I am the soul of gods own joy:
He clothed me tenderly, in flesh;
Gave the island satellite as home
Where sense and impression mesh.
From the life of my days he is weaving
Indestructible record of mind
The coin of the realm is eternal:
No fragment of me left behind.

It's a beggar's moon, for you and me,
A lunar ride, to the edge of dawn,
Clutching stardust in our hands
Where love lives on, forever free.

It's a beggar's moon, we see above,
It's phases glowing like an orb,
As fairies fly and wishes spiral
And lonely couples look for love.

It's a beggar's moon, will follow us
It's shadow haunting word and look,
And eyes that speak an older tongue,
And smiles that last, till we are dust.

I am love's Savant
Of perilous divining;
No simpering hierophant,
Of the desperately climbing.

For love arrives naked,
Sans cloak or cloche,
While love's finger beckons,
For me to come close.

I'm privy to his prophecy;
To the keyholes I tiptoe,
Where I see the aristocracy-
In flagrante delicto.

As his scribe, I'm resigned
To write impassioned words;
Still, desires will not rewind-
Even though they be absurd.

When I was just a child, they were just a married couple;
Older, middle-aged, nothing distinguishing about them at all.
I loved swimming in their swimming pool,
Until they upsized, to a glitzy neighborhood of rambling,
Ranch-style houses.
And they upscaled, to exotic, foreign vacations.
Brought me back a Hawaiian volcanic stone, with emerald flecks,
A salt and pepper shaker set from Israel.

She was a clothes horse, always kept her figure,
Dressed slinky but classy, for an old babe;
Visibly stood taller, if another woman
Ever complimented her clothing or style-
And they invariably did.

My dad said that when alone with her husband,
That man would brag about daily *******
From his office receptionist, at the end of the workday
Before going home. I was older then, tried to imagine
How the shared exchange could have furthered
Some ancient, nightly excavated ambition?

Alone with her once, my dad said he made an innuendo,
Some playful joke which he had since forgotten the point of,
Probably due to the more stunning reaction it caused.
He had always loved teasing with words,
But he said that she had dropped all suggestion of pretense,
And she had told him then, You couldn't handle it..
He still chuckled about it, long after the fact.

Funny how for all those years, what I remembered seeing
Was a mostly colorless couple
Who always drove large Cadillacs.
And how in the later years, he could only move
While tethered to his oxygen tank,
Though it never hindered his smoking.

I want to disappear now, into the smell of books, old ink,
Moldy columns and perfumes of dried flowers.
What keeps us alive, bundled into these bodies,
Are incoherent strings of dna the gods of our existence,
Do they determine if our days are mostly carefree
Or slipstreams of inchoate agony?
Does the loveliness of life arise from its randomness,
Or the randomness from incalculable beauty?

Why do some pay the ultimate price,
And some never seem to pay anything at all?

Is my breathing my tithe, a piece of each day that's unwound,
Tribute paid to the universe, itself but one hallowed out-breath
From the sphincter of time and inconceivable distance?

I can wrap myself up in pages of words, in folds of paper
Trying to cover myself in understanding,
Yet no man holds the keys of what we are,
Or what we are yet to become; faith is all we inherit
In the orbiting chaos of time, we find once-living shreds of it
Always in free fall, floating forever through the continuum,
A whispered message from the secret heart of being,
To never forget, that the smallest mercies can save a soul.

In the greater oyster world
All the children eventually grew old
The windmills ran down
The fields went back to clover
The stones kept all their secrets
Waterways forgot their courses
The sundials were covered with moss
And time eventually stretched out
To touch the edge of infinity.

Lost in the blue, trying to winnow the way to you:
Swift flies the sickle; the aim be sharp and true;
The thresher dividing the wheat from the dross,
The clearing, it gleams where the golden rows close.
The day may be long but with scarce a complaint
So long as the grain is kept free of all taint.
With long winter shadows returning again,
The laid up fall stores soon turn sour and thin
Again will I dream of toil spent in the sun
I'll count all the hours till winter's undone.