I feel motion sick
Even when I'm not moving
I wonder:
Is it physical,
A side effect of the medication;
Or is it in my soul?

I play two keyboards
Both are black and white
One has letters and one merely voices
Both have meaning, and power
To change the way people think, and see
My fingers pause
Over the keys
Ready
To make music.

How could you be so kind
As to leave me with an
Awkward shoulder hug
And a word that never was?

Imperfections are the beauty of life.
The whisper of a fragmented shell, the uneven receding of the ocean and the glimpse of a half-moon, neither crescent nor full, while the sun begins to rise.
A quiet dawn, absent of the flaming colors of super-saturated images on an “artist’s” computer.
The fact that, as a writer, I am now ******* the rules of grammar and the fragmented, half-beauty of an imperfect sentence is the only result.
Beauty doesn’t come from using big words or even perfect words. It comes from being halfway there, half the joy of our sight fulfilled, half the excitement and mystery and sorrow of not knowing, of not seeing, of not understanding.
Beauty isn’t meant to be understood – or even appreciated.
It is meant to be.
As long as it exists – without the passion, the ****** struggle of the artist’s search for meaning, without the human condition of imperfections and rectifications, art is.
Art doesn’t need you, the artist, to exist.
But you need art.
Beauty that mirrors your own imperfections.
Your own incompletion.
You are not finished yet – you are not an artist yet – you never will be.
You are not creating. You have never made anything original in your life. You can only transpose that which is already in you. And as you are completed, you can begin to know completion, fullness, consummation –
But not quite. It is something that you will never reach. Not on this earth, in this body, with this bound and sleeping soul. A flicker of a spark in the darkness is not enough to truly wake your spirit; death alone can rend the iron chains and throw you out beyond your body.
Enough
Never enough.
You are never enough.
Art is never enough – always maddeningly imperfect, broken. What does art do? What do you do? Beyond the existence of the dripping seconds, absorbed by deserts of the poor, the tired, the embittered – they act. They do.
They are always doing.
But what is it to be?
Complete in yourself and in all? To be I am, the one condition by which anything can be anything or have anything, and to be enough?
I am lost, and blind, and cold, in the echoing halls of time.
Alone.
Barren.
What am I?
If I am not an artist, not enough, not – somehow – alone?
What can I be?
You – all of you – this human experiment that has reached new heights of love and joy and passion, ceaseless, peaceless, senseless and hollow.
Look at the world. Look and believe.
Death devours all; never satisfied, even with Shakespeare, with Napoleon and Caesar and Alexander the Great.
Even with you, and me.
It will never cease consuming as long as a single breath stirs the air.
Why are we? Why do we keep striving for that fragmented beauty, the misty song of another way to be?
Is there anything but the carnal, the voracious appetite of Death and Man for blood?
Or is humanity nothing but animals who have deluded themselves, told themselves that they can see what others cannot, that justice reigns and that this world is something other than what we see?
And I, caught amidst the whirlwind of all the nothing new, caught and spinning, pretending that I can see what others cannot, that I have something to offer through these black and white and formless words.
Nothing new.
The world never changes its axis; it spins and moves but never really goes anywhere, year after year, in the blinding plummet of galaxies around their black-hole hearts.
Is that all a heart is?
Is lightning only the fire flashing through black clouds that illuminates and kills?
Is poetry only syllables and words we cannot know?
Is the world only what we make of it?
Because then, well, ****.
I guess this is the story of my life, guys.
An arrogant, blind ******* who hates herself and draws away in silence. I drift in the vast reaches of space, unreachable, unlovable, with the rest of humanity spinning around until we get too dizzy to bear the tide and surge of life any longer.
And then we keel over and die.

Beneath the dim October sky
Wrapped in a shawl of celestial mist
I saw an unloved ghost fly by
And heard him bemoan the life he missed.

I walk down to the stream,
a ghost among the tendrils of mist
wakening from the moist air.

The half-moon gives a weak light to my feet,
but grows stronger
as the night rises
and shakes off the sleepiness of twilight.

Sitting on a rough stone,
I look into the shadows
and begin to think.
I pull out my flashlight, try to write,
then turn it off and stare at the stars.

Branches of the tree above me grasp at the wind.
I wrestle with much more,
but cannot grasp my thoughts
or the inconceivable movement
within my soul
any better than I can subjugate the bodiless air.
A melancholy that is not sorrow
settled on me a year ago
this night, in the dark of October's waning moon.

I stand up and leave the stone to wander.

I meet the banks of the shallow stream
and stand there for a while, empty.
There is nothing,
there has been nothing,
for twelve months
since I renounced my pain and bitterness.
Everyone tells you that somehow
love will find you
when you let go of hate.
Everyone is wrong.

The stars spin
in their slow, silent dance;
the highway sighs in the distance;
the moon rises slowly as it had done
for thousands of years.

"Speak!" I importune the stars.

They do not answer.

"Show me your light!" I implore the moon.

The moon hangs there,
still,
among the darkness of the stained sky.

"Answer!" I demand of the sky,
and the sky says nothing.

Twelve months of solitude,
of emptiness and silence,
hovering over the abyss.

I have looked into the abyss.
The abyss has looked into me.
And slowly, like the setting moon,
like the way a fever ends in peaceful sleep,

I begin to fall.