When the lamp is shattered
The light in the dust lies dead—
When the cloud is scattered,
The rainbow’s glory is shed.
When the lute is broken,
Sweet tones are remembered not;
When the lips have spoken,
Loved accents are soon forgot.

As music and splendour
Survive not the lamp and the lute,
The heart’s echoes render
No song when the spirit is mute—
No song but sad dirges,
Like the wind through a ruined cell,
Or the mournful surges
That ring the dead ******’s knell.

When hearts have once mingled,
Love first leaves the well-built nest;
The weak one is singled
To endure what it once possessed.
O Love! who bewailest
The frailty of all things here,
Why choose you the frailest
For your cradle, your home, and your bier?

Its passions will rock thee,
As the storms rock the ravens on high;
Bright reason will mock thee,
Like the sun from a wintry sky.
From thy nest every rafter
Will rot, and thine eagle home
Leave thee naked to laughter,
When leaves fall and cold winds come.

Before I knocked and flesh let enter,
With liquid hands tapped on the womb,
I who was as shapeless as the water
That shaped the Jordan near my home
Was brother to Mnetha's daughter
And sister to the fathering worm.

I who was deaf to spring and summer,
Who knew not sun nor moon by name,
Felt thud beneath my flesh's armour,
As yet was in a molten form
The leaden stars, the rainy hammer
Swung by my father from his dome.

I knew the message of the winter,
The darted hail, the childish snow,
And the wind was my sister suitor;
Wind in me leaped, the hellborn dew;
My veins flowed with the Eastern weather;
Ungotten I knew night and day.

As yet ungotten, I did suffer;
The rack of dreams my lily bones
Did twist into a living cipher,
And flesh was snipped to cross the lines
Of gallow crosses on the liver
And brambles in the wringing brains.

My throat knew thirst before the structure
Of skin and vein around the well
Where words and water make a mixture
Unfailing till the blood runs foul;
My heart knew love, my belly hunger;
I smelt the maggot in my stool.

And time cast forth my mortal creature
To drift or drown upon the seas
Acquainted with the salt adventure
Of tides that never touch the shores.
I who was rich was made the richer
By sipping at the vine of days.

I, born of flesh and ghost, was neither
A ghost nor man, but mortal ghost.
And I was struck down by death's feather.
I was a mortal to the last
Long breath that carried to my father
The message of his dying christ.

You who bow down at cross and altar,
Remember me and pity Him
Who took my flesh and bone for armour
And doublecrossed my mother's womb.

The tree of knowledge was the tree of reason.
That's why the taste of it
drove us from Eden. That fruit
was meant to be dried and milled to a fine powder
for use a pinch at a time, a condiment.
God had probably planned to tell us later
about this new pleasure.
We stuffed our mouths full of it,
gorged on but and if and how and again
but, knowing no better.
It's toxic in large quantities; fumes
swirled in our heads and around us
to form a dense cloud that hardened to steel,
a wall between us and God, Who was Paradise.
Not that God is unreasonable – but reason
in such excess was tyranny
and locked us into its own limits, a polished cell
reflecting our own faces. God lives
on the other side of that mirror,
but through the slit where the barrier doesn't
quite touch ground, manages still
to squeeze in – as filtered light,
splinters of fire, a strain of music heard
then lost, then heard again.

WHEN cold December
Froze to grisamber
The jangling bells on the sweet rose-trees--
Then fading slow
And furred is the snow
As the almond's sweet husk--
And smelling like musk.
The snow amygdaline
Under the eglantine
Where the bristling stars shine
Like a gilt porcupine--
The snow confesses
The little Princesses
On their small chioppines
Dance under the orpines.
See the casuistries
Of their slant fluttering eyes--
Gilt as the zodiac
(Dancing Herodiac).
Only the snow slides
Like gilded myrrh--
From the rose-branches--hides
Rose-roots that stir.

The winter comes; I walk alone,
       I want no bird to sing;
To those who keep their hearts their own
       The winter is the spring.
No flowers to please—no bees to hum—
       The coming spring’s already come.

I never want the Christmas rose
       To come before its time;
The seasons, each as God bestows,
       Are simple and sublime.
I love to see the snowstorm hing;
       ’Tis but the winter garb of spring.

I never want the grass to bloom:
       The snowstorm’s best in white.
I love to see the tempest come
       And love its piercing light.
The dazzled eyes that love to cling
       O’er snow-white meadows sees the spring.

I love the snow, the crumpling snow
       That hangs on everything,
It covers everything below
       Like white dove’s brooding wing,
A landscape to the aching sight,
       A vast expanse of dazzling light.

It is the foliage of the woods
       That winters bring—the dress,
White Easter of the year in bud,
       That makes the winter Spring.
The frost and snow his posies bring,
       Nature’s white spurts of the spring.

You stop to point at the moon in the sky,
but the finger's blind unless the moon is shining.

One moon, one careless finger pointing --
are these two things or one?

The question is a pointer guiding
a novice from ignorance thick as fog.

Look deeper. The mystery calls and calls:
No moon, no finger -- nothing there at all.

19.
You cut it open and let it fill the gaps with your blood,
You're exhausted,
The clouds in your head do everything they can to stick around, you wish people would do the same,
You are not surprised anymore,
You destroy yourself to get a taste of the bad because you've had the good and it just doesn't give you the high you crave anymore and you hate it but you can't stop,
You can't stop,
You're lighting fires, starting riots, you even take as many pills as you possibly can but none of this will make you feel anything and you're left feeling as empty as you did when you came into this,
Have you ever looked at yourself? I suggest you don't

18.
There are cigarettes on your breath,
Your eyes have bags under them that could hold the world and then some,
People come and go now, and you care a little bit, but not enough to do anything about it,
You got your license over the summer, the highways around here know you better than your family does at this point and you think you like that,
You think if you run away far enough from all of this that it'll go away,
You make yourself as busy as you possibly can in hopes that it will take your mind off of all of this,
You still think about her every day, but she doesn't think about you anymore, you don't do anything about this,
It's getting cloudy again,
You don't sleep as much anymore

17.
You get upset because you care more than they do, but you don't say anything,
You start to wear colors again because black just doesn't make you feel as pretty,
You want to feel pretty because they're  pretty and they deserve someone just as pretty,
Your demons aren't as ugly as hers, and you fight hers off to make it look like yours are as weak as your grandfather's spine, she doesn't buy it

16.
You lose your virginity,
You feel powerful,
You feel broken, but you feel powerful,
Everything hurts all of the time but you don't want to realize it because you're in love and being in love is powerful,
You watch her smoke cigarettes,
You smoke her cigarettes,
You break yourself on her because it is the first and last time you will ever feel like you're able to pick yourself back up when heartbreak pushes you down,
Your parents don't believe you're depressed,
You don't eat as much,
You can't sleep like you used to be able to, it hurts you,
Your best friend tells you that the only reason you're so sad all of the time is because you don't believe in God

16.
You start to believe in a god and you start to believe in yourself but you forget the difference

16.
You get high for the first time and you realize why addicts choose to live in their worlds instead of ours

16.
You wake up and you feel nothing

16.
You wake up and you feel nothing

15.
You try homeschool this year because your private Christian elementary school never prepared you for public high school and they force you so far into the ground that being a corpse sounds better than being a flower in the soil, you believe every word they tell you,
You isolate yourself,
You listen to extremely depressing music and you like it,
You start to wear all black,
You feel alone no matter how many people are around you,
You throw yourself into the snow on a cold December morning because at this point you just want to feel something, anything,
Your parents don't agree with you,
Your mother tells you to pray and your father doesn't even listen to you,
Your mother gets breast cancer this year,
You ask yourself how the anxiety is still letting you think for yourself since you realize something so deadly can spread so rapidly

14.
Your uncle takes his own life,
This is the first time you really think about death,
You wonder what it would be like to be like them,
To wake up and never feel anything ever again, and you kind of like it,
That cute girl you really like smiles at you in the hallway now, you've been at her for months,
It's funny how young love starts to take roots,
Everything is fine now

13.
Moving schools is hard, this is the first experience you have with losing friendships,
It's crazy how often they come and go now

12.
You can't even remember the last time you didn't get more than 8 hours of sleep,
Your dog is your best friend,
You don't even think about the color black, your favorite color is red like fire

11.
Your best friend's father kills her mother and then himself,
You wonder what it's like,
How wonderful it would be to make someone stay forever and never be able to leave  

10.
Your grandmother is alive,
She has a funny smell around her whenever you visit her,
There's this weird stick in her mouth that looks like it's on fire,
You don't like it

9.

8.

7.

6.
You can name every single kind of dinosaur that ever existed and you love hot wheels,
Your favorite food is peanut butter and jelly, but you only eat it if your mother makes it

5.

4.
Your grandmother loves to buy you toys,
She tells you that the memories are worth more than the money,
You remember this specifically

3.

2.
Your second birthday party includes a ball pit, hundreds of balloons, and all of your family members,
I wonder if this is what my funeral will be like

1.


0.
Your mother and father meet with the doctor again,
You're on your way and they've never felt more excited in their lives


I wonder if they ever wondered about how their little boy would grow up,
I wonder if they ever thought about how I would turn out,
I wonder if they ever wondered about everything that would happen to me

It's funny how everything someone experiences in their lives molds them into what they become,
Out of everything, I wonder what it was that made me so numb

Sometimes life feels slow,
Other times it feels like it's going a million miles an hour

Sometimes it feels like I'm living in dog years because I've seen too much to be this young

Dear Self,

For you it is November 9th, 2016. Despite all odds, Donald Trump is president. Mike Pence, governor of your home state of Indiana, is his VP.

You are 17 right now. You were born into a world run by George W. Bush. You spent your whole childhood hearing your parents yelling at the tv, angry at the Texas governor in the White House.

You grew up in Obamanation. You saw months of “YES WE CAN” and “CHANGE” stickers going up, and a magnet your family still has get put onto your refrigerator. You heard your mother’s sigh of relief when Barack Obama was announced the 44th president. That was half your lifetime ago.

You spent the last year following the campaigns. You were not surprised by Hillary Clinton running again. You “felt the Bern” of the somewhat radical Independent candidate previously unknown to you, Bernie Sanders. You laughed off the wild reality tv star Donald Trump’s campaign.

Months went by. Bernie and Hillary were fighting hard leading up to the primaries. Republicans slowly started to drop out. Big names like Jeb Bush, Mike Huckabee, and Chris Christie left the race. Bernie didn’t do good enough in the primaries, which was upsetting to most of your friends, your older brother, and your mom, who all voted for him. Ted Cruz fell off, defeated, in May.

It was down to Hillary and Trump.

You followed the comments made at their rallies. On their social media. You heard a lecture about the election from Josh Gillin of Politifact at Indiana University over the summer. You won an award for an opinion piece you wrote on Trump. As the election day grew closer, you watched every presidential debate. You analyzed them in class.

Last night, you stayed up until 4 A.M. to see the results of this election. You sat through excruciatingly slow interviews, political analysis, and different predictions. You couldn’t turn away from the blue and red maps, the aggressively American backgrounds, the anxious masses.

The tired tv hosts were right, it was a nail-biter.

As Trump gave his victory speech, you wept.

You wept for the months you spent wishing this wouldn’t happen. You wept for the 1920’s suffragettes, for the descendents of MLK and Cesar Chavez, for the Orlando victims. You wept for me. The people I joined. The people who will join me.

I am dead.

You learned in your final moments that homophobes look like normal people. They are not all rednecks with beer guts wearing ten-gallon hats. They are more elusive than that. They can be dressed smart. They can have friendly voices. Familiar names and faces.

A friend of a friend of a friend of a friend killed you. Someone you live near. You might have passed them in a car. In the mall. In the school hallways. It was someone that people you knew,  knew. You probably could’ve gotten their Twitter handle if you had heard their name before.

You were killed in a city that VP Pence had once stood in.

People tried to learn about your killer. Were they someone you knew? Someone who just went crazy? Someone who couldn’t handle who you held hands with?

You were too young, the local news anchors said. Your school administration said. Your mom said.

Mike Pence didn’t say anything at all.

Your friends didn’t say much. They cried. They withdrew. They wore baggier clothes. They bought switchblades. They washed “*****” and “ladyboy” off of your tombstone. They wondered about joining you, voluntarily and not.

The school newspaper’s headline: DEAD AT 17.

No one thought it would happen to you, except you. You stayed up late at night, imagining your funeral. The first thing you did in the morning was practice for your wake. Every time you left your house, you were a dead man walking.

No one  believed this more than you did.

The news anchors said it was just one of a string of murders. People said it was an isolated incident. Your friends said it was a hate crime. Your mom said it was the worst thing that  ever  happened to her.

There was no question that you were gone, even when they found you- chest jumping. There was only one thing to wonder: who was next?

Not an if, but a when.

I hope the when is  never.

All my love- to you and everyone else,

Yourself