man’s irate response – I am fleeing out of the
line and into the hallway desperately hoping I can remember where I
saw the rest-room and whispering silent prayers to God that it be
unoccupied.

-Salvatore Labaro