They say you never know
just who you are
until you sit with darkness
all around,
but I think differently.

What we become            

alone

                            is no measure for humanity.

isolation throws our shadows into focus,
brings out the demons
where they can see to play;
but that 'self' is no more true
- and no less -
than when we laugh with the
companions of our fight

if you want to see your own face
truly,
and not in a carnival mirror
you must be willing to find a
kaleidoscope
of
answers.

some are masks, and some are
true;
some are old, and others
new;
some we have as ****** upon us,
some we craft with hands made new,
hewed from sinew, heart, and realized
with ***** soles...

Some of our faces are beautiful.
Some aren't.
Some of our faces have broken.
Some healed.
Some of our faces are worn out and tired imitations of what they ought to be, and some of our faces are clean.

Some of our faces are seen only in the dead
of night.
Some of our faces...
                                         ...well, some of them are a
beautiful impression, so we use them more often,
and try to forget the breaks
that happen in between.

All are true, and all are you. Don't let the
hidden faces
you wear in secret
define you.
You are more. No less, it is true.
But more.

God! Far more than those.

fresh ink pools,
mind benumbed,
leaking through the stagnant nib,
filling up the page
with spreading patterns I
cannot declare my own

am I the only one
who wants to make afresh
what hand and eye and mind
made once before,
to find the wand'ring stream
of thought that led me
to this pool
where mirage crystalized
with words
and deigned a portrait to
be captured
on my page?

but life is not so kind
to the half-blind,
who see in bits and pieces
and must color
the betweens
just to catch a glimpse
of untold mystery

more's the pity;
what I'd give to have the
diction of another year,
the fresh, uncluttered eye of mind
to throw and jumble elements
and still weave out
the golden line
that separates the madman
from the muse

I'm not so special after all;
just like the others
I still see in part
and sometimes not at all;
the golden thread lies useless,
and the gleam of gold
has dulled
if the magic and the mystery
are left to
past endeavors;

a maker makes,
          a singer sings,
                                  a tree stands treely by,
all in their orbit spin unceasing -
all drink the full delight of what they do

so lift your pen, weary poet;
the first few lines are stained
with rust; but still they
must be written.
speak of the music in your soul,
the discord and the pain

write what you see,
and what you don't,
the tendril's tender blooming buds
the towering trees above;
write the mosses underneath,
write each secret of the worlds
hidden
from the eye,
and write the glaring lights we think
we've seen before.

bring to light with blackest ink,
because that's what poets do.

darling, won't you come away
with me,
let's lose ourselves;
in the dying of today
let's drink more deeply
than we've ever drunk
before,
let's open up the corridors
that long have been shut up
to ourselves,
and pace their length together
with God

insight comes at night
when whispers are the
language of terror, or delight;
the piercing eye of mind delivers
truth most clearly
in the dark

or so I find

If I am poetry,
then she is prose.
But I am mangled, far more than she
so to read our lives out like a
story,
you might suppose the order
should be switched.

Don't ask her, though. She'd simply say
that I'm right if one is making that
comparison -
- but then go on to say that it's a
false dichotomy,
that there's another option that
I haven't thought of
yet.

Of course, since she's not here, I don't
know what that would be.

is it the sounds inherent
to the click of a pen,
or the meaning we layer
upon it?

click-clack; done.
clack-click; ready.

is it the way that she walks
or the delighting that he
pours into it?
is it the darkness, or our own
shadows?
is it the truth, or just our truth?
is it...
...real, or a fabricated reality?

and does it matter which is which, if the made-up one
is better?

I don't know.
A little bit of both is closest to the way
things really are, I think,
with a touch thrown in
of God.

way out in the distant open,
where stars burn
in their stable courses,
nothing but the hissing of
combusted gases
breaks the silence

so much of the universe
is unlivable
so why is it littered
with detail
so fine that the best
our scientists can do
is guess and run their
calculations once,
and once again?

+

pitiable love consumes it's
daughters,
pining after the last sweet
sigh of summer
as it bathes in winter's pain

hungry for bread
for the flesh of the dead,
and waking to groan in the
thousand-year night

simpering sailor of skies
spread like seas,
docks on the island,
the tomb of his breeze

hallowed howling, a temple's
gloom,
wolf and knife and priest
come soon

discovery comes sooner than the drowning
of day,
details unmask
but you knew where
they lay.

Deaf and mute and eyeless
stranger,
pilgrim from a foreign star
pitch your tent on the liar's island,
fuel your way from shore to shore

half-known visions cloud
the sky above,
stars and charts speak dim
and slow
flinging out solutions to the question never
asked
but always posed

why?

why these mysteries,
while scarlet ribbons flutter to the floor;
why these planet-spinning stars
when there is butter spread on bread;
why this life-defying silence,
when from the cradle of a thousand
infants, a thousand infants roar?

hilarity is not the mother nor the
cousin
to this beauty;
it's an apposite distinction
left out to laugh like
empty hulls hung
in wind.

No face is peering through the shutters
of the world,
no hand is sifting through the sea-shore
grit of galaxies left out
to spin amidst the ever-dancing
light

or so they say;
with odd and accurate
predictions that sustain
nothing                                                                                      
but denial
in the face of a world too vast and untamed to pretend for one moment that we all are not the most infinitely consequential of specks to hurtle through the dark and unforgiving void of space lit up with brilliant blues by a feathered mother sitting close and warm in the hatching heat of a nest that has not yet raised its eggs…

skies break open
far above
thunder dies on the ear
in the unforgiving roar
of the undoing
of this mortal shell.

Rejoice, dirt-dwellers, sun-begotten
creatures of the dust and breath of God;
thus the end shall come.