For the Last Artist

The moment before I heard you were gone,

and in the shattered moment thereafter,

the difference I wished I'd never known,

each day in me begins to grow clearer.

Is it always so fragile creation?

I know the madness described inside you,

the drawings on your arms for protection,

the ideas you aspired to make true,

in some else's imagination

will slowly fade and lose identity.

What becomes of the world we leave too soon?

Of all that has been seen, what may we see?

If it's true that what you've lived lives in them

your future may now be another's dream.

Ben Gage

music

The World is on Fire

The world is on fire

and it has ever been so,

if anyone tells you no

they are a liar.

All our plans and wishes

are paper balls thrown in the blaze,

I can see tomorrow behind the smoky haze

burn brilliant bright before bursting into ashes.

The fiction of innocence

is suspended. Our lost faith

describes the truth

of a life without consequence.

Is the end of days this sad?

Like being alone forever

in perpetual fever

for the love you never had:

the wind blows your hair in a cloud around your face,

a wild web crocheted cloth of thread

softly dances about your head

while your eyes peek through the lace.

Ben Gage

The Birth

The dark cloud disappeared in the black night:

a strange bright star lit the sky with candles.
Arriving too late to find rooms, for naught,
they lay with the animals in stables.
Both anxious to end their predicament,
aching, drained of everything but spirit,
unprepared for what must be heaven sent,
fearful they were not anywhere near it,
he held her hands as she closed her eyes
and suffered through the first contraction.
“God help me?” he asks as his woman cries,
unaware of the perilous question.
Exhausted, numb, like anybody would,
overwhelmed by all that’s misunderstood.

Merry Xmas

Ben Gage

The Mammoth Hunter

From a faraway dark horizon, shapes

appear on the crescent foreshortening,

their great lumber thump a rhythmic drumming

headed towards lost ancestral landscapes.

To the slow earth quake thrum below my feet,

a slow rumble ocean of tall grasses

wave like crowds to the frequence of the beat

their bunches of seeds as each foot passes.

How long has extinction kept you away?

Who told the herd to leave and not come back?

When did cave drawings fail to make them stay?

Will they leave a trail that I can track?

It’s a holographic world of visions

played out upon a shared screen by pixel

in a struggle to make believable

what’s real despite the contradictions.

Ben Gage

The voice that use to call me can speak now

The voice that use to call me can speak now,
from a far place out where I could not look,
past what I should and should not want to know,
as if I were in a dream and then I woke.
I can not say if what I hear is near
or if the sounds were meant for me to find.
I am stalked by what there is to fear:
I have left tracks in search of what is mine.
Short of breath, the nerve I use raw and red,
I see more with my eyes closed tight and blurred,
I can smell the meat of the dark thing bled.
I must be close if that is what I heard.
I did not know why what was in the hunt
could turn, charge and change all I thought to want.

Ben Gage

In the Old Beginning

In the old beginning while the world spun
a different orbit, drawing upon a
large wild nature, was life a burden?
Born small and powerless, each night and day
hiding in sanctuaries, traveling
for food and safety, hunting and hunted,
armed with only the hand tools we can bring,
before the naming of the names of God,
were we worst off, naked, less possessive?
Hungry for what hasn’t nor shouldn’t be,
unable to demand which life to live,
we were in a paradise, weren’t we?

Each morning greeted by more explosions
a hemisphere apart, scenes of neighbors
and neighborhoods diminished by fractions
with each bomb burst boom breaking what took years
to make: a building or a back the same,
suddenly each an object in the way,
another target in a weapon’s aim,
a small ordinary act of a day,
a vignette of an on-going story,
without an ending that can be written,
able to find peace for everybody,
in this civilized moment we live in.

Maybe there are no words in language yet
created to speak what is a secret.
Like some cave painting whose colors are wet
the meaning’s not the metaphor of it.
Buried deep in an impossible place,
discovered by a random accident,
painted by an artist without a face,
outside natural light, incandescent,
the truth somehow survives for all to see.
Perhaps it has its start as a picture,
drawn on a private wall from memory,
explanations can always come later.


Ben Gage