In the distance, a piano
Sings quietly to the night.
Surrounded by trees,
I stand facing the sound,
Eyes closed and body swaying
Back and forth
Ever so slowly, the notes
Drifting to me on the breeze
As I stand in the woods
And twilight, trying to find
My place within the world.
Here, the breeze glowing
With the soft light of music,
I find my place,
Listening to it all,
Note by lamenting note.

My future’s been told by the rain,
quietly reading my palms
with droplets cold as tears.
Divining my fate,
falling fast and free
from somewhere up above,
mystically dripping down,
Pouring out like tears
Into the palms of my hands.

This, the singular moment in time:
my past, present, and future
all roiling and breaking on the same shore,
and like an island
I stand bearing witness to all that is,
the man I was, I am,
and I will become,
meeting here with palms upturned
and open to the rain.

There is a harsh beauty in mathematics.
Under curves and over slopes,
Equations rise and fall endlessly
In a perfectly measured void.
Optimized, rationalized, sterilized;
Formulas that never lie,
Theorems looming before us
Like an archaic God,
A golden deity whose
Volume is maximized.
How I dream of drifting in this flux,
Concave up and concave down,
Riding the sign of my second derivative
For positive and negative,
For better and worse.
I would not travel alone;
With C by my side,
Friend, ally, brother,
Always paired with my antiderivative,
For whenever we journey back
Into the past, it is necessary
To have a companion to pull us out again
In case we are unsure of where we started.
Rules and laws
Strict organization, control;
There is a harsh beauty in mathematics.
Order; two plus two is always four.
Sines and cosines and theta
All dancing in the unit circle of life,
A conga line that joins itself
To form a mathematical ouroboros.
But the harshest of the harsh beauties
Presented in this Divine Subject
Is that though there is an infinite capacity
For positivity and growth,
So too is there the possibility of stretching
Endlessly towards negativity forever.
However, it is much more terrifying
To lie in the middle;
To be undefined, unknowable, and to add
Or subtract to no effect;
The most fear inducing, mysterious, and gorgeous number
Of zero; nothing yet something,
Infinite yet not,
The most grand of all contradictions.
A hole; a jump; a discontinuity,
Easily removed from life and smoothed out
If you just apply the formulas.
Graphs and coordinates, integers and ordered pairs,
Is that not what life is?
We live within the grandest equation,
Each our own variable,
Constantly solving for ourselves
With the harsh beauties of mathematics.

I was told by my peers  
That honor and valor  
Could be found in a far-off field,  
As if war was a scavenger hunt  
Wherein men of all ages  
Fought to the death  
Looking for little baubles  
And adjectives.  

I was told to return  
With my shield or on it,  
And how different those words sound  
When you listen to the shells, shouts, and screams  
In a far-off field.  

But when this land sleeps in silence,  
The locals can be grateful  
That all the young boys  
Looking for adjectives and baubles  
Have made a far-off field  
Full of daisies,  
Beautiful in the sun  
And graceful on the breeze.

I remember the tops of clouds,
Looking as far as I could see.
I don't know if the Pacific
Is a pretty place,
But at altitude,
At least it's sunny.
Under the cumulus blanket,
Man makes his own clouds,
Thick with metal and smoke,
All black and shrapnel,
And God help you
If one opens up around your wingtips.
I remember nosing down,
Gritted teeth and twisted belly,
Eyes flitting between instruments
And the little ship
Getting fatter and fatter
Through my prop.
You wait till the last second,
Drop your ordinance,
And pull your nose
Up and up and then
You push that little throttle bar
To the limit,
And then the **** black clouds
Start up all around you,
And when your big baby shakes,
You know something's wrong,
And you cry out
"Buck? Buck?"
Like I did.
And then you don't know
If your face is covered in tears
Or blood from you or Buck.
I remember landing on that carrier,
Big and metal and gray,
Like a big tombstone for your friend,
And your plane is the coffin.
**** it, I remember.

What tortured verse doth speak of pain?
What rhyme doth voice this painful smart?
What words can soothe a battered brain,
An empty soul, and shattered heart?
Alack the day! No more am I
To live, to hope, to write or love.
Indeed, I fear mine end is nigh;
I wish to go to Him above.
Without my Love to guide me through,
This tempest's rage doth seem too much.
And now mine heart doth lifeblood spew,
I gladly go to Death's cold clutch.
For as I'm here, and you're away,
There's nothing bright about the day.

That which you were,
You were,
Yet that which you are,
You are not,
For we have not forgotten.
One cannot be gone
Whilst remembered.
Bright in life, now shine brighter
For all that has been,
Is,
And will be.
Ethereal, infinite;
These words become you,
And we shall meet upon the golden shore
At the horizon.