We live in the unlighted state of America
Where what happens when we turn the lights off
Is dealt with darkness
And matters of delicate touch
Are treated with sharpness
When our only language
Is to inflict anguish
We cut connections in the bedroom
To clear our cynical head room
For contempt and judgement

People looking for a feeling to fall into
Or a reason to live
Must face frigid climates
When the public invades privacy
And ill fated ****** exploits
Pervade salacious tabloids
Our ****** regrets
Cut the deepest
Society reaps them
Sowing us together with resentment
We provide each other with relief
But not the relief we're looking for
We give each other hours of relief
Until those useless hours become days
And those fruitless days become years
That engender endless tears
As it remains warm in our car
But the winter outside freezes anything that breaks the plane
And our air conditioning only helps so much
When the spinning wheels are in our faces

There is a national coverage in the media
That presents a bleak picture of the ****** health of America
I feel I sit somewhere in between
*** offenders and a disgusted public
When I observe the observers
Who are too scared shitless to ever face their own emotions
Judge those for overindulging in their emotions
They lived their life in fear and safety
So they could be the righteous ones
To admonish the risk takers and mistake makers
Yet they are of the least value to humanity
They're the people who grade all your answers as incorrect
Without providing their perfect alternatives
While trying to erase the context
Because of what the context has to say about society
People feeling that they can never be emotionally vulnerable
Until they experience sheer desperation
And no dollar contract
Can replace human contact
Yet we give men so much money and power
And ask them to feel fine in our cold shower
Until we are soiled by their intention
A nation committed to selling Stella Artois
A nation full of Blanche DuBois

Humanity folds in on itself
When we attack with ***
Humanity does itself a disservice
By not trying to understand these attacks honestly
We forsake forgiveness
And embrace desperation
Until we become unbearably desperate
For attention
For approval
For ****** contact
For money
For validation
And sometimes our desperate desires become tangled
I'd like to think of that as love
And not a meeting between two practical rapists
That conjoin in the middle
Yet somehow come out distorted on the other side

From time to time, lifting his eyes, he sees
The soft blue starlight through the one small window,
The moon above black trees, and clouds, and Venus,--
And turns to write . . .  The clock, behind ticks softly.

It is so long, indeed, since I have written,--
Two years, almost, your last is turning yellow,--
That these first words I write seem cold and strange.
Are you the man I knew, or have you altered?
Altered, of course--just as I too have altered--
And whether towards each other, or more apart,
We cannot say . . .  I've just re-read your letter--
Not through forgetfulness, but more for pleasure--

Pondering much on all you say in it
Of mystic consciousness--divine conversion--
The sense of oneness with the infinite,--
Faith in the world, its beauty, and its purpose . . .
Well, you believe one must have faith, in some sort,
If one's to talk through this dark world contented.
But is the world so dark?  Or is it rather
Our own brute minds,--in which we hurry, trembling,
Through streets as yet unlighted?  This, I think.

You have been always, let me say, "romantic,"--
Eager for color, for beauty, soon discontented
With a world of dust and stones and flesh too ailing:
Even before the question grew to problem
And drove you bickering into metaphysics,
You met on lower planes the same great dragon,
Seeking release, some fleeting satisfaction,
In strange aesthetics . . .  You tried, as I remember,
One after one, strange cults, and some, too, morbid,
The cruder first, more violent sensations,
Gorgeously carnal things, conceived and acted
With splendid animal thirst . . .  Then, by degrees,--
Savoring all more delicate gradations

In all that hue and tone may play on flesh,
Or thought on brain,--you passed, if I may say so,
From red and scarlet through morbid greens to mauve.
Let us regard ourselves, you used to say,
As instruments of music, whereon our lives
Will play as we desire: and let us yield
These subtle bodies and subtler brains and nerves
To all experience plays . . . And so you went
From subtle tune to subtler, each heard once,
Twice or thrice at the most, tiring of each;
And closing one by one your doors, drew in
Slowly, through darkening labyrinths of feeling,
Towards the central chamber . . .  Which now you've reached.

What, then's, the secret of this ultimate chamber--
Or innermost, rather?  If I see it clearly
It is the last, and cunningest, resort
Of one who has found this world of dust and flesh,--
This world of lamentations, death, injustice,
Sickness, humiliation, slow defeat,
Bareness, and ugliness, and iteration,--
Too meaningless; or, if it has a meaning,
Too tiresomely insistent on one meaning:

Futility . . .  This world, I hear you saying,--
With lifted chin, and arm in outflung gesture,
Coldly imperious,--this transient world,
What has it then to give, if not containing
Deep hints of nobler worlds?  We know its beauties,--
Momentary and trivial for the most part,
Perceived through flesh, passing like flesh away,--
And know how much outweighed they are by darkness.
We are like searchers in a house of darkness,
A house of dust; we creep with little lanterns,
Throwing our tremulous arcs of light at random,
Now here, now there, seeing a plane, an angle,
An edge, a curve, a wall, a broken stairway
Leading to who knows what; but never seeing
The whole at once . . .  We ***** our way a little,
And then grow tired.  No matter what we touch,
Dust is the answer--dust: dust everywhere.
If this were all--what were the use, you ask?
But this is not: for why should we be seeking,
Why should we bring this need to seek for beauty,
To lift our minds, if there were only dust?
This is the central chamber you have come to:
Turning your back to the world, until you came
To this deep room, and looked through rose-stained windows,
And saw the hues of the world so sweetly changed.

Well, in a measure, so only do we all.
I am not sure that you can be refuted.
At the very last we all put faith in something,--
You in this ghost that animates your world,
This ethical ghost,--and I, you'll say, in reason,--
Or sensuous beauty,--or in my secret self . . .
Though as for that you put your faith in these,
As much as I do--and then, forsaking reason,--
Ascending, you would say, to intuition,--
You predicate this ghost of yours, as well.
Of course, you might have argued,--and you should have,--
That no such deep appearance of design
Could shape our world without entailing purpose:
For can design exist without a purpose?
Without conceiving mind? . . .  We are like children
Who find, upon the sands, beside a sea,
Strange patterns drawn,--circles, arcs, ellipses,
Moulded in sand . . .  Who put them there, we wonder?

Did someone draw them here before we came?
Or was it just the sea?--We pore upon them,
But find no answer--only suppositions.
And if these perfect shapes are evidence
Of immanent mind, it is but circumstantial:
We never come upon him at his work,
He never troubles us.  He stands aloof--
Well, if he stands at all: is not concerned
With what we are or do.  You, if you like,
May think he broods upon us, loves us, hates us,
Conceives some purpose of us.  In so doing
You see, without much reason, will in law.
I am content to say, 'this world is ordered,
Happily so for us, by accident:
We go our ways untroubled save by laws
Of natural things.'  Who makes the more assumption?

If we were wise--which God knows we are not--
(Notice I call on God!) we'd plumb this riddle
Not in the world we see, but in ourselves.
These brains of ours--these delicate spinal clusters--
Have limits: why not learn them, learn their cravings?
Which of the two minds, yours or mine, is sound?
Yours, which scorned the world that gave it freedom,
Until you managed to see that world as omen,--
Or mine, which likes the world, takes all for granted,
Sorrow as much as joy, and death as life?--
You lean on dreams, and take more credit for it.
I stand alone . . .  Well, I take credit, too.
You find your pleasure in being at one with all things--
Fusing in lambent dream, rising and falling
As all things rise and fall . . .  I do that too--
With reservations.  I find more varied pleasure
In understanding: and so find beauty even
In this strange dream of yours you call the truth.

Well, I have bored you.  And it's growing late.
For household news--what have you heard, I wonder?
You must have heard that Paul was dead, by this time--
Of spinal cancer.  Nothing could be done--
We found it out too late.  His death has changed me,
Deflected much of me that lived as he lived,
Saddened me, slowed me down.  Such things will happen,
Life is composed of them; and it seems wisdom
To see them clearly, meditate upon them,
And understand what things flow out of them.
Otherwise, all goes on here much as always.
Why won't you come and see us, in the spring,
And bring old times with you?--If you could see me
Sitting here by the window, watching Venus
Go down behind my neighbor's poplar branches,--
Just where you used to sit,--I'm sure you'd come.
This year, they say, the springtime will be early.

I. LONELINESS

Her Word

One ought not to have to care
   So much as you and I
Care when the birds come round the house
   To seem to say good-bye;

Or care so much when they come back
   With whatever it is they sing;
The truth being we are as much
   Too glad for the one thing

As we are too sad for the other here—
   With birds that fill their *******
But with each other and themselves
   And their built or driven nests.

II. HOUSE FEAR

Always—I tell you this they learned—
Always at night when they returned
To the lonely house from far away
To lamps unlighted and fire gone gray,
They learned to rattle the lock and key
To give whatever might chance to be
Warning and time to be off in flight:
And preferring the out- to the in-door night,
They. learned to leave the house-door wide
Until they had lit the lamp inside.

III. THE SMILE

Her Word

I didn’t like the way he went away.
That smile! It never came of being gay.
Still he smiled—did you see him?—I was sure!
Perhaps because we gave him only bread
And the wretch knew from that that we were poor.
Perhaps because he let us give instead
Of seizing from us as he might have seized.
Perhaps he mocked at us for being wed,
Or being very young (and he was pleased
To have a vision of us old and dead).
I wonder how far down the road he’s got.
He’s watching from the woods as like as not.

IV. THE OFT-REPEATED DREAM

She had no saying dark enough
   For the dark pine that kept
Forever trying the window-latch
   Of the room where they slept.

The tireless but ineffectual hands
   That with every futile pass
Made the great tree seem as a little bird
   Before the mystery of glass!

It never had been inside the room,
   And only one of the two
Was afraid in an oft-repeated dream
   Of what the tree might do.

V. THE IMPULSE

It was too lonely for her there,
   And too wild,
And since there were but two of them,
   And no child,

And work was little in the house,
   She was free,
And followed where he furrowed field,
   Or felled tree.

She rested on a log and tossed
   The fresh chips,
With a song only to herself
   On her lips.

And once she went to break a bough
   Of black alder.
She strayed so far she scarcely heard.
   When he called her—

And didn’t answer— didn’t speak—
   Or return.
She stood, and then she ran and hid
   In the fern.

He never found her, though he looked
   Everywhere,
And he asked at her mother’s house
   Was she there.

Sudden and swift and light as that
   The ties gave,
And he learned of finalities
   Besides the grave.

Not from the sands or cloven rocks,
  Thou rapid Arve! thy waters flow;
Nor earth, within her *****, locks
  Thy dark unfathomed wells below.
Thy springs are in the cloud, thy stream
  Begins to move and murmur first
Where ice-peaks feel the noonday beam,
  Or rain-storms on the glacier burst.

Born where the thunder and the blast,
  And morning's earliest light are born,
Thou rushest swoln, and loud, and fast,
  By these low homes, as if in scorn:
Yet humbler springs yield purer waves;
  And brighter, glassier streams than thine,
Sent up from earth's unlighted caves,
  With heaven's own beam and image shine.

Yet stay; for here are flowers and trees;
  Warm rays on cottage roofs are here,
And laugh of girls, and hum of bees--
  Here linger till thy waves are clear.
Thou heedest not--thou hastest on;
  From steep to steep thy torrent falls,
Till, mingling with the mighty Rhone,
  It rests beneath Geneva's walls.

Rush on--but were there one with me
  That loved me, I would light my hearth
Here, where with God's own majesty
  Are touched the features of the earth.
By these old peaks, white, high, and vast,
  Still rising as the tempests beat,
Here would I dwell, and sleep, at last,
  Among the blossoms at their feet.

When eyes locked he fell
And time set a new fever
Upon the world.  It did not
Help that her voice touched
And moved and tore into
His stone as if water carved
A million years of buried lime
Or that the spheres that sang
Were now sounding discordant,
Confounded as he was, fallen,
Empty as the universe, slight
As the lonely, lost, and unlighted
Seas of the moon.

                              And her hair,
It was not fair, that the endless,
Playful stars could fire even brighter
Below the forgotten heavens.

An endeavour to grasp the ardent;
trying to sooth the seething, the fervent-
-ly glimmering stars cleaved and concised,
misgiven and juvenile; yet far hind-tarded:

"The fool burned trying; and the starlet free."

And here I recon; I concede-
readily and consequently,
in admiration; in recede:
captivated, inadvertently.

Smitten and bewitched; I'd stay,
expedient and unruly:

"My sight I have bargained; all for one seething spectacle."

With this I stray, unlighted and aphonic;
I leave my sentiment in silence.

.
When eyes locked he fell
And time set a new fever
Upon the world.  It did not
Help that her voice touched
And moved and tore into
His stone as if water carved
A million years of buried lime
Or that the spheres that sang
Were now sounding discordant,
Confounded as he was, fallen,
Empty as the universe, slight
As the lonely, lost, and unlighted
Seas of the moon.

                              And her hair,
It was not fair, that the endless,
Playful stars could fire even brighter
Below the forgotten heavens.

When eyes locked he fell
And time set a new fever
Upon the world.  It did not
Help that her voice touched
And moved and tore into
His stone as if water carved
A million years of buried lime
Or that the spheres that sang
Were now sounding discordant,
Confounded as he was, fallen,
Empty as the universe, slight
As the lonely, lost, and unlighted 
Seas of the moon.

                              And her hair,
It was not fair, that the endless,
Playful stars could fire even brighter 
Below the forgotten heavens.

When eyes locked he fell
And time set a new fever
Upon the world.  It did not
Help that her voice touched
And moved and tore into
His stone as if water carved
A million years of buried lime
Or that the spheres that sang
Were now sounding discordant,
Confounded as he was, fallen,
Empty as the universe, slight
As the lonely, lost, and unlighted
Seas of the moon.

                              And her hair,
It was not fair, that the endless,
Playful stars could fire even brighter
Below the forgotten heavens.

When eyes locked he fell
And time set a new fever
Upon the world.  It did not
Help that her voice touched
And moved and tore into
His stone as if water carved
A million years of buried lime
Or that the spheres that sang
Were now sounding discordant,
Confounded as he was, fallen,
Empty as the universe, slight
As the lonely, lost, and unlighted
Seas of the moon.

                              And her hair,
It was not fair, that the endless,
Playful stars could fire even brighter
Below the forgotten heavens.

When eyes locked he fell
And time set a new fever
Upon the world.  It did not
Help that her voice touched
And moved and tore into
His stone as if water carved
A million years of buried lime
Or that the spheres that sang
Were now sounding discordant,
Confounded as he was, fallen,
Empty as the universe, slight
As the lonely, lost, and unlighted
Seas of the moon.

                              And her hair,
It was not fair, that the endless,
Playful stars could fire even brighter
Below the forgotten heavens.

When eyes locked he fell
And time set a new fever
Upon the world.  It did not
Help that her voice touched
And moved and tore into
His stone as if water carved
A million years of buried lime
Or that the spheres that sang
Were now sounding discordant,
Confounded as he was, fallen,
Empty as the universe, slight
As the lonely, lost, and unlighted 
Seas of the moon.

                              And her hair,
It was not fair, that the endless,
Playful stars could fire even brighter 
Below the forgotten heavens.

When eyes locked he fell
And time set a new fever
Upon the world.  It did not
Help that her voice touched
And moved and tore into
His stone as if water carved
A million years of buried lime
Or that the spheres that sang
Were now sounding discordant,
Confounded as he was, fallen,
Empty as the universe, slight
As the lonely, lost and unlighted
Seas of the moon.

                              And her hair,
It was not fair, that the endless,
Playful stars could fire even brighter
Below the forgotten heavens.

When eyes locked he fell
And time set a new fever
Upon the world.  It did not
Help that her voice touched
And moved and tore into
His stone as if water carved
A million years of buried lime
Or that the spheres that sang
Were now sounding discordant,
Confounded as he was, fallen,
Empty as the universe, slight
As the lonely, lost, and unlighted
Seas of the moon.

                              And her hair,
It was not fair, that the endless,
Playful stars could fire even brighter
Below the forgotten heavens.

When eyes locked he fell
And time set a new fever
Upon the world.  It did not
Help that her voice touched
And moved and tore into
His stone as if water carved
A million years of buried lime
Or that the spheres that sang
Were now sounding discordant,
Confounded as he was, fallen,
Empty as the universe, slight
As the lonely, lost, and unlighted
Seas of the moon.

                              And her hair,
It was not fair, that the endless,
Playful stars could fire even brighter
Below the forgotten heavens.

A dark sentiment
in my empty soul
gives me unlighted conceptions
Standing in a crowd of people
is my heart sitting shady
I wonder why
and in the cold comfortable night
is where is feel home
Alone
and I smile.

pitch-black
eyes
and unlighted
flesh
brings
the
whiskey smile of
death

Alters laid broken on trodden roads
as if breadcrumbs left for nothing
unreconcilable yesterdays parted
and the unreachable roads recharged
breaking all the chains that bond
but there were others that stayed
itching, screeching and reaching
for hope that never shook hands
for faith that embraced and decayed
and their entry points hallowed
swallowing their souls in an abyss
inside the dark zones, unlighted ozone
deep in the waters where fish swam
as they licked with fins undisguised
those alone inside a cage under the waters
strayed in the depths, left for decay

My mind is a museum of unlighted bulbs,
It's dark and murky,
Please help me clear my mind,
And return it to its original clarity.