I love stone. Don't you?
We forget ourselves for
a moment when we stand
beneath
a mountain. A true experience
of a mountain makes us
feel small, which is right.
Because we are. But
we only forget for a moment,
really less than a minute, and
soon we cast about for a little
sharp-edged rock to carve our
names into the cliffside.

Once, a person lost
their faculty for emotion.
That turned out alright, though.
He wasn't ever sad.

But it was sad. It was tragic.
Because we listen to our
little voices, and grind our names
haphazardly into the rock,
and it's really very silly
to try to be immortal. Even mountains
know that. And we live
with these very silly
voices drumming all the time in our heads,
and we think that's us.

We think that those voices are us.

And that person? The tragedy
is, I don't know if he ever gets
to be corrected. Do mountains
interrupt him? To forget ourselves
for a moment beneath a mountain.
Does he ever get the chance to ask:
Why do we forget ourselves,
anyways? Who is it that made us pause?
The mountain? It didn't move.
Our little voices? Ha!

It's something else. Something powerful.
It shuts up your internal monologue,
and in those moments, you are at your
most agile, most eloquent, most true.
On stage. In a sport. When you read
a set of words that hold power to change
your life. Does it have a name? It has many.
"Soul" is only one of them.

And that person? Yes, it's sad.
But ask yourself this: you've seen
your mountains. They made you
step back. I know they did. There
was an instant that your little voices
were completely, utterly hushed.

That moment happens, and it's
entirely out of your control. The
next moment is truly up to you.

So what do you do? Take a picture?
Carve your name into a rock?

It is a midsummer storm, and the air is textured like heavy cream
warm and thick and sweet. It hasn't yet began to rain, and bare toes
grasp clods of dust, the kind with root fibers tangled inside,
and everything  is keenly sensed: the smell, the taste, the touch,
the sound of the wind and the warmth in this charged moment.

It is impossible to not be humbled before these grey clouds,
massive structures that remind you of the roiling turbidity of silt
at the bottom of a river, freshly disturbed by a fish's tail
- except these grey giants, these clouds feel infinitely large.
Humbled, yes.

And powerful: the little human on the parched earth
feels vigor pumping through veins,
a feeling typically beyond recollection
that is difficult to trace to its source.
Where is this power flowing from? Not from some
deluded sense that this small mammal could shift
a single bead of moisture in the sky, no;
where is this power flowing to? Its effect is . . . unplanned,
it is spontaneous in nature, even though it feels so rooted
that no-one, certainly not you, could move it.

This power? The source is invisible, the fate uncertain.

The purpose? Take note. This is faith:
to be so confronted by reality that your inner monologue
forgets to stay in a continuous loop; at last, you hear your part
in a greater melody; to concentrate
on something outside the ceiling of your skull.

Reality will only be itself.
Either project your attention outwards to trust the truth,
or blind yourself with anxiety.

The power you feel inside the storm does not belong to you,
it belongs to the Greater Picture. But, the choice is always yours:
hide away, or raise your face. the   rain
    begins
          to             fall.

Give enough faith
   strike a fulc-
*** for a balanced rack:
shift all the mass
   and the *****? It's an arduous tack --
Have you clutched a spring,
  felt the choke in the wire ring?
It is smoke to my throat-tight and tears.

Look: all the weight
   all the trust that I've fishing-cast
on a Man who's not a man,
  who is more than that.
For the love that's agape and
  that's flooding past
with no end-sign in sight.

It's Him whose advice
  that I pivot towards
like a rod guiding light
  guiding lightning fo'ards
But for once, though I list;
like some empty gourds
   I'm alack, lack-a-days.

God, I've a Führer, I'm a furious
man, with a shame, and a love
that I can't I just
can't
I'm in love
but it's broke
so rabbinical Man: what do I do now,
so lost? so lost.

We love each other.
Can't you leave me alone?
Am I a Job, to be taken from home
and broke? In the dust? In the pain, stupid
lust, and my tears? Where's the mountain
moving now?

Now, I'm just a fool;
you're the Lord,
and I know that too well.
You've a plan
  -- I assume. --
and sometimes I quell
all the fears, sheathe my dagger-filled eyes.
But I'm mad, God.
I'm mad.

So what now? I love you God,
and I've belt out my piece.
So what now? I was hoping
that this poem would rose-petal
to peace
but it's not. So I'll wait.
In flaming throat-tight and tears.
I shift my weight,
restless-pray,
pray that wisdom perseveres.

Discussion ends, and we talk on:
to clarify lecture, thereon
concerning life - the rules by which we play
as clumsy wise with books and blades,
chemists cutting to remake
the human form, and change, reshape
their lives with information, application
of our minds, the drugs concocted
via our thoughts. This the power -
and its light we cannot help but hope to wield,
for who declines the hands that look for aid,
to bring the flush to lives that fade?

Discussion ends, and we talk on:
I with slow mind, I ask thereon
for I am slow, but eager so
he answers, words like hands that move
competent in their purpose, and kind
to funnel knowledge to an empty mind.

Discussion ends, and we talk on
Still spoke of drugs and blood, thereon:
Influx flow in, efflux flow out,
the drug, first raw, march'd through a route
of enzymes who transform its love
for water -- made it dissolve
like salt in *****, strained away
with all your waste. Their hands are good,
those of your doctor, liver, blood.

The mathematics predict efflux
flow out -- flow in
influx dictate that concentration drug in blood
will rise - molarity
increased - at rate unchanged if not
that substrate concentration guides
the liver's rate:
a second order interaction,
see, reaction rate increases
until the speed
flow in/the rate
flow out is one, the same, and thus the blood's
molarity will change no more
-- this he taught me, as we spoke,
and if my mind wandered too far,
as it sometimes does, his hands
reached out - the type
articulate in words or digits,
which, touching, reawakened mine
to further sculpt my hands refined.

Wind walks wild -
there is no end and no beginning,
only movement:
the great big arms of a mother
on a sea of waterfall foam -
cold embrace that
can't be returned.

We shine with heat
that only certain beasts
will see -
we are a strong, wet candle
that does not gutter
so long as our rivers
of tears
are kept within.

Only a broken heart
feels the shiver in a wind's embrace.
Only a shattered mind
feels blown apart in the breeze.

I walk in biting snow,
my hand is up to strike
me, my face -
I told my arm to do that
when an autumn wind cleaves through.

First you see the front,
and then you see the flip side -
falling Autumn leaves

are like paper -
veins,
brittle webbing
transparent almost,
and impossibly made
with any human hand unless, of course
you plant a seed.

Winds can be troubles
turbulent, mindless, sharply
they pluck; and I hide

but I
am as concealed
as a leaf -
I ought to listen
to what is told to me:
you are no fool, to
choose to

walk in biting snow;
under trees, nearly naked,
but hard as packed earth

and I walk in biting snow,
no words to voice my thoughts, I lift
my hand
to strike
but I honestly ought to listen to the

dying, tumbling leaves -
both their front and their flip side,
the fragile candor

of their fall.