Abbey Road

by Michael Kriesel                                          

Apperception. Knowledge tattooed on my

brain. Like knowing my left hand’s there, or time’s

contemporaneous. Everything

demanding God’s attention all at once.

Every bill falls due now. No credit

for the lord of time who floats above the

grooves of linear experience. Old

hippies remember Abbey Road, side 2.

In grooves we live, forced forward. In dreams we

jump the vinyl wall, travel astrally.

Kept in line by time. The only way we

learn down here. The perfect training tool. Time

merely measuring matter in motion.

No matter, no time. Just eternity’s

ocean, and consciousness, attaining to

pure light’s height, looking down on its record,

cued to every note at once. A burst.

Release. We become lighthouses on a

shore with no sand or water, one at a

time. A light for others to steer towards,

until we’re all light. Eternity’s not

very long. A winter walk. A movie

where you’re frozen between frames, like slides. You

exit, enter doorways in the air, as

you balance on emptiness, between fields,

zippers jingling a second, stepping through. 

~ first published in The Writer

photoart from SAC photo

Luck

by Michael Kriesel

Standing in the doorway with a beer,

he always offered me a can

when I got home.

Ted was a retired navy chief

who lived next door

and drank alone,

but I’d been in the navy,

so we’d stand and shoot the shit

sometimes until the moths came out.

One time he told me how

he ran the war at night

when all the brass went home.

Ted was at the Pentagon during Vietnam.

Every night he’d get these giant photographs

from air reconnaissance to analyze.

Every night he’d tell

the pilots what to bomb.

I didn’t understand back then

the way he drank alone

with his own ghost,

though now I’m old enough

to just be glad I never

had the luck to kill someone—

much less whole photographs.

~ first published in Chiron Review