I KNOW WHERE I AM HIDDEN and THIS GHOST by Donald L. Simons

I KNOW WHERE I AM HIDDEN and THIS GHOST by Donald L. Simons 


I saw me coming

I know where I am hidden

Follow the poplars and I am the one out of step

Next to the brook where I am playing alone

Searching everywhere for myself

When I am right underfoot.


My notch in the catacombs is empty now

Healed shut after all my departures

Even as I still hear the clanking bones,

All the empty bones.


There are advantages to being me when no one is looking.

Presence is hard to see.

I am the one in the room when no one is in the room

When the room is all there is.


I asked on my way out the door, but the door said no. 

It knew nothing it said, only how to open and close. 

I replied, on my way out of the door, that I did not know how to do that myself, but the door was now shut.


I do not miss my dead life

In those drawers up in the hills

Where a breath is only itself

And only once.

Only the drawers will miss me.

THIS GHOST

The roads I walk do not lead anywhere now, not even to the end.  And the people I pass are all me.  The only way I can get here is by not being here.

I have come upon it many times, this place that is no place, each time as if the first time, always the last time. 

A map was handed to me once more, the same map with the same roads going nowhere, except that there are fewer of them now.

What happens when there are no more roads?  It means that there are no more roads.

As for the hour here, it is all one hour, the same hour.

I found God this time, although not where I thought I would find him, not in death, not in this death.

But now who is this who delivers the map to me each time?  I have believed it was myself always, but it is not, not yet.

Standing over myself while standing over myself I am only corners now.

Calling after God

I saw God in the hallway and called after him,

but all he would say was that he never promised me anything.

I told him that I knew that already.

He didn’t want to be blamed, he said, to which I replied that I wouldn’t want to be blamed either.

It was encouraging.

There are residents here who are born, live, and die here unseen.

Eternal Spin

And so here we all spin for our eternity

In this forest of eternities

Emptying into where we have already been.

My leaves

I have fallen away from my leaves

These leaves of me so innocently old

As to miss me.

Vacuum

Death is a vacuum that

Only another vacuum can fill.

Shallow Grave

I am a shallow grave.

Reality

There is no such thing as water here,

Only the river it flows in.

Nestor

My name is Nestor

I hand maps to people.

Second awakening

The floor dropped out from under me

And I was standing in a bottomless pit, a hole in my mind

Nothing but darkness all the way down

To madness.

I wanted to say I told you so

But I didn’t tell me so

Because I was the one who insisted on unraveling myself

Of purging myself of myself

Leaving only this yarn of me

This pile of yarn in the dark.

Whereupon God opened his eyes all at once,

Not that God but this one, and we recognized

That neither of us recognized the other, and

that all we were was this steep space under the floor where neither of us had ever been before.

Corner of the night

Time chiming in the dark, in one spot in a corner of the dark, the same spot in the same corner of the dark, a high flame on a tiny candle staring at me slowly, dripping down the sides. 

I have confessed to monkhood, but nobody heard me, having not heard me myself.  I have also admitted to killing myself, in this same spot in this same corner of the dark, in this same dark of the night, the chiming.

There are no isolated events in the world, never just one of anything.

Spirals

Spirals do not end well.  Mine did not end well.

I no longer have a foreground or a background.

I want to be gone without a trace but I already am.

I do not want to be dead but I already am.

I left my breath behind.

The truth is that I do not want to be anywhere.  I cannot be happy anywhere.

My thinking mind watches as it ceases to exist.

Missing Person

I found myself missing.

Maps

The maps that Nestor handed out were not of roads but of catacombs, showing where all the buried were buried.

Again

All I remember is buzzing through a long barn,

When there was a loud crack from a far-off shadow

And all that was, was nothing again.