William Michaelian

Poems, Notes, and Drawings

Tag Archive for ‘Diaries’

Burning Candle

Burning Candle — March 5, 2010

Lunch. I’d just fallen asleep on the floor in the back room when I heard a strange noise — the sound of a hanger, perhaps, falling for no reason from the wooden rod in the closet and banging against a bracket on the way down, or of a penny committing suicide by throwing itself into an old cider jar half full of its tragically expired brethren. Awake for the nonce, […]

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Four in the Morning

Suddenly I notice that scratching my left arm near the elbow makes a cricket-sound. After being a cricket for a minute or two, I’m ready to be human again, albeit differently. Now I wonder if I was human before. And what if this is a sign that I’m becoming a cricket, or that I’ve really been a cricket all along, or that I was, or will be, a cricket in […]

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Another Chance

In the grocery store, I met a gentle dog wearing an unnecessary muzzle. We looked into each other’s eyes — ah! and if I may put it so, we exchanged souls. But the one who’d placed the muzzle there looked through me and beyond, like a window in the cold. And through it I saw another chance — I saw it come, and saw it go. [ 500 ]

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Perchance to Dream

A calendar not marked by dates, but cricket wakes and thunderstorms. A journal of bright Shakespearean colors — and then, in wanders gray and takes the stage. A fallen leaf, written without hand or pen. A leavened moon. A risen when. [ 497 ]

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Scene from a Recurring Childhood

If my age is equivalent to the number of times the earth has traveled around the sun since I was born, how old would I be if I lived on another planet, or in another galaxy, or in another universe altogether? And isn’t this what I already do? The degree to which I resist things as they are — that might be a more accurate rendering of my age. The […]

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Or Should I Say

The strawberries are blooming again. During the past few weeks, with my encouragement and approval, they have sent runners in every direction. Joint by joint, new plants are tacking themselves to whatever bare ground they can find. And where they are growing over rocks, they are rooting in the gaps in between. The secret? Water, along with the understanding that every inch of this wise old earth is a sacred […]

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