God bless those that are more selfless than I.
They keep the infinite balance, for the rest of us.

E.D.

It is difficult to know
How she may have spoke.
When she wrote
It was as if she was dictating
The words of an angel;
One that knew too well, for this realm.

How the words have danced through time
While, I know, she only glimpsed their immortality
From a dark corner.

It makes me wonder, in my awe
Was it a speaking voice or a magical wand?

Poor are the poorest
who drinks life
and hates its gall,
but still - are fearful of death.

How they make this life their limbo.

You must not press forward into,
but draw back into abstraction.
With rest enough in its odd burrow
its wild beat will carry you your way.

A Skeptics Joyful Taste

It would take a formidable force
To keep you from being a good man.

We, us two, have come a long way;
Extended lengths of silence
For me to realize
We cannot truly be divided.

Yours is a voice that agrees with my existence;
It echoes well - through me.
Like a skeptics joyful taste of truth.

So now I remain humble - as I see
More clearly beyond you -
Understanding better your Master.


To Dad
2007

How we prop up the foolish - despite the evidence before us
and bury the ignorant - prior to investigation.

Adapted

Oh,
how I’ve adapted to my optimism
willing to accept life’s grander lessons
humble enough to recognize my own blessings
so to my pen I offer my present confession.

Oh,
how I’ve relied on my false stability
came to be convinced of my ‘honesty’
relying on a chemical support system, chronically
and now freed, thus far, into peaceful irony.


2003

I Am

I.
I am not everything I pretend to be. For
my heart wants me a Romeo, my soul
wishes me a poet, and my thoughts are
fooled, thinking me a god. This world
wants me to be tomorrow’s fallen angel;
to soak in its sorrow.

II.
Yesterday has insisted I carry its burdens,
as today is confused about where I dwell;
I myself, am closing my eyes with the
hope I shall sleep in peace, forever. I am
not everything I pretend to be.


1994

Still, Perfected

I can still write love poems.
Not just silhouettes and their assigned words.

I can still put you in the middle
After all the mechanical failures in our (connected) souls.
I can still offer you truth, on paper
Because I know something else of your existence;
I know where it glows -

I’ve seen better days, when the sparkle in your eyes
Makes for a formidable challenge -
To the twinkle of champagne.
I taste its sweetness with my heart
And bear it’s lightness on my tongue.

How these days of an unbroken chain, turned -
To cracked porcelain; sometimes we hurt.

Still, how I would take the broken pieces over the world.

Because the faith I find in my mortality - in us
Allows for simplicity. Even hidden -
This is why I can still write love poems.
For inside the words is where I find you, perfected.


To Heather
Circa 2002

A Poet

A poet is someone who speaks of ordinary things with tempting eloquence. Always trying to convince you that these things are greater or lesser than your senses say they are; much of it may be nonsense, simply wrapped well.

For you it will not make much sense. The purpose is the poets alone. For him it serves as therapy for a mind moving too quickly and a hand that moves twice that. He claims no obligation.

But still how beautifully the music of the soul accompanies - as the poet hijacks the written word and leaves behind his peace.

What is left - but a residue: Glints of silver dust. He calls it poetry; we take his word for it. And somehow, in the end, we are all fine with that.

I Come

I come with words.
They have guided me here .

Take them in and protect them -
Even if I am not given the esteem of your order.
Disregard the bareness of my actions.
Forgive me the plainness of my mortality.

I come with words.
Take them in and protect them.

A Stranger. A Pilgrim.

“Death has a thousand doors to let out life: I shall find one.”
- Massinger

I am a stranger.
I keep my legs crossed
And my eyes shut lightly.
I sit in a dark room -
A familiar spot, every moon;
Fully aware of my abeyance
And content with it’s “third person draw.”
I have been here before
Mingling with my other lives -
Staring at myself in full three dimension
And laughing at my careless humanity.

I can’t speak the language I once could
But -- I remember well the words.
They were strong and high order, cachet and poetic.
And how they arranged them to please my wit -
And how they tumbled from my pen on command.

But where now, I ask, is that friction that sparks this prose?
Where is that sudden storm that thrusts me into myself - now?

I must have been a strange creature - this one;
Whipping forward a good word
While on pilgrimage, go I, into the nothingness.

June 21, 2008

Substitutions and compensations
Connect the words for me today.
How I have searched for the original voice, lately;
Fear and aloofness have retained the best of me.

As if time was mine to compromise -
Hoping my posterity may forgive me as I fall short.