Champion pitted against champion:
King vs. King

The ant steps forward to meet his
mortal foe,
pincers held high and pride in his
six-fold step.
The tribes are at war over food and
possessions -

and both crushed alike by the sudden
scuffle of a
warrior fighting for his life.

Back home, he has a wife and children,
and a promise that he'll see them
once again;
but now his promise to his king
is being tested, on the metal of
an enemy's blade,
and all his life is flashing like
a lightning storm ahead.

No less driven by that same fear,
but glad it is not
his turn
to taste the incarnation
of it,
the other man advances, and they
clash their swords -

"Checkmate, my boy."
+++

All the world's a stage,
and all the stages worlds.

The pieces have no frame of reference;
for them each moment is
truly life or
death
played out in a hundred different
possibilities.

(Stakes are only as high as they are believed to be.)

So set your stages carefully,
ant, farmboy, king, or god -
each dance upon their own stage,
and each one rules his world.
+++

And so his king fell, thumping on the
checkered board, laying down a
checkered past of expediency,
hasty decisions, and a mind unused
to strategy.

"Next time, grandpa.                  
                              I'll beat you next time."

Every time I set pen to paper
I am struck with the vastness
of the world that I am entering.
Sometimes I stand on the brink, unwilling
to hurl myself over the edge of
what has already been made
into the long dark of uncreated
nebulae and whispers of
story that run through
my fingertips as intangibly as
starlight from above.
The possibilities are endless. It's true.
And the sheer immensity of creating -
such a lost, divine, and yet
most common art -
it pushes me backwards with
hands given substance by
nothing more (and nothing less)
than my own mind.

Is it hubris to create?
Miserable makers are we,
unfit to be gods
of anything, let alone the
vast, untamed beauties
which ramble in that long
and undivided brightness
of imagination.
We are unworthy all,
and I most of all;
the hand that spells out majesty
has broken heartstrings,
plucking at them
day by day
and clutching at the tattered ends
when at last they failed.

Yet still the world of what could be
expands like stars in space,
every time I step up to the
portal of that world
(the unmarked page).
What is this gift, this mystery?

To write love and darkness,
joy in misery,
these hands - this ****** ink of mine -
is able still.

Grace.

The word should be
blank,
when this hand tries to write it.
And yet the ink still flows
and forms the shape,
a living testimony
of itself.

So here I stand, one small pen
in hand, like a bucket meant
to catch an ocean of rain.
And my inevitable failure
is somehow
still,
an overflowing success.

One moment of that other world captured is enough
to stir the hearts of men,
and turn them from their gold to things above.

it wasn't till I walked there
all alone,
that I realized all the beauty
I had missed.
A smiling face beside me, and
fingers twined with mine
were focus, thought, and scene
enough,
for the eyes of my young mind.

it wasn't till I walked my path
a good way on my own,
that flowers once kept hidden
from me
began to bloom and grow.
A smiling face above me and
a ring of friends around,
hands full of pencils, paper,
and notebooks full of ink -
for what might be the
first time,
I've begun to truly see, the
wholeness God intended
when He stooped to create me.

no smiling face, nor fingers twined,
nor hearts ablaze with
love and fire,
nothing can ever steal the place
of my soul's sweet
desire

to love is to be is to will is to do -
to do is to love, and

dear God!

                 I love you.

The world is far more
alien,
than I supposed before.
All it takes to see this is a trip to
somewhere
humans aren't supposed to be -
the sky above, or foundering
in the deep, deep
sea.

The truth is, we've only got a tiny window of the
space that's on this earth,
and while we call it home,
there's far more we can only
glimpse and stare at
from afar.

There's a world above the clouds
that no one could have
ever seen,
(if we never made a flight machine, that is)
but always it is there, regardless of our eyes.
And when we've tumbled through
that air-space and
come down,
well, it goes back to being what it
was before - the gentle
undulating whiteness of the tops of
clouds and plains.

From a distance, it should be solid,
one thinks. A planet
of white rock, with blue sky
overhead
              and sun.

The tall and gentle creatures
that should live here,
soft of foot and hibernating
for years, perhaps,
in crooks and hidden crannies
- Lord only knows -
white of skin and eye and bone,
matching the world they live on,
unchanging and yet
never same.

But no. There are no creatures
in the clouds.
None but us - and we don't live there;
no, we wouldn't dare.
We'd die, if we ever tried.
And that's the point.

The world that we call "ours"
is just a sliver, just a slice
of everything this world is,
and all that lies between.

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.