I once read a story about an ant
who set his mind to move a mountain.
An insect, a millimeter from jaw to legtip,
laboring against a mass of stone and
soil quadrillions of times his size.
But he worked
and worked
and worked
moving the bedrock one dram at a time,
year after year, season after season,
each trip melding into the next in an
endless march of mindless labor, until
where the mountain once stood,
a peaceful valley sank down. All because
of the labor of one very determined insect.

At the end of the fable, the writer tells us
never to give up, for what we choose
to work and persevere towards
will surely happen if we truly try.
As I read the story, I knew he was right.
Never give up.
Even if it takes a quadrillion trips,
1,000,000,000,000,000 trials,
before the mountain bows to you.
Even if your small, insectoid mind
cracks like a candy-cane under a sandbag,
even if you collapse and die after 6 decades
of exhaustion, millions more left to go.
Never give up.
Even if your task is impossible, and it
destroys your life, everything you love,
everything that makes your little ant-soul tick.
Never give up.

Nocturne (Friends Without)

I sit with two others in a dimly lit room.
My friends.
We laugh and talk through the evening
and into the night.
But others come, bringing sickness.
My friends
I no longer know them.
In their heads, their eyes are not their own.




Nocturne (Friends Within)

I hate what I cannot see, and shun those
I can’t understand.
I will try, I promise I will try, to grow.
Let it in.
So I too can stare upon a world alien
and strange.
Do I even know myself?
Are these eyes even my own anymore?

There are old ways that we have forgotten,
sacred to our ancestors generations ago.
Far before men named Jesus Christ
Muhammad and Confucius,
our ancestors knew the ways to live
as enduring and resilient as the seasons.
Songs and rites, gods as ancient as the
deep green forest, and stories
of the rise and fall of great men:
Chieftains, farmers, warriors, musicians
whose songs echoed over young world.

The world was harsh then, as cold
as the towering bedrock of the mountains.
We gave thanks for what we had,
both to the gods and to ourselves.
The choice was to live strong, work hard
or die like a wounded animal.
The world was fair in the days of old,
our cares cleansed through sweat
and blood, and in the crushing weight
of the labor of survival we found peace.

Today, our peace is lost. We have
nations, such foreign things,
a group of people enslaved by custom.
The green forest has become
the fireplace of a world too gray,
the unforgiving mountains mere pebbles
beneath our trembling, dying feet.
Though our lives are calm our minds
are shattered, the breezes of indifference
blowing away the forgotten ways of old.

I peered into the future and saw
Possibilities dancing in semi-reality
like snowflakes beneath a stormy sky.
But the one before us was clear
as ice upon the frosted curved glass.

A madness has spread among
the countless peoples of the world.
A disease of the mind which makes it seem
to the sick man as if they are made

of glass. A fragile thing, so
frail and delicate they might break
upon any but the softest impact.
The afflicted, day and night, scream in fear

at any possible contact harder
than the lightest touch.
“I’ll break”, their blood-chilling screams
echo through the empty halls of history.

The world has broken in this future
like a music-box wound down to

silence. Men and women hide in
padded chambers, for fear of breaking
their porcelain forms upon a pavement
or stones a toddler could step over.

A cure for the glass does not exist,
save for a light tap to show the ill
that they are more than they believe.
Yet the sick would rather not be healed

than face the reality of their own resilience.
The world cannot hurt you, my friend,
but you yourself can hurt the world
and shatter it like a crystalline snowglobe.