Poetry can only be judged at a distance.
No poet can judge his/her own work.
No one who knows the poet can judge.
Proximity inevitably mixes objectively
with subjectivity. The writer will be judged
against the backdrop of personality.
The chain of words will be linked to
him/her and not to the message.
Poetry results from a need, a need
to express the intensely personal
and intimately necessary. A need to
announce we exist without expectations,
without claiming a role. Just a voice
in the darkness hoping for some light.

The tent of love is fragile, but a refuge from
the world of storm that swirls about it’s ropes and stakes.
The supports strain and squeal, warn of failure
but the show goes on, in spite of the warnings.
Then, love, under siege from the storm seeks refuge.
Stop the show! Call in the clowns! If the clowns come in
the storm will vanish. I deny it’s there. If so, then
who is the clown? What happens when the tent collapses,
the show stops and the clowns don’t appear?  I am
alone amidst the  props I thought were real.
I was real, love was real but for now it’s
over until the next show.

Guide or friend, guest or host, family or stranger,
all different but strangely the same.
No difference in the beginning or end. Just eternal sameness.
Death is just the beginning of the unknown.
The unknown is so vast we can’t even contemplate it, for fear it’s enormity will overwhelm our small minds.
A mind overwhelmed is a mind adrift on a sea of sorrow
in a storm of regret, while the islands tend to fade
into the fog, leaving only the pain.
Is death the end of beginnings or is it the final beginning, the
end of endings? Is it that bridge to eternity where seas are calm,
our course is set and our destination forever?
Fear of death is the fear of forever. Fear of forever is the
fear that the possibility of eternal life, without strife, just
might be true. Hope is our connection to the eternal.
Life favors certainty, death only offers uncertainty.
Certainty is the gift of yesterday, tomorrow only
offers uncertainty and maybe our ticket to forever.

Before you, life was an illusion, a dream
well, maybe a nightmare.
You came to me, like the great sculptor not seeing
just a block of stone but seeing David in that block
screaming to get out.
You reached into my shell and drew me out
into the springtime warmth of you smile,
the sound of your song and the depth of your love.
I am immersed but I do not drown... each breath
takes in only love and my capacity increases with each sigh.
Born again is too simple for your creation. Fabricated
remade or crafted better describe your pact on me.
I feel life, outside of mere existence. I see flowers where
once I saw only weeds and your sun shines on me always.
I bask in you and your love...

If I feel then it’s real.
If I can’t feel then it’s an idea.
But can’t I feel an idea?
Isn’t love an idea whose
manifestation lies in feeling?
What I see isn’t real until I feel it.
Love isn’t real until I feel and am felt.
Until then it’s just an ache,
a nagging sense of the incomplete,
a desperate longing for something
beyond something that’s just out there
in a place, beyond which, there are dragons.
A dangerous journey, my arrival assured
only if I feel. I see, I hear but these senses can deceive.
Feeling is the last refuge of reality,
without it we are adrift in a sea of ideas.

I know what I know and know what I don’t know.
I want to understand the infinite,
the concept that time goes on forever, it’s endless.
The idea of the infinite haunts me,
I can’t understand it, label it or grasp it.
I can only accept it. We call that acceptance, faith,
that great catch all for that which we can’t or don’t understand.
Thwarted by the infinite we overdose on the finite.
Books, movies and pictures, all imploring the world to
remember that we existed. We even create yards of stone,
each stone calling out our name to anyone passing by.
I accept the fact that my mind will never conceive the infinite.
But, it’s still there, haunting me, driving me to fight it and  
fabricate new ways to thwart it.
However, perpetuity is a fools errant, even if it is carved in stone...

My ears hear the sound
but my eyes see
only the motion of her lips.
Her voice is like music
drawing me in like the doomed ships of lore.
We kiss, that great dam of emotion bursts,
A tsunami of passion floods my being,
I am swept out of reality
and into the moment.
But the moment is fleeting, the passion recedes
yet the music continues
to, once again, draw me to that shore of mystery.