What is your greatest fear?
Do you worry about the past
The present, the future?
Do yesterdays woes play on your mind?
Or the worries of tomorrow?
How about the angsts of today?
What is your greatest fear?
Does money concern you?
Do you envision that a lack of material wealth will make you a lesser person?
Or that you won't be able to provide
For your mother, wife or children?
What is your greatest fear?
Do you fear great adventure?
From missions across treacherous terrains,
To learning something new.
Or maybe the unknown?
Does a non-existent threat debilitate and paralyse you?
What is your greatest fear?
I would say mine own is the fading of a great ability
To make words dance across a page as if they possess a life of their own
To link together phrases, to bring life to seemingly dreary monologues
To paint pictures with nouns and adjectives
Record films with verbs and adverbs
This is a gift I have been blessed with
Yet
I am scared
For I do not know when my time will come
And this pushes me
But until then?
I shall do what I know best
I shall write, query and ponder all the great questions life has for us
So I ask you
What is your greatest fear?

Mistah Kurtz—he dead.

      A penny for the Old Guy

      I

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us—if at all—not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

      II

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death’s dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind’s singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.

Let me be no nearer
In death’s dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat’s coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer—

Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom

      III

This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man’s hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Is it like this
In death’s other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.

      IV

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places
We ***** together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death’s twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.

      V

Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o’clock in the morning.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
                                For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
                                Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
                                For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

A hundred crows from all corners,
Flew into view, and whirled about,
As if the cracked earth set quaking,
As if the sky was tiding, sloe black,
What ominous undulations accrued,
What murderous tribulations due?
The very sound they made was tear,
Was tirade and all those black flecks;
Dark sparkles of sun, shadows of fear.

I look for Leo, his tawny dress,
His noble pride.  I see him ever,
In silent days his warmth his stride.  
Our friendship moved, grew a lease
With eyes sleepy, tempered, so wise,
Always serene.  How his waif voice
Would purrmurr, did chide and lift
Me from my human daze, my king
This spring is full of remembrances
And mornings that linger with mute
Vibrations and greetings.  How, now
I fear the carpets pressed unmoving
And times caress unsoothing.  I look
For you, with loving pause, and I cry.

.
The lone stark bugle cry—
Horn of the great mountain elk,
Ripples down cold through morning
Dusted wood as the mushrooming dews
Drop into dearly waded pools under
Fawning toes of forage and cool
Evergreen.