Some of my books
are freeing themselves
of me
as they travel the night trains
south & north,
and no longer can be veraciously located
geographically
in the table of contents I keep

This goes for Jalal al-din Rumi, Claude Lévi-Strauss,
Gary Snyder, Douglas Hofstadter and Chögyam Trungpa;
important fellow travellers,
who've regularly been part of my luggage
on planes long ago and on trains nowadays,
but sometimes haven't registered their move
in the indexes

In my dreams,
irrespective of whether north or south,
I'm dislocated too
- or perhaps spread like quantum waves
across time and space,
beyond my control

This morning, as I lay
in The Great Ship of Dreams,
my mother was off to se about my father,
who lived somewhere else,
though Mom died in 2007 and Dad in 1992,
and my son – 39 years old now -
poured a full pitcher of cold water over me,
to prove some point, at dream age circa 8,
leaving me quite devastated
when I woke in my northern bed,
as summer was obviously turning slowly into fall
(to paraphrase Dylan's Idiot Wind),
my realization being that time's too short
and the wounds too many
(to paraphrase my own On Time & Death)
for me to ever heal even a fraction
of them
before I cease
- so part of death
will be spent
under the black light
of evil stars,
in the backwash of dreary deeds
and uncontrolled rage