An aesthetic is a polished stone of truth.
Where beauty shines its insight
Onto a multitude of reflective curves and planes.

Small wonder the world smiles upon the couple.
Who have shifted the surfaces they slipped from.
Orpheus and Eurydice reunited:

Having finally tripped out of the cave and into the sun.
Their outward smiles shining with the inner joy of a sight regained:
Love is the greatest beauty of them all.

Journeys rendered dateless,
Unending,
Wayward and extending out,
Round the compass points --
Dizzying aspiration to cease this race,
To slow my sprinting soul,
This pace splintering, in exhaustion.

Expiring breath of hope or of home
Evaporated in a distance
Vanishing and
Disconnected.
Drifting
On trackless tides, across
Labyrinthine depths,
Within the vast heart
Of the world
I cannot run from.

Yet, I moved to and between
The center or its peripherals, in
Singular or collectives,
Seeking pattern and
Drawing connectives –-
Brushing by and
Bustling among
People
Entranced In their own
Objectives.

I watched their movements
And their exchanges,
I heard their rituals and
Invocations.
In all these transitions,
They have no inkling
That their seemingly trite
Lives merely manifest
The epic motifs of the heavens!

Our imaginations mirror
The vitality of the gods!
We are as immortal as they!
Our simple, sensual stories
Are also enduring legends
Unfolding,
As our pages turn,
Our flags are unfurling!

Just as our fellow
Olympians of old
Engaged in a marathon of
Endeavor to heights
Unimagined!
From those mystic days
Since Orpheus’ ardent lyre
Sang notes
Of Nature’s divinity, Her
Eternal sweetness.

We need only sense that
It is in Nature’s essence
We are sharing.
With her, we are joined in
An undying marriage,
A unified pairing –
Our human heritage,
Our dignified bearing.

We share in that song,  
We share in that sweetness,
We share in that race,
We share in Her immanence.

This journey is our own.

It goes on, unending!

I was not born of god and muse.
Pictures of virtuosic health  
captured in epic poetry
that I don’t want to write.

The music I make charms my world.
Trees and rocks
obey not the wind and current,
but the meter of my songs.

You too fell for tricks of snake,
though my tune called your name
long before they evaded my coil.

Forgive me, I won’t question your sleep below.
For even the rules of your warden dictate
you can’t look forward
while you’re looking back.

I could be your Orpheus.
Which is to say that even after death
you won’t get rid of me.

I could be your Orpheus,
but with the way his story goes
wouldn’t you say I’m probably
more like his lyre.

Longing eyes upon you cast
As a mirror does reflection find.
In the air of chambers behind
Lingers restless passions laid to rest.
Like a silent laugh or tearless cry
My life seems waste to my enemies.
Their wrath I did bide my time to appease
But hope-sight you gave me--ethereal eyes.
Through these common sight can never be
As a soul into new dimensions born.
At these seas I stand formless on the leas
No longer hiding but now riding the storm.
Your soul holds mine deeper into these seas--
Orpheus and his love reunited forever in
Glorious form.

I hear your lyre cries
I hear your grief and sorrow
I hear your love for me.

You refuse to listen as they tell you
That I am too far beneath the surface
Trapped in the clutches of death's flames.

My beautiful minstrel, no longer incandescent
Do you think Apollo would be proud of what you've come to?
You roam around with your lyre of gold,
Yet you have killed your flame for love lost.

I miss the way you enchanted all of Greece with your melodies
You now make the gods and goddesses weep in pity;
You make the flowers wilt and die of sadness,
You make even the sirens wail of broken heartedness as
they drive away the sailors who were once enchanted by them.

Do you see the beautiful might of the songs you sing?

O Orpheus, listen to me when I tell you to stop searching for me:
Do not enter the caves and traverse the darkness once more
A darkness you are not meant to be in,
Darkness you are too precious for.

I hear your lyre cries
I hear your grief and sorrow
I hear your love for me
And I am sorry I could not come back with you...

But listen now, my love
Although you long for me still
I am now the only thing in your world
That your music cannot bring back to life.

I would have rather been Orpheus,
travelling to various hells for you
and singing songs to save you
even though you couldn't save yourself:
stop looking back. The flames aren't worth it.
Let my eyes burn brighter than the abyss.
Just whatever you do don't turn your face
away Eurydice. Hades will have his Persephone
and you are not her.

It's better this way I guess. I would have looked
back at you and watched you crumble into
a shadowy pillar of salt as did the wife of Lot
when she looked back at *****. I am faithless,
which is why I cannot sing like Orpheus. I am faithless,
which is why I would have watched you melt into
a shadowy memory of the underworld even if I could.

Instead, I was a messenger of these strange myths.

Wings on my feet, I raced against the multitudinous
skylines of the worlds I do not inhabit, skipped across
volumes and volumes of rows and columns of planets and
stars written by dead old men and women. They spoke presently
of the voluminous presence their absence had created, and did so
without having known of the secrets of this absence when
they wrote about their respective presents. Presents conferred
to winged-feet wishful thinkers who spiral uncontrollably with their mouths
to sudden and dangerous depths: Every serious reader remembers
the time they stopped whispering controversies and started shouting them
without knowing that they were shouting them: Ideas are messy things
that don't need loudspeakers: Decibels violently shudder themselves out
of being the moment you mention to your mother that God
might not exist and Camus said so: Existence itself implodes outwards
like how plants produce seeds that make themselves when novels
start at their ends which are really their beginnings: Children
**** their mothers through birth: Boys with wings on their feet
take the library too seriously.

This is
          how
and
          where
I flew towards you without a chariot

and found you in your various hells, one book at a time,
and why I would have rather have been Orpheus
because at least then I could have sang you songs
before you ended up retreating back into your various
selves. It could have been my fault then for looking back.

It could have been,
   could have been,
   could have been
you that was Orpheus. You who looked back.
You being the reason that I crumbled into a pillar of
shadow and salt because, as did Lot's wife, I looked back.

We both did, and watched the whole world invert itself
on its axis, then turn and twist and shift itself
into superimposed images and shapes and dreams
that changed you from muse to poet and
dream to dreamer
and Eurydice to Orpheus
and to Lot then his wife
and to this: which you always were.

              Those wings on your feet: When
the librarians changed the positions of the bookshelves-
and therefore our imaginations: our movements
and stanzas and scenes and days and nights-
               Those wings on your feet: When
that happened they must have stopped fluttering
for a second. I tried flying again and fell.

I haven't been much of a messenger since.

I just wanna let you know
That I want you back
That I can do everything
Just to be with you again

Im sorry if I looked back
I didn't know
I am sorry Eurydice
I wasted the chance

Now that you're gone, forever
I'll just pluck my lyre
And sing a sad song
Until we'll meet again

In the underworld
Wait for me my love
my life, my Eurydice

I remember your breathtaking portrait.
Your eyes were horizon-blue, awake and ignited in love with a modern man.
In a modern era a love so hot you’re prepared to grieve it 
for the rest of your life
Just to dance in its fire until it fades.
You burst forth and lit the fuse,
Loving hot and working feverishly to emerge and
Forge futures for your daughter and I.
But her father burnt out young,
And his ashes lured her into a shivering, toxic sleep.
In that future she also loved a man she would widow young.

She has felt the cold fire of snow on her face
Passed or thrown out onto the ground
But I can’t tell you if she ever felt that love again.
I won’t tell you about all the cats and dogs she slept with
Or how she threw me and threw at me and all through me
To the sheriffs in a wild state.
Then, with you, she lost love in the last person who loved her.
Her voice cracked and shaded when you couldn’t remember her name.
She drowned both of our spirits and we slept poor, wet, drunk.
These decades have tired her body
And I refused to allow its cold hollow eyes near mine.

Asleep, I consumed myself with the loves of men and the grief for each love.
I ate and breathed men and fever-dreamed through relationships.
I aimed poisoned golden robes at lovers thrown with a motor’s velocity
And then ran loud red lights smoldering through hot teared eyes
With the unsober intention to silence us both in the burning frost of February.
Hate veiled all reason and hystericized my being and thirsted for more:
More prohibited liquor than I could ever nurse it with
More pills than the pock-nosed doctor would give when he
Sliced open the belly of a howling wild animal mother me.
Many more.

And when I died I awoke in ice and raged my way to the surface of the Styx.
It was there I emerged warm and wet next to a modern man who reminds me of you.
I fell and I rose through our molten love and forged myself within it.
We, in a worn and unwealthy future still love and work for our unborn daughters
As hotly in dynamic color as you did in crisp black and white.

Through him and through you I can love her again.
And when our daughter bursts through, undrugged and undoctored,
She will incite her own century’s hot voltaic Spring,
In a pyrotechnic era of alive and alert daughters,
Gaining ground and dimension and speed,
Because she will know our love.
I wish you could see the horizon in your daughter’s eyes
When she sees our yet unconceived apple of discord.
I hope the warmth will awaken her, and she will emerge and forge herself
And know again the good rage of a fiery and awake love
Worth grieving.