Some people are writers
some are speakers or preachers.

Some try to do both
but one side of them always presses forward
as if to say,
This is who I really am
This is my natural gift.

You walk lightly,
said the old wizened man,
As if the floor were too thin
and you, afraid to use all your weight.

I looked at him with a surprised grin
and said
You are perceptive
no one ever said that out loud to me.

He just grinned and winked.

I get up in the morning
and my first duty is to our cats
to ensure they have food and water
to satisfy their simple needs.
They have no urgency to gather in
the myriad strands and filaments
of my mind to focus on them.
Unlike me, they are without ego
or neurosis or compulsions
or impulse to chew and devour
startling new currents of thought
or to dissect and parse tradition
to produce some new light of intellect.
Their feline genius of simplicity
is my present focus of admiration
and desire.
But of course I could never dissolve
the accumulated humanity
focused in my solitary mind
and achieve the elegant ease
with which our cats occupy
their meager patch of earth.

I seem to be at home on the margins
where I can be alone
with my folly
sweltering in my private bowl of stew
simmering in the sins
surrounding and piercing me
but you found me there
invited me into your heart
where you loved me
redeemed me
sewed my seams
pulled together my crazy quilt
made separate parts into a whole.

Without all my lovers
I would never enter the realm
of the fully human.

It comes in, sparkling and exciting,
with the promise of fun and zest
like a mist dappled with thrills

but it is a false promise
like the allurements of commercials
with smiling faces and a myriad of glitz

it ends in a state of shame
controlled by lords of the dark
and the owners of hell.

I brim over with gratitude for love
and the forces of beauty and mercy
that break the trance -
the spell always ending
with the unlit inglorious state of shame.

Today I am running on empty
nothing inside to fuel my rising
from this morass.

Does this wet lowland into which I sink
come from me
or the invading viral horror?

Alone I cannot raise myself up
I need a power far greater than me
to invade heavy me
with light.