Mark seemed to have it all,
a beautiful wife,
two strapping sons
& he was always out to have
serious
good clean fun.
A hellacious paddler
& consummate fisherman,
always teaching his boys
a higher standard
& fulfilling
his honey-do lists.
So naturally,
it came as a big surprise
when he asphyxiated
himself with carbon monoxide
in his own driveway
during broad daylight.
It tore us apart actually.
At the funeral,
his wife told me he had seven stepfathers.
I never knew that,
but maybe,
just maybe,
he thought he was a failure
when his wife filed for divorce
the morning of his departure,
and he couldn't live with that.
The thought of his own children
growing up like he did,
it must have been hell.
Perhaps
the mystery will never be solved,
but just the same,
all I can think about
is the damage,
the other hell
he left behind.

chosen child for nature's creativity
tangoing to the sway of twilight trees
such spiritually sensual sensibilities

hypersensitivity heightening passion
life intensified in intellectual interest
love embellished with emotional empathy

oh, to bottle her elusive essence
to drink in her wistful nights
to infuse my tea with her promise
to scent my pillow with her dreams

uncork the atmospheric aroma
of sepia tinged crescents
wafting in celestial patisseries

sweeten the clear blue skies
with mists of crystallized honey
perfuming the divine aether

oh, fill my breath with her ephemeral
synchronize my life's pulse to the
metronome ponytails of skipping girls
followed by the tails of wagging dogs

Lucky are those who have found love
and been loved.

Lucky are those who bear the gift of face.
   Easy is for them to find an easy case
            for their own taste
     - a goal for their own base.

Lucky are those who has an outstanding confidence.
For by it, they don’t live with a doubtful fence.
Freely as they get any wants in their existence.

I give away smiles, pieces of my lies,
        pretending not having rainy skies.
Hiding my Breathless sighs.

Sometimes I am like a rock
   too dull to feel, a surface too rough.
A sense I lost, an unreachable core,
I don’t know how to love anymore.



*© 2014 Pax

Ain’t even gotta work to
Capture your Imagination.
Meanwhile i lost my id.

If you accidentally
             fall out of love,
Do you just dive
                back in head first?
           Feet first??
                     Eyes closed???
        Cannon ball????
             Or
Do you walk away
       Cause you can't swim
And you're scared to death
                   of *drowning?????

Two excerpts, for the full article, see the notes


"It occurred to me that there were two sets of virtues, the résumé virtues and the eulogy virtues. The résumé virtues are the skills you bring to the marketplace. The eulogy virtues are the ones that are talked about at your funeral — whether you were kind, brave, honest or faithful. Were you capable of deep love?

We all know that the eulogy virtues are more important than the résumé ones. But our culture and our educational systems spend more time teaching the skills and strategies you need for career success than the qualities you need to radiate that sort of inner light. Many of us are clearer on how to build an external career than on how to build inner character.

But if you live for external achievement, years pass and the deepest parts of you go unexplored and unstructured. You lack a moral vocabulary. It is easy to slip into a self-satisfied moral mediocrity. You grade yourself on a forgiving curve. You figure as long as you are not obviously hurting anybody and people seem to like you, you must be O.K. But you live with an unconscious boredom, separated from the deepest meaning of life and the highest moral joys. Gradually, a humiliating gap opens between your actual self and your desired self, between you and those incandescent souls you sometimes meet."

"External ambitions are never satisfied because there’s always something more to achieve. But the stumblers occasionally experience moments of joy. There’s joy in freely chosen obedience to organizations, ideas and people. There’s joy in mutual stumbling. There’s an aesthetic joy we feel when we see morally good action, when we run across someone who is quiet and humble and good, when we see that however old we are, there’s lots to do ahead.

The stumbler doesn’t build her life by being better than others, but by being better than she used to be. Unexpectedly, there are transcendent moments of deep tranquillity. For most of their lives their inner and outer ambitions are strong and in balance. But eventually, at moments of rare joy, career ambitions pause, the ego rests, the stumbler looks out at a picnic or dinner or a valley and is overwhelmed by a feeling of limitless gratitude, and an acceptance of the fact that life has treated her much better than she deserves.

Those are the people we want to be."