Who shall praise the sour wheat?
We shall praise the sour wheat.
Who shall praise the stillbirth?
We shall praise the stillbirth.

We shall be grateful, yea; even for emptiness
And vacancy
For there is still another opposite, even to the
fullness of nothing down here-

We should be grateful even that we realize
there can be a 'nothing' instead of a 'something';
We should be glad-
Even the void here contains worlds of universes
While the echo there just goes on
past the unraveling edge of forever

if you have something real to say to this world,
something else will come along to fill up all
the available time; truth is the one thing
not allowed down here

the self is a repository that has been
collecting things since the first man
had the first thought, and if you don't
believe this, the primal fear of deadly snakes
still remains very much awake
in our dreams to this day as a warning
of imminent danger

your thoughts get strung out
from place to place
when you travel, and others
can read them like signposts
along the highway

i can feel you arriving before
I know you are traveling this way,
and the dying can be felt leaving their
bodies before they realize it
themselves; departures and
journeys are not what they seem
down here

loud music frightens in the presence
of others; the loudness will unveil
fragility and capability they did not
know you possessed

because I can be so deadly
at the heart of me, I must pretend
to the innocence of a child
or risk execution

On the ship of self we're riding
Somewhere we do not know;
We tip the doorman, pay the driver,
The wheels begin to roll;

Past scenery drear and lovely,
Past clouds and oceans all;
Till everything is featureless,
Beneath a darkened pall.

Still many miles we're riding,
As to the end, we must;
Unsure of where we're headed,
We must rely on trust.

At last the rolling ceases,
The doors are opened slow-
We find we never left at all;
The journey's in the soul.

The universe has rhythms
To rock itself to sleep;
Praying Jews at nightfall,
In front of stony walls;
A slow-circling hawk
By a fortress deep,
And a dozing child
Where a woman weeps.

The universe has secrets
It touch with guilty hands;
Buried unmarked grave,
Of one who was not saved;
A war to break at morning,
When death will have his day,
Words of peace on dying lips
They can never say.

Hide in plain sight
Hide the hole within your soul,
Hide your dark blots all away
And run away that you shall live;
And live to run another day.

Hide in dark and hide in light,
Hide your life's continual blight-
Hide from truths so they won't find
The blackest hole of all; your mind

Hide in plain sight
Hide the hole within your soul,
Hide your dark blots all away
And run away that you shall live;
And live to run another day.

Hide the brilliance of your soul,
Hide it deep, hide it well-
Hope they won't think to look there
Stand watch to guard it, if you dare

Hide in plain sight
Hide the hole within your soul,
Hide your dark blots all away
And run away that you shall live;
And live to run another day.

Hide in hell worlds of the mind,
Hide in spells they'll never find-
Don't let them own your living soul
Much better far, to live in holes.

I sleep in sadness;
Or else sadness weeps
Weary and diffident,
Around the world, entangled
In morose grey deeps.

Sad in your gladness,
That I can't participate;
In torpors I circumnavigate
The whirling ocean, gravitate-
Would wish that I could burn.

Wish, to feel anything at all:
That love had me in thrall,
Or hatred made a mess
Of my well ordered senses;
Life: this just is.

Bite me or kiss me,
Wake me up; enlist me,
My dreams grown fainter than a wisp
Nearly drowned in status quo,
When all I wanted, to flame or glow.

There's no time
As life grows taller
Than a winter shadow,
And strangles your words:
Where did glad go?

I chase myself around a corner,
Find no one's waiting there,
For no one to grasp hold;
There's a vacancy inside me
It's colder than cold.

Hell's a moderate place, at best
Everyone's happy and soooo well-fed;
Watching endless hours, of a tv show:
Please set me on fire-
Don't **** me slow.

I can feel this consciousness;
That it's nowhere, and yet it feels local:
It's not in the rocks or the soil, the trees
Or the sky; it goes where I go
And I know where I'm going-
But it goes, without knowing.

Time and distance mean nothing to it;
And I'm its parasite, all the while believing
That I'm the one in charge;
Keeper of the maps and the shoes,
The tires and the itinerary.

Without it, I'm nothing and nowhere,
Just as lost in space as it is.
But I can't help fantasizing
About being the kite for once
Instead of always being the kitestring.