Vertigo Dawn

Author's note: 

This is a free verse narrative poem about Wednesday Morning September 26, 2012 at 6:OO AM...The prose poem before this was part of the aftermath of that morning...This defining life moment is about far more than experiencing Vertigo for the first time...

Vertigo Dawn

The dawning ended the rumination

of a reoccurring dream’s silent reverie.

Sweat soaked sheets adorned traces

of the realistic repressed passion

of a slumbering melodramatic feverish delusion.

It was a normal awakening moment’s sleepy imaginings,

vividly revealing my shy and yet poignant desires.

I don’t know how or where I went wrong

I don’t know where I belong

I’m tired… exhausted from sleeping alone

For a fleeting moment, I thought I was real

And yet as soon as that dream dust cleared from my eyes,

I became overwhelmed by doubt

When all heightened emotions were borne out,

in the anguish of austere self-discovery.

Clearly an illusion manifested into my mind,

as an imaginary chimera of hope sown in hopelessness.

Disenchantment from too many sleepless nights,

viewing the awakening dawn,

from the lonely cotton sheets.

As I rose to dry my naked skin,

an unfamiliar motion enveloped me.

Overcome by Vertigo and fear,

I felt I was consciously floating through the sky

Frantically panicking, fingers pinching perpeation soaked skin !

Hands groping for a vacant heartbeat !

Mind void of sound,

without a familiar panicked, pounding, pulse

It seemed the outbound stage

had finally arrived at the station.

Conscious life spun as it buzzed throughout a vortex maze

Visualizing this day of reckoning had come,

a sense of final peace overcame fear

Envisioning the time to free the child transcends illumination

The instant to take the magic carpet ride to final distant horizons

Where profound, unconditional love was in the making

I had dreamed I had arrived on the other side

Regretfully realizing my greatest fear…

Never remotely imagining…

That final flight would be alone

The world whirled around inside

a mind’s tempest of emotions

Recognizing these were the final moments,

tears flooded the sweat soaked sheets

as that last lap around the circle was sent in motion.

The screen flashed every lost lifetime of scenes

onto my mind made tempest theater

The final reel exposed my soul’s final regrets

My tear soaked, bearded face screamed out

In a soulful release of sighs too deep for words

A moment to remember, a moment to forget

The more things change the more they stay the same

I visualized I was an orphaned child

Finally finding the undiscovered pathway

to my forever home..

Harlon Rivers...September 29th, 2012

Authors' notes:

This has been an extraordinary week. An emotional roller coaster ride of epic proportions. This week I have traveled from the threshold of a glorious dream come true to falling unexpectedly off the cusp of life as I knew it. I have never experienced Vertigo but I have experience dejection. Neither is pretty...Sometimes life events just get your attention for the aftermath that follows.   There is something to be said about "when you least expect it"...

I thought Vertigo was something from the great cosmos beyond and in an unusual way it is. Maybe change beyond experiencing Vertigo has been brewing for a lifetime. Maybe change is finally here...too many things have happened to deny these winds of change. I have spent a lifetime getting to this moment only to find that the more things change the more they stay the same. This epiphany is not completely clear to me yet, but I know that this week has definitively changed me in this specific stage of life.   We do not know what it is like to pass...some have come back, no one I have ever spoken with.  Maybe it is like Vertigo and without someone there to see you or touch you or say goodbye or I would miss you if you were gone, we may not even realize we have stepped into another realm. If we experience dejection we may not even care or even welcome that moment of freedom.   Maybe it would not be recognisable, as if we left one dream world into another...One door closes another opens is what I have always been told.   A can of worms has been opened in my heart and soul...

Something like the "Word Whisperer" poetry blog would fade with the Author's avatar, soon becoming lost in Internet space.  IRL..."If a tree falls in the forest, does anybody hear?"   "When a faceless blogger or stranger in the computer screen on the internet is left for dead would anybody hear?"    I can't handle being DELETED...BLOCKED...UNFRIENDED...It's hard enough when we are just simpily ignored.    Maybe it's all an illusion of a troubled mind.  I do not publish anywhere else anymore, so much of what is here is more a less a type of memoir of my life.  I call it "thinking out loud".    Most do it from time to time and occasionally it can cut like a knife to the bone unintentionally...

If I ever get serious about it in these pages I fill, there may be another 100 poems already written to post here. Many published, many more not , most yet to be written... in order to complete a lonely writers portrait..  Its never too late too write in an effort to find understanding.   Since I left other writing sites after I had rotators cuff surgery and recovery has been at a snails pace. I have felt like a man on a secluded island, a feeling I am quite familiar with.  This has been going on for 6 months, over three since surgery and there is likely another 6 months to follow...

"I ain't no lamp but my wicks burning low" a pearl of wisdom from the folksy  Low Anthem song, Ghost Woman Blues linked below.

Not that it matters to anyone but me, but maybe someday I will tell some people from my past and my present, who think they knew me to come and see who I actually am...If I'm going to do it, I need to do it because I do not know what it means the exact moment we realize our mortality.  It feels epic...I have recognized other's mortality many, many times before but this time it is mine and eerily different.   This time I see it and believe it...I was blinded by the light.   When I screamed out into the darkness Wednesday morning...there was complete silence.  Not a soul answered... Since that moment there has been a string of events that tell me my life will never be the same again...I have discovered I am not who I thought I was...

Ghost Woman Blues by The Low Anthem

Authors note:

If there is any interest in why this poem was written just follow the link to the side bar called

Diary of the Falling Dominoes

Thank you for visiting The Word Whisperer…

http://harlonrivers.blogspot.com/p/oct-1st-oct-6thdiary-of-falling.html

Broken Arrow

Some things we learn so slowly... Some things we never learn... Some things we learn the hard way... The only way to survive a broken heart is to leave Cupid's broken arrow and hope it heals with a scar before it drips and drains all remaining life from your heart...

The spell was cast by memory

With the wanderlust of a rolling stone

Traces of broken dream’s dust and ashes

Fell like love cast out with a claustrophobic moan

A broken heart could not convince me

Every heart has not a home

 A lonely sailor, banished, cast out for the final voyage

Into a world without an island to feel a tranquil peace

Born of mother earth, into a race where faded memories were erased

Journeying out into an unknown raging sea, before learning to walk the land

Dreams of some lost abandoned safe haven, an illusion

Welcoming shorelines were never discovered by this soulful man

A world where what’s lost is rarely found

Where square pegs never fit the round 

When the die is cast from molten life

It cools and forms flesh and bone

Insignificance, abandoned, left feeling like a heart without a home

In the end the faded memory is chiseled and scribed on some forgotten mossy stone.

In a distance I hear the eerie silence

The ship's final soul has sailed on a windless sea

Drifting infinite fathoms, the icon of a loveless being, another random lifetime lived, 
like a lonely sunken ship of treasures, lost in the darkness undersea.

I’ll walk another endless mile always knowing,

there will never be a home for my heart in the world ahead of me.

Reborn into a world where every passing thought becomes a fading dream

Love may be the last gasping breath left unbreathed

Belonging is a walking contradiction of my self esteem

Oh! heart and soul be set free...

Exhausted and weary of struggles, forsaken by gravity

No longer resisting the absolute surrender, the final choice that sets your soul free...

© 2012 Harlon Rivers… September 27th, 2012

The Third Day of Autumn

Happy birthday Dad...Do you remember this place?

Life as a child was not always difficult; after all I was a child. I’m thankful that through self-discovery, I am now able to search and find pleasant memories of good times past, to find a balance from my half empty half full childhood. Here is a snippet of my “Olden Days.”

I always wanted to be a farmer. Dad’s oldest sister had 80 acres in a small town along the Molalla River by Union Mills. He was a fireman for my first 15 years. With 24hr on and 48hr off shifts, he would work the land for the family. I would ride around on the fender of that old Ford tractor and keep him company. My boarder collie, Solo would run along with us and catch field mice, gophers and moles. It was a wonderful memory. When the crops were in during the summer we went fishing and camping all the time. Here is a great example of me and my dad. We were very poor and dad sacrificed and rarely bought a thing for himself, but I remember this one time he bought a new fly rod before a fishing trip. He sat it by the big chair in the front room and admired its beauty when ever he got the chance. After a few days we left for our first trout fishing trip of the season.

We are 50 miles down the road going like hell to get there for the evening bite. He pulls off in some gravel and says, "Oh Shit!” We turned around and drove back home. I'm thinking what's up with that. He goes into that little house and comes back out the door with that fly rod. I did not laugh out loud until I knew it was safe because Dad never swore around me... Then I giggled like a little girl every time I thought about it for the next 300 miles.

We got there and put up an old canvas tent and launched our old wooden boat with a 5 horse motor and oars as the backup. The next morning when I got up at O dark thirty there was a foot of snow on the ground. The fly rod was with other fishing rods leaning on the snowy picnic table. I got a new hatchet and hunting knife for my fifth birthday that winter and was itching to cut down a tree or slay a grizzly bear or something manly. I was hacking at a piece of firewood my dad cut up the night before when somehow that fly rod slide off the table and in the path of my hacking with the hatchet. I cut about 2 feet right off the tip. The former mentioned giggles of joy turned into giant tear drops running down a five year olds face. My dad took out his big red handkerchief and wiped my face off without saying a word about what just happened. What a man!

The farm had about a two acre garden, dairy cows, chickens, and rabbits and assorted other creatures. All my Dad's 9 brothers, sisters and family's and Grandma and Grandpa would have giant Sunday feasts there. My uncle Harlan was the tenth child but was killed in a railroad accident while coupling rail cars. I never new him, only why I shared his name, yet spelled differently than he. The aunts would bake pies and cakes and cookies while aromas from heaven filled the giant kitchen. They would make fresh egg noodles to go with the freshly slaughtered chickens for Sunday supper. I knew what love was in those precious days.

I always used to say I wanted to buy a farm in Scotland and grow potatoes. It was the dream of leaving it all behind...Don't ever think that new dreams can not grow when new seeds of hope are planted in the remaining dust of forgotten dreams...Even if it takes a few tear drops to water them.

Peace on the Planet...

Tommy Emmanuel...Amazing Grace

instrumental acoustic guitar

http://youtu.be/vc9Oy06IHXc

Authors note:

If there is any interest in why this poem was written just follow the link to the side bar called

Diary of the Falling Dominoes

Thank you for visiting The Word Whisperer…

http://harlonrivers.blogspot.com/p/oct-1st-oct-6thdiary-of-falling.html

Suffering the Silence of Regret

The only sound breaking the silence that night was that moment a sigh of regret could be heard as the candle flickered and smoked when its light vanished for the last time....

...a poem by Harlon Rivers

There was not a distinct defining moment the day

that concluding conversation fell silent into thin air.   

At that distinct moment, a natural conclusion occurred,

as Westminster gutturally marked midnight.   

The certainty of the conclusion of a lost dream

The  final sunlight from a beautiful setting sun,

as it peacefully submerged below the distant horizon,

drowning in the ocean’s mystic presence forever.

Orange sky’s gentle breeze hushed by a merciful surrender.

Love’s twilight consumed by the cresting swells of the tempest purple sea

The white capped chop of a raucous ebbing emotional vortex

became the final crescendo, when direct light of thought,

was devoured by the watershed of darkness.

 Musical chimes melodic decay echoed and fainted 

into the deafening calm of silence’s finale.

Love song’s reveries written and sung,

would no longer be heard over the sounds of silence.

Once lost hope was smothered by the tears of the final surrender,

the tall, ornate candle now lay spent,  

like the thriving passion that had grown bitter cold.

A small formless puddle of chilled,

once molten, wax was all that remained.

The long wick’s flame drew final breath with a sigh.

Dying flickers faded slowly,

reflecting poignant memories of passionate  sharing,

like the afterglow of the love, its radiance once illuminated.

Turning loving lives into the smoke and ashes of silent regret

 Painful inharmonious silence,

had become a carcinoma within lost souls. 

Suffocating love’s final burning embers glow

Leaving two hearts once beating with one pulse

Alone together in Deafening Concluding Silence...   

© 2012 Harlon Rivers 

The River's Muse

This piece was written to honor my Native American heritage and culture. I spend countless hours at the river with paper and pen. When feeling lost, I will find peace there embracing the spirit within my soul...


A poem written by Harlon Rivers

The mighty rolling river is my sanctuary

Where the turbulent water reaches its shores

Landscaped by erosion’s rounded river rocks,

Every color and shape transformed by mysteries to explore



Floodwater logs are cut for firewood here

Smoke dried salmon is cured and dried for food

Tyees’ souls join me here, inspiring conscious universal awakening

Emotionally stirring thoughts, born in quiet spiritual solitude.



Water rushes past my island on earth

Where eagles nest and soar up high

Beavers dam where flocks of geese swim

Blue Heron’s nests fill trees to the sky



Head waters birthed in forked mountain high

Waters rise from beneath mother earth

Rapids pass villages plummeting miles and miles.

Gravity’s tug and draw journey to aide the salmon’s Holy birth



I know I’m one with sacred ground

Ancestors spirit's power is present at ease

The pulse of river water's muse

Is the pulse of this mixed-breed



The half-breeds myth, not Indian or White.

“Young buck born with a divided heart!”

We have big ears we hear everything

A step child orphaned, reborn into the spirit's light



The placid harmony of the river's gentle flow

Waters speak a mantra directly to my soul

I grieve the loss of ancestral grounds

Ancient territories pilfered for miles around



Upstream above where the mighty water falls

Landscaping this river's great divide

Cascading walls of water soar and plunge

From silhouettes high and wide



For centuries rivers carved and shaped an ominous path

Fertile valleys were eroded deep and wide by raging waters wrath

This place was graced through those centuries past

My heart's ashes will rest where river waters yearn to pass



Ancient brothers fished with spears from platforms built up high

Hollowed out trees, as paddled canoes, tended fish wheel traps

In quest of the bountiful sacred Salmon, our food sustaining life

I embrace an ancient heritage, our spirit shall remain steadfast...

© 2012 Harlon Rivers

Garden of the Heart and Soul

Emotional transparency of the spirit within my my soul... A poem about introspective spirituality...

A poem by Harlon Rivers

There is a place where love grows 

In the garden of my soul

There is a place where light shines

In the garden of a beautiful mind

The mind tends innately

To the spirit of the soul

In combination, all together in unison

They all have made my life whole



There is this place where love flows

In the spirit within my heart

Where raindrops quench thirst like gentle tears

They fall, cascade and nourish

The garden and all it’s vibrant flora

The rhythm of the heart beat of the universe

Is the pulse, the pace, the harmony,

Of this peaceful place inside this fleeting flesh and form



There is a thorn tree in the garden,

Surrounded by season’s grace

Daphne’s fragrance in late winter,

Red roses bloom in spring

Gardena’s pungent alluring aroma sings

White orchids throughout all my heart’s seasons

Lilly’s of the Valley’s bouquet fills the air

Enlightening the slumbering darkness dreams



In the garden of my healing heart

There are thistles from my mind

The seeds were sown in darkness

Scattered recklessly, carelessly all around

Their pointed sharpness pierces

Bleeding points pricked inside the soul

Wilted dried flowers mourn where red blood spots drain

Renewing flourishing life when decomposed



There is a time in autumn

When the leaves shall fall and decay

Within the garden of the soul

There comes a time

The setting sun will fade

When a beautiful mind will no longer shine

It’s as natural as the circle of life sustaining growth

The time for going home



Who will tend this garden?

From beginning until end?

When darkness falls into dormancy

Will moon beams radiate new life?

Into the winter starlit heaven’s skies?

Who will harvest eternal love?

Love grown in this garden was not mine to keep or hold

The soul of this man is the spirit’s soul to keep


© 2012 Harlon Rivers

Proverbial Walls...

Whether kept at arms length or ten thousand miles away, 

Irrelevant still feels the same...

A poem by Harlon Rivers

It’s a long way up and over that proverbial wall 

to explore the dark side of the moon

Lessons lesions left marks years ago,

still leaving the unresolved tracks of my tears.

Some things we learn so slowly

And yet pass away like the shadow of a dream



Whether kept at arms length

or ten thousand miles away,

Irrelevant still feels the same.

You saw me naked through a prism

The light of sober truth knows no refracted disguise

It cannot be blocked by disbelief’s fading light



There was a time when

being simple hearted and true blue

was something relevant to be.

But then came fallacies of blame

Remorse for misguided shame

Allowing dark imperfections to be seen.


The boundary walls

are fortified castles in the air.

The mote is deep and wide

When building bridges fail,

your tall tower walls

have got to fall some day.



While dusting off the confusion from an evaporating dream,

I feel like a lost stray dawg,

fetching a barbed wire bone.

Too hungry to know

What the illusion of love showed

Was only teasingly toying with me



Your fortress walls are a maze of protective halls

Unrequited love is a tethered ball and chain

Ignore a stray dog and it’ll disappear

Back to the solitude where sleeping dogs run free...

Don’t throw him a barbed wire bone because he’s hungry.

He’ll howl at the dark side of the broken hearted moon, when you set him free 

© 2012 Harlon Rivers 

Mystic Desert Rivers

Crawling across the barren cactus wilderness... Chasing this impossible dream... He followed the mirage of an exotic wild river wide, flowing effortlessly through his mind made illusions, beneath the sweltering desert sky...

a poem by Harlon Rivers

Crawling across the barren cactus wilderness 

Chasing this impossible dream 

He followed the mirage of an exotic wild river wide  

Flowing effortlessly through his mind made scenes 

Beneath the sweltering desert sky

Rippling down stream towards the refreshing Ocean’s tide 

He searched charily through a labyrinth of chimera

While standing on the brink of delirious splendor 

Spiny leaves awakened all senses of uncertainty 

Mystic static air excites his sun wilted skin 

Enticing infinite reborn senses to come alive 

Imagination’s dreams evolve into distinct possibilities 

A daydream of an erotic fragrant, vibrant flower 

Pricking his heart, drawing blood with her cactus quill 

A figment of a poignant hallucination 

Inching slowly, slithering and frayed 

Wearing his heart on his sleeve 

Too thirsty to drink, once bitten, twice shy 

At the crossroads of an oases 

The illusion of a meandering basin river turned far, deep and wide 

The mysterious desert flora hid bashfully 

Behind a sun faded shadow of solitude, 

With her taproot in a desert spring’s bedrock 

Her beauty reflected in the twinkling of his eye 

A prairie wolf paces in the distance 

Vultures are gliding in the arid desert skies 

Silhouettes gracefully soaring in hazy solar disguise 

Coyote, was just listening to the blustering wind howl 

Blowing the drifting sand over 

the lonesome travelers’ trail of trials 

"Taunt and tease prickly pear blossom 

Share the simple life of the prairie breeze 

While I’m crawling through pebbles and cobbles 

Over bedrock through sand dune fields to the sea 

Your splendors draw me to your spring water oases 

The spirit of your abundant soul set me free"... 

© 2012 Harlon Rivers