My heart,
it strained,
tears ran,
welling
from my
lids, to
track their
way,
down the
lines of my
face.

Of the
affairs of
my love,

Ashes and Dust...

Wandering.
Night fills the sky,
path lit by burning lamps,
few and far between.

Stumbling.
Jasmine in the air,
silence fled, returns in
abscence, of my footsteps,
upon the hard and cobbled
way.

Tears.
wind stirs the leaves,
And sighs a song of
soft farewell, flowing
through the grasp of folly,
fingers stretched to empty air,
And the shining stars above.

Gone.
Stars fade and pass away,
the moon falls in knowledge,
of the coming of the day.
Cool darkness fades.
And I left with nothing,
bitter memory, and the tattered
shreds of dream.

I am dreaming, I know.
Land unknown spread out
before me, air charged, expectant
of the coming storm,
cool wind sighing past, and setting
the leaves all to rustling. Sunset, glorious
in days dying.
I am dreaming, I know.

What is life, but the ending of
death? Long pain and fleeting joys,
to be taken away at the Final Dark.

Long pain with no beginning,
joy fast, far, and fleeting.
Life a stretch of joys and
sorrows, Death a release to
soft tomorrows.

Endless Cycle.

The fire blazes, crackles and snaps,
the women dance around its light,
while the men around, in the dark-
ling shadows, beat the drums to the
song of life.

Flutes sigh their trilling songs,
and strings dance and thrum and
blur, as the fiddle plays its wild
abandon, out, into the currents of
the night.

The wild boar is caught and spit,
its dripping fat, the flames do lick,
and now the call to feast and song,
to mead and meat and legend tall,
under the stars and the hunters
moon!

Floating...
lost,
within the multicolored
fragments
of consciousness,
seeds of life
and of all
creation,
everywhere...
my mind a spinning
vortex, all
thought a
myriad
of turbulent
confusions...
I am lost,
within
myself.
And it is good.

She stands there by the open window,
its mornings gray that lights her face.
her curls are long and fair and golden,
dulled by the light of the cold winters
morning; truthful in its stark demean.
Her face is pale and fair and lovely;
dark shadows circle her eyes, and her
eyes are gray, cold as the dawn, as they
watch the procession of men down the
road; in black are they robed, and their
cowls are dark. Her figure is lovely, or
was lovely, once; angles there are, and her lines
are hard and stark and sharp. Tall she stands
in the wasteful light, her pride a mantle, to
hold back the tide. Dressed in a sheet of
shimmering gray, almost she would blend into
the grey dawning morn, were it not for her hair,
though lackluster and shorn; longer it was in
summers fair past, till she cut it with shears and
shivers and hate. The cowled procession slows
to a stop, before a man and a pit and a naked tree.
He speaks in a voice of resonance and power; not
a tear is shed in that makeshift bower, not a tear,
not a whisper, not a head bowed in grief, for the
man they had carried. They spared him no pity; he
had shown none in life. The woman watches from
the empty tower, no tears shed there in her ancient
bower. Cold she stands in the cold morning grey,
robed in power and pride, and great beauty, past.
She watches as they lower her dead lord inside, no
coffin, he; too many had he broken. She watches
in silence, in pain, and in pride, foolish though it be
in the grey mornings light. Dirt over him. Dirt under.
A paupers grave, in a field, in winter. No honor in death;
he had had none in life. Last shovelful thrown; the ground
is smoothed over. The priest and his men leave the grey field
empty, save a tree in the center, stark in death.
she watches, and remembers, and falls in her folly, in her cold,
prideful folly, to join him in death, who had murdered her love.
To join him, though he it was who had murdered her love, and her joy and her dreams, and her young, laughing beauty. Fallen she, through prideful
folly.

I am awake, at this ungodly hour.
Fragments of a dream forgotten,
fall through my clutching fingers,
like sand on a windy day.
I scrabble frantically at myself,
the dream was important, it
was! But to naught. For in doing so
I but stirred the wind to greater speeds,
and swept the sand away. I fall back,
head cushioned by folds in a wrinkled
blanket, and a pillow wet with tears.
I stare at the slowly spinning fan, air blowing
like a soft spring breeze, to still my racing
frantic heart, and dry unnoticed tears.
I stare at the spinning fan, unseeing, uncaring
of the gently comforting breeze. I know in my heart,
my secret sanctum, my quiet place, alone, that 'twas
no happy comedy, no carefree summer dance. A tragedy,
close at hand, is what had come this night. As I fall,
gently, down into the realms of sleep, I remember, a last fragment,
spinning aimlessly on the cusp of that void, forget. Flashing it
fell, but I caught a sight, a fleeting glimpse, of the tragedy held within.
Ashes floating, still lake beneath, and the muted, trembling sound,
of the womens stifled weeping. And the stars were all alight, shining coldly,
down from the black expanse, and a winter wind was blowing.

Spring
time of life
growth

Death
from out
Life

Life
from out
Death

Drifting....seed caught in the wind of life,
one more among many; a grain in a storm
of a thousand sands. Wandering, lost in the
sighing ether, suspended between earth and
sky, it sees many things, and yet sees nothing.
Meaning is lost to it, feeling torn from its numb
grasp, in the hour of its waking. It has known
nothing, has felt nothing, save for the grey air of
the world without, and the grey within; there
where his heart had been.