I have never fit the vision of another's life.

Phantom
I merely wish to be acknowledged now,
Brought out from shadows to the light of day;
Is that so much to ask, too much to hope,
Must I go on diminishing, accept

That I am unacceptable to those
Whose judgments matter most in such affairs,
Erase myself in order not to shame
The one who loves me just so long as none

Discover my existence, see my face,
Or ever have to know that I exist,
(For they would disapprove of me, of us),
And must I understand and wait my turn,

While days turn into weeks, and weeks to months,
And years pass by, till I accept the truth?

 Secrets
The secrecy is finally what destroys
What hopes we might have had for normal life
Outside the arch, ironic quotes we learn
To wield as weaponry, suspending love

Between the spaces of its crossing out,
Committed to identities still played
For others’ sakes—the intellectuals
Who cannot be impressed, the immigrants

Who bring the customs of abandoned worlds,
Insisting that we live by them in turn,
Despite the newer worlds that call our hearts
With promises of freedom long-delayed.

Afraid to tell our truth, we hide away,
Pretending to be free inside our lies.

 Encoded
Shifting uncomfortably from side to side,
To find a position where the tumor
Grows quiet, or quietly, allowing
A moment to forget oncoming death,

The silent enemy that no one sees,
Not yet, as you have managed to conceal
This truth, as so many others, with words,
The jokes you tell to fill the empty space,

The awkward silences that felt like death,
At least until the cancer got its name,
Was birthed into the world from sequences
Encoded long ago in DNA

You would refuse if asked, yet no one asks,
While time, which once seemed infinite, runs out.

Lear’s End
Ungrateful, like a serpent’s tooth, my child,
A foolish man, four score and upward now,
Once thought the reason for your birth to be
My pleasure from such obedience paid

As to my momentary lawless whim,
For I the mold, and you the form in wax
Who should regard my will as like a god’s,
And yet insist upon your own desire,

Will lock each other’s hearts with chains of steel,
With adamant and iron, forged by the hate
That burns and melts us into one, in shape
And substance indistinct from each, from both.

When never comes, and death returns for us,
And ripeness falls, whence comes forgiveness then?

Puzzles and Solutions
Alighting on the latest explanation,
Recalling none that came before the words
Pronounced today for those who would believe
Instead of think—for thinking causes pain--
Much better to accept that those who know
O’ersee us in our danger, making light
Victorious in combat with the dark,
Surrounding us with good, benevolence
Eviscerating chaos, bringing peace,
Sweet order, and obedience to law,
Instead of thinking for ourselves, in pain
And constant struggle to discern a truth
No holy book contains between its leaves,
Laconic priests and all their lies aside.

Acceptance of authority will bless
Us like the meek, whose noble sacrifice
Gains worlds inherited from arrogance,
Humility our weapon ‘gainst the rich
Sated with their own excess of fortune,
Attacked at last within their citadels
Too lofty to be swift assailable,
Yet pulled apart in justice for our cause.

Or no…unless we take upon ourselves
Unburdenings that only courage fuels;
Gods nor Heroes need apply, but merely
Ordinary men and women with hearts
Sustained by all the wasted years they fight
Side by side to once redeem with force of arms,
Intelligence, and will to live, despite
Perceptions of the crowd, the gossips’ tongues
Sibilant with scorn for those who will not kneel.

 State of the Art
We write our poems with a studied air
Too casual to be indifferent, yet
Somehow about such things as grapefruit rinds,
And all the ways their bitter pith sums up

Relationships, both modeled and engaged,
The disappointments that we revel in
While tossing new-read pages to the floor,
The mic drop of the newly-vegan rockstar

Too frail for irony, whose coiling words
Require more than unreflective strength,
But cannot find the source to fuel their wit
Aside from borrowed phrases, attitudes,

A certain flippancy in place of craft,
And prose, disguised by random breaks, as verse.

 Heresy
You must not let yourself be seen with me,
The dark and sage misruler of the hours
Twixt night and day, the quiet witching time
Inside whose veils the truth begins to seem

And merely seem, where laws too quickly melt,
And thaw, resolve themselves into a dew
And dry beneath the fading summer sun,
For I am one who fascinates the eyes

Too timid to regard the sight of truth
As aught but lies, and those who cling to fear
While staring at the thing they disapprove
And yet desire in softly-whispered moans;

For these, the dead who never were alive,
To walk with such a one is heresy.

Erasure
I sat and quietly erased myself,
Removed all trace of my existence here,
So none would know that I had been alive
And walking at your side the day before;

I wiped away each letter of my name,
Replacing them with yours, as if to shape
My absence from material deceit,
A rearrangement of the time and space

Through which we moved, a forgery of words
Both written and removed, now read, unread,
Elided like the nights their absence hides,
Keeps safe from prying eyes, and locks away.

My name is spread upon the thinning air,
Invisible, and I was never here.

Grifters in the Book Room
The hustlers, self-promoters, and the frauds,
With cellphone cameras stalking clueless prey,
Now tightly focused on the awkward pose
Of smiling faces who have no idea
Whose cheek is pressed to theirs so urgently
In pictures meant for Facebook, Twitter feeds,
And Instagramish boasting: Look at Me!
Look Who I’m With! We had a lovely lunch
And talked about how she could guide my work
And help with my career. It’s networking,
And all the best and brightest students know
That meeting with the stars is vital work,
Much more than crafting well-formed arguments
Or writing clear and flowing sentences
That do not hide behind obscurity,
Or merely replicate the thoughts of those
Regarded as superior in word,
In worthiness repeated endlessly
Transformed from flesh and blood and hard-won mind,
To merest templates, shortcuts for ideas
Too hard to grasp, too dense to understand,
Left stripped of context and the barricades
From which they hurled defiance to the world.
 

The Dust-Eater
What metaphor or turn of phrase will serve
To hide my face, to save you from the shame
Of being seen outside redemption’s gaze,
Profanely close to him tradition scorns,
The devil’s worthy representative,
For who but him still bids you disobey
The fathers brothers who would rule your heart
Reserving for themselves the use of flesh?

Yet, is it really so the Lord your God
Has bid you look, not touch, nor ever taste
The fruits of other gardens than his own,
As though our fathers kept the trees of life?
And do those eyes still watch your every move
Inside this Eden’s high enclosing walls?

This paradise comes at the cost of fear
Of love withdrawn by those who disapprove,
Insisting on your daily sacrifice,
The lifeblood, not of rams, but of your heart.
 

Consummatum Est
Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?
No more but such a dream as I desired
In all my weakness and infirmity,
The partner and the soul I never had?

Have I, then, been alone for all my days,
Enraptured with the possibilities
Of love and life lived on the terms of truth,
In spite of Pilate’s question I ignored?

I put my trust in you—I was a fool
To have believed in love amidst the sands
Of Palestine, or else among the vines
Of Italy, or Gaul, or worlds unknown.

I gave up everything for you, my life,
And here am paid, in heartbreak and in pain.
 

Miltonists
We line the newest students up in rows,
Turn pages all at once, for unity
Reflects, and yet instills, the orderly
And orthodox perspectives we require,

Prevents them ever asking certain questions—
Blind alleys for the blind who know not truth,
Tradition’s voice, Augustine’s words, and God:
How might they read our poet otherwise?

Foul heresies might creep into the fold,
Abandoned to their sin, their fallen souls,
Refusing still to worship as we know
Our poet did, imaginary kings.

A revolutionary? So some say,
But we define his limits, and his life.

Set Alight
I am a truth too painful to be told,
A secret that must still be kept for shame,
A foul disease left feeding on the pith
Of life, lest it divulge through openness,

And Gossip’s tongues find your embarrassment
Fresh matter for their hateful mockery,
Humiliation being seen with me,
A fool who should have known that all his best,

Abandoned in the dust of wasted time,
Was never good enough—not then, not now—
To earn him anything but silent scorn
From one whose favor he would die to have.

But now the time has come to set alight
The foolish hopes of life, and watch them burn.

Into the Shimmering
You knew that it would have to come to this:
A disappearing in the desert sands,
Abandoning the world, then swallowed up
Inside the outlines of a dying sun,
While somewhere in the endless yesterdays
The woman you had spoken in a dream
Of life, but nothing more than fairy tales
Scratched lightly in the dust beneath your feet,
Blew swiftly through your weak and outstretched hands,
Such thoughts as might become a backward fool
Believing in the words as written down,
Despite the verses they were stolen from,
The borrowings of fevered brains too dry
In seasons such as these, to think but chaff
When wheat would feed us, though it give its strength
Too late in this, our harvest season's death.

The Provençal-inflected conversations
Still echo as the sand begins to burn,
Though fractured mirrorings, and all you hoped
Deliberations might make real, remove
Into the shimmering contrivances
Delirium calls hope, acceptance soon
Weaves silently—like sighs inside the wind—
The necessary truth you struggle with
Until, like thinning membranes overwhelmed
By quickly rushing fluids once held back
By supple flesh, you burst, now rent in twain,
No purpose now in all the lies you told
Yourself and others whom you claimed to love.

And in the letting go, the draining blood
Into the sand, you wonder if your words,
If all your cunning passages, had dreamed
Of love, or whispered subtle invocations
Vain, to one outside the reconsidered
Passions of a somewhere you did not belong.

Outcaste
I flirt with death each night, the love I know
Will faithful be at last, embracing me
With whispered promises of passion's heat,
Eternity inside a final breath,

Immortal life between the now and now,
Belonging, finally, amidst the shades,
Without the need to smile and be polite,
Conversing in the empty languages

Of life beneath the sun, where social cues,
Expressions of the eyes, unwritten rules
And shibboleths shared only with the tribe
Within whose ranks I never once belonged,

Assigned the place I cannot now escape,
Unseen, unspoken to, invisible.

Der Liebe Des Lebens, Hier am Ende
Hier stehe ich; ich kann nicht anderes;
Denn wo sonst kann ich meinen Anspruche
Zu lieben, trotz meines Alters und Mängel,
Um Leben, trotz mein Hässlichkeit und Jahre,

Um Schönheit dunkelst Augen, schönste Haut,
Und leise singenden Stimme, deren
Akzente lächeln, und macht mich Traume
Der Liebe, des Lebens, und ihres Herzens.

Aber dies ist nur ein Traum, erwartungen
Für etwas wie Liebe, und Zeit gekommen sind
Um die Ende zu setzen Träume jetz
Und die Dunkelheit warten hier am Ende.

Denn ich war ein Narren, der nie passen
Die Vision von ein anderen Leben.

Muse, Beyond a Blind Man's Reach
I would but serve her, with my pen-sketched lines,
The words with which I reach for her at night,
Yet she will not acknowledge me by day,
Denies she knows me, keeps me wrapped in dark,
A secret she relies on me to keep,
And so I do, because a fool knows naught
But how to play the games of foolishness,
To listen to the heartfelt promises
That someday she will be with me, if time
And silence have their way, if I will wait,
And let another year go by (which store
Of years begins to seem exhaustible,
Where once they well appeared as endless days),
And if her plans succeed, and all goes well,
And nothing intervenes or interferes,
And I am nothing like the kind of fool
Who would insist on being recognized
And not deny the hopes I let myself
Drag once again into the harshest light
Of day, where all my faults will be exposed,
My failures and my flaws, the ugly stains
Of lived experience that will not out
No matter how I wash, and wash again...

Then someday she will visit me, perhaps,
And she will take me out into the light,
Without the need to feel ashamed of me,
Or keep me wrapped in silent secrecy,
So I will once again know what it is
To write of love, and have it be the truth.

The Stranger
Which one among you is the stranger here?
Whose eyes see through the skin we hide behind,
Pretending we are men of parts whose words
Might stand for truth before a wretched world
Whose plotline always leads to tragic ends,
Though played by actors who cannot rehearse
Forgotten lines for never-written roles
Whose audience is blind, insensible,
And dumb beyond the hope of miracles.

Which one among you has the tragic flaw,
Intelligence too great to fit the plot
You find yourself condemned once more to play?
Your entrances and exits never change,
And brilliance cannot save you on the stage
Where old conventions must be served each night:
Revenge, the comedy of lovers, fools,
The grasping kings whose wars, in honor's name,
Leave countless Hotspurs bleeding in the dust
They turn to mud with drops of red-tinged life,
Returning to the nothing whence they came.

Which one among you has the curse of sight,
And walks alone amidst the eyeless crowds?

Epiphany
The faintest whispers, memories of the past,
Soft meetings of the eyes, if not the minds,
And all the loves he once believed were love,
Crowd in upon him as the darkness falls

Caressing him with shadows' fingertips
Whose lightest touch once marked him from the tribe,
A man outside the world, pressed to the glass,
Condemned to watch as others laugh at him,

The awkward way he stands, or sits alone
While happy people celebrate themselves,
And what is else not to be overcome
By loneliness, except to laugh and drink?

He was a fool to think he might have love,
But now, alone each night, he knows the truth.

Epilogue
Each sunset passes like the ones before
And I am one step closer to the end
Of days spent waiting for...I know not what,
For nothings that I stretch to fill the hours

The no ones that I spend my evenings with;
What matter now the years of reading books
If all they ever brought was solitude,
Long years of teaching those who do not read,

Who hide their laughter with their folded hands,
The laughter aimed at me, and at the books
That I, a foolish man, would have them read
Not knowing how pathetic I appear

To all the golden children for whom words
Are nothing but impediments to life,
Dull handicaps to love and sunlit days
Soon followed by the gleaming silv'ry nights,

Enjoyed by natural children of the world,
Whose passions and desires are easily
Returned by others like unto themselves,
While I sit with a book, and wait for sleep.

For I have been a fool who never fit
The vision of another person's life.

The Troubadour in Winter
When bright magnolia blossoms first appear
Before the dying winter takes revenge
With rough winds tearing buds that scatter down
Amongst unfinished cigarettes and death,

The condom wrappers lying in the mud,
Mute witnesses to pilgrims' desperate pleas
For love, or something writhing in its place
In pain or ecstasy—the difference fades

To insignificance beside the fall
Of petals none will ever see again—
With springtime's span elided by the sun
While frost-chilled air resumes its bitter grip

And strips the branches of their helpless life,
I think of all my foolishness and hope,
And hate myself for my belief in lies,
The promises of youth, the simple gods

Of bronze-age fairy tales, whose right and wrong
Was always lighter than the thinning air
Of syllables composing ancient names
Whose meanings, urgent once, are now obscure,

Occult and hidden from my sense like love,
And all the promises I once believed
From those who loved, and from myself in love,

The faithfulness that each voice swears to each
While speaking sonnets from their widened eyes,
Unfinished poetry whose lines drift down

Amidst the fallen petals, never read,
And swept away by winter's dying winds.

Evensong
The troubadours and all their songs have died,
Dispatched by pious hands, remorseless years,
Some burned alive by lovers of the rules,
By bigots who insist that only those

Like them are worthy of God's love or yours,
Those other people worthy of their deaths
And naught but scorn in life from those, the pure,
Whose judgments matter in the courts of love,

Propriety, and strict observances
Of ritual and rite, ethnicity
And social roles, and never mixing blood
With those of lower caste, or foreign tongue,

Whose word for “yes” is oc instead of oui,
With consonantal sounds that serve as marks
Of difference, in songs of decadence
And love, that celebrate the casting off

Of hateful laws, and jealous tyrant's sneers
At those who merely wish to celebrate
The quiet beauty of each other's eyes
Without regard to property or race

And all the lines that hatred draws between
Ourselves and our too-long unlived desires.

The Moor of Venice
With downcast eyes, I see my fate, too clear
To be denied, the one resorted to
In private hours, though publicly unknown,
The secret lover, met in shadowed rooms,

Kept hidden from the eyes that disapprove
Of me, my age, my race, my everything,
The catalog of all my deepest flaws
Which cannot be undone and render me

Unfit to love, except on quiet days
And stolen afternoons before the dusk
Descends, and your return is soon required
By he who owns you and will not let go.

I cannot hold out hope, though I would be
A fool, if only foolishness would serve,
But no such foolishness will serve my turn,
And you and I both know how this will end.

I cannot be acknowledged, lest the truth--
The truth that brings the nightmares in your sleep--
Be seen by those whose judgments matter most,
For what does Venice with Aleppo's law?

And what do you with me? The Moor with whom
You laugh in secret, dreading to be seen
With me by anyone you know, your friends,
Your family, while spinning fantasies

Of breaking free, refusing life in chains--
Such hopes as now I know will never be,
No sitting down again beneath the trees
Where once I played, no waking up in light.

For what would you with one you are ashamed
To answer “yes,” when asked about in dreams?

Blind Mouths
“You know, I heard the faculty get drunk,
And toss the smaller ones like dwarves in bars;
It's true! I swear—I also heard they swap
Each other back and forth, and don't wear rings

Because they worship Benjamin with blood,
And sex performed in rituals, with masks
That look like Derrida or Althusser,
Or creepy ones like Heidegger and Marx,

While sodomizing old anthologies
Of ancient Greece, or post-colonials,
The wretched of the Earth, their pages torn
And stuck together in the moistened heat.”

They while away the time with gossiping
Of those who never speak of them in turn.
 

Cipher
As darkness falls each night,
I miss the home
I know I will not see again,
And know myself a fool
For wanting what I cannot have.

Summer
Each summer fades a little sooner now,
With scents of jasmine and the promises
Of love that float on honeysuckle wings
Like beauty just beyond my fingers’ touch,
Or music soft—too soft for me to hear--
While fading light turns purple in the skies
Whose canopy seems lower now than once
When I was young, and all the world seemed warm,
Alive with joy and possibility
Not yet traduced by lies, experience,
The sight of lovers’ faces growing cold,
The sound of subtle shifts in voice and tone
As words become routine, and newer lights
Now beckon from the dim horizon’s mist,
The rising stars that follow setting suns
While breezes chill what once gave passion’s heat,
Dispelling all that seemed, but never was,
False fire, soft ashes from illusion’s flames,
The blue and curling smoke of childhood dreams
Whose words and images grow faint with age.

Each summer fades a little sooner, yet
Renews the urge to hope, to skip with hands
Held tight, not caring what the passers-by
May think, as laughter is its own reward;
Though love comes slower now, in compromised
And compromising forms, with whispers, stares,
And disapproval as its cost, what else
Brings back—though only for a moment—light
And warmth, and all the promises of youth,
Despite the loss we know will come at dusk?

Each summer fades, yet who would miss the joy,
No matter how it ends, each summer brings?

They Speak of Love
They say that love is patient, love is kind,
Does not keep close account of injury,
Releases others from the agonies
It bears itself so others might be free--

They lie.

Does this surprise you after all these years?
That parents always had themselves in mind
When having you, extensions of themselves,
That fathers guard their daughters jealously,

So jealously that one might think the guard
Desired the flesh he never thinks about
Except in cries and whispers through the tears
Of guilt-stained nights spent stewing in the heat

And sweat of lustful, rank, enseam'd beds,
Where sex is always sin, and women whores,
Except the virgin girls who must be kept
Unused--for that is how they think of it,

As if the value of vaginas dropped
With mileage, even certified pre-owned--
Unless an allied male enjoys the fruit
Of Father God's forbidden tree of life;

That friends would threaten to destroy your life
Because your heart does not obey their rules,
And you must be reined in, brought back to heel,
How could this still surprise you even now?

They speak of love, these guards and faithless friends,
These owners of the flesh, defenders of
The prison bars they live behind themselves,
They speak of love with all their golden words.

They lie.

Perhaps Not Yet
I cannot say exactly why I love,
Since love has always come at such a cost
That I could never pay without the loss
Of blood or dignity—the hurtful words

That always mark our disappointing ends,
Once being called her soul-mate as she left,
While foolishly I helped her carry bags
Too heavy for her as she said goodbye—

I carry weight for those I know will leave,
Or play the fool, pretending I am more
Than second choice (or third or fourth), and wait
For those who are not with me—never me—

But always somewhere else, with someone else,
And spend my nights alone, while listening
To all the sounds of life and joy outside
As couples walk, and laugh, and live a life

That I imagined once could still be mine,
But that was long ago, a dream or two
Has passed into the falling mist since then,
And I have grown a wiser, sadder man

Who knows he is not shaped for sportive tricks,
Though not a villain yet, perhaps not yet.

Villagers
The Christians came, in false humility
Demanding we lay down our hard-earned pride,
Give up our ancient gods of war and song
And take up crosses for a god of fear

Disguised as love, whose craven worshipers
Call evil all the joys of life, such men
As would destroy the world to purify
The sin they see in every woman's face,

The women they demand keep silent, still,
Obedient and faithfully at heel,
No Shield-Maidens they, adept at striking
With swords and words, in counsel and in fight

A warrior's partner, warrior in herself,
Far worthier than gods of sacrifice
And those who come to claim us in their names,
Reducing us to slaves of priests and prayers.

These villagers think me uncivilized,
Congratulate themselves on being first
To bend the supple knee, unman themselves
In service of a dying god who turned

His cheek and left his people to the blade,
Congratulate themselves on tyranny
At home, their wives reduced to property,

Their children slaves, sold off or worked at will,
So slaves they are and slaves they will remain,
Unless they find the strength to leave, to fight

And cry for joy with every battle scar,
For life and love still come at passion's cost.

Be Damned the Rest
We went by many names, but we were one:
Ascomanni, the Lochlanach, the Dene,
Some even called us Rus, Varangians,
Who sailed the rivers of the Gardarike,

And took what we would have, from west to east,
Whatever we might win or lose in war,
Two fates of equal measure in the end
For men whose dreams were of Valhalla's halls,

With lives and deaths of fire aboard long ships
Which took them from the azure Caspian shores
Across the icy waves to Vinland's fields
And all the fearsome joys the sagas tell.

Though years have passed, and memories long have dimmed,
I've not forgotten who I am, a man
Who never will submit or yield, as once
A fallen prince declared despite his pain,

For those who came before me, live in me,
And I have spent too long in making peace
With those whose dearest wish has always been
For war, who wish to make me blush in shame

At what I am, not of their blood or line,
Or worst of all, not of their faith in gods
Whose weakness shows their cruelty and rage,
Whose service is the enemy of life.

I wish no peace with them, unless my sword
Might speak, but better still to turn away,
For who would be on terms with such as these,
Whose villages are breeding grounds of fear?

Let flowing cups be filled with sweetest mead,
While those who love us drink—be damned the rest.

Mead Song at End of Days
I live outside the camp of Christian souls,
The other, so unclean, untouchable,
Unthinkable as any son of Cain
Or dying child of the Amalekites,

For I am not among the chosen few,
The sons and daughters of abandoned lands
And faithless gods who left their worshipers
To all that might be done by sword and fire,

The tender mercies of the Pharoah's wrath,
The Sultan's rage, the Fuhrer's lunacy,
The sudden storms of Koba, Dark and Dread,
Which drove the tearful masses to despair.

No, mine are heathen songs, no Christ, no God
Of sacrifice and guilt and turning cheeks
To those who laugh at their servility,
Or those who think themselves a chosen race

While looking down at me as on a slave,
A foreigner whose blood is thin and pale,
Unworthy in the eyes of shallow fools
Who wear their ignorance and fear as masks;

But I'll not see myself through foolish eyes,
Though they reject the world outside their camp,
Where Ingvar Far-Traveled, and war-like Leif,
Old Erik's son, found promised lands of vines.

Your ancient villages are not the world,
Your Christian songs so much hypocrisy,
Your hatreds merely proof of cowardice,
Your false bravado nothing more than fear.

I would not ask the favor of such men,
But turn my back, for mine is all this world.

For all those stuck in lives they do not want--my rough translation of a 13th-century Provençal ballad about being stuck, and getting unstuck:

Coindeta Sui
     I'm graceful and fair, yet my heart's in despair
     For I have no desire for my husband.
I'll sing you a song of my longing for love:
I'm small and I'm young, my body’s still fresh,
And should have a young man who can fill me
With joy, with whom I can still play and laugh.
     I'm graceful and fair, yet my heart's in despair
     For I have no desire for my husband.
Now God damn me if I ever love him:
I have not the least passion for him,
Yet seeing his age, I feel so ashamed,
I pray Death will come kill him, and soon.
     I'm graceful and fair, yet my heart's in despair
     For I have no desire for my husband.
But one thing I know I'm determined to do:
My passionate friend swears to give me his love,
I weep and then sigh, if I see not his face,
To this hope, or none, I'll surrender,
     I'm graceful and fair, yet my heart's in despair
     For I have no desire for my husband.
So I'll tell you what I have decided:
Since my dearest friend has loved me so long
I'll give him my love, and offer myself
To the man I so love and desire.
     I'm graceful and fair, yet my heart's in despair
     For I have no desire for my husband.
On this pretty tune I make ballads to sing,
For true lovers to sing everywhere,
So love-learned ladies our love songs might sing
To all the dear friends whom we love and desire.

The Memory of Amalek
Bléssed is the one who dies for idols,
For country and for Fatherland, whose flag
Sewn over sleepless nights and bathed in tears
Shines bright against the enemies of state;

Though death is the same everywhere for all,
Revenge and spite and malice summon sons
Of ancient homelands, seeking to repay
The debt of death that cannot be discharged,

The genocides that cannot be undone
Nor ever understood except in light
Of evil we have long called good—the gods
Of ancient tales, demanding fear and fealty.

The memory of Amalek is gone
From under heaven, at the word of God.

Quarantine
It will not do, to mix the elements,
The older wineskins filled with newer wines,
Or pastured animals in urban zoos,
With doormen and a monthly subway pass

As if their inclinations could be changed
Or overcome by poetry or art,
By learning's fruit, the storylines of plays,
A sculpture's line, sonata's moonlit notes,

The fine-wrought phrases of the writer's son
Who keeps his poems secret as his love
For fear they'll both be mocked, and he exposed,
Unworthy as he is, to well-earned scorn.

For foolishness like his must pay its price,
Kept safely isolated from the sane.

Becoming Masks
The price of living under tyranny,
The lies we tell to give us space to breathe
When those who “love” us seek to curb our will
And make us like themselves, their images

Of fear and hate for what they do not know
And cannot understand, a different world
Whose pleasures they regard as dangerous,
Whose joys resemble all the “sins” they learned

To crave and cravenly reject in youth
Spent listening to those who did not know
The world they taught their children to disdain
While clinging to the ancient ways of death.

The lies grow deep, and scar us over time,
Becoming masks we cannot soon remove.

The Worshippers of Might
The committees of union and progress,
Great leaps forward in red shirts and white leagues,
With nations being born from Klansmen’s rage,
While cultural revolutions by day

Bring final solutions by darkest night,
And students training in the killing fields
Plan secret purges—intellectuals
Are first, to keep them is no benefit,

To kill them is no loss—essential work
Is done by hand, and those who would reject
Tradition must be dealt with by the blade,
Or barrel of a gun, whence power grows.

They’re all the same, the worshippers of might,
In love with death, and eager to obey.

A Dark and Fallen Angel
I look at you, and years of joy unfold
Before me in your eyes, the quiet things,
Your sleeping face in moonlit pre-dawn hours,
The sound of your “Good morning” in my ears

While kissing, tucked beneath the blanket's warmth,
The feel of you beneath my fingertips,
Electric flesh, anticipating touch
And all the pleasures fingers bring, and lips

Whose soft and pliant skin brings ecstasy
To those who know its secrets, and can play
--Like virtuosos on their instruments--
A symphony's desire with expert hands.

I see the aching world inside your eyes,
And will not give you up, let come what may.

Graduation Day
Just days before, I had read the letters,
the testimonials to my work by people I respect,
people whose names matter, whose work matters—
and I felt like they could not possibly be about me.
But they are. I am the figure they describe.
I've achieved everything I had once told myself I would,
without ever really believing my own words.
I've actually done it.

But standing here, alone
in the middle of a room of happy people,
amongst people celebrating themselves and each other,
it doesn't matter.
They all have someone, these celebrants,
someone here to laugh with,
someone to talk to,
someone to sit or stand next to.
I'm the one in the corner, nursing a cup of coffee,
then a glass of wine,
to have something to do with his hands,
to appear less awkward, less isolated, less out of place.
It doesn't work—it never really does—
and as soon as the ceremony is over,
I slip quietly out the side door.
No one sees me go.
No one notices that I am gone.

Human contact comes easily to them, it seems.
They all have someone,
friends, husbands, wives, boyfriends and girlfriends,
people who love them,
people who love them openly.
I would trade all my accomplishments to be one of them.

I will never be one of them.

Non Serviam
Your fear of them is tying you in knots,
And they will never loose the reins they hold,
Nor see the world as you would have them see,
But ever will maintain their rough demands

For swift obedience, for what they will
Is right for you, if you would understand
Their greater wisdom in such things as love
And life and how one ought to live by rules,

Not flout the old traditions, but remain
Inside the villages you thought you'd left
Behind, while living next to those whose lives
Embody freedoms villagers forbid.

So this it is, your choice: submit to fear,
Or take the chance to live before you die.

A Trail of Ambiguous Picture Postcards
A poem should be long, like pain of childbirth
with penciled epidurals serving in the place of art,
otherwise, what would be the point of writing all this prose
we cleverly disguise as verse by randomly breaking
lines without regard to rhyme or reason(less) forms
which only prove my point above—a poem should stretch out,
allow itself the room to wind from line to line
while never quite bothering to make a point, or do much at all
except luxuriate in its own reflected vanity,
howling in wastelands that really are nothing more
than a pale imitation, the burden of the park
on a Sunday morning, calling to the ephebes
of a long-parched imagination while making notes
toward a merely ordinary fiction, nothing elevated
enough to be called supreme—and though we went down to the sea in ships
and assumed each what the other assumed, we nonetheless
could not escape our derivations and borrowings, and so we theorized
the death of bourgeois notions of originality, positing the end
of discrete (or discreet) authors, the Romantic progenitors
of our myths of origin, and the mind-forged manacles of our despair.

Images and references and metaphors, none of them
ever quite developed or honed into anything like sense,
but left in an evocative fog of unfinished language,
dragging themselves through the unread streets
in the empty city afternoons, while ceaselessly being borne,
not into the past, but into a time that never was nor will ever be...
and what else can we ask of our poets now, but to reflect
our own disinterest in ourselves, to be themselves confused,
uninteresting, and lacking anything like form or function,
spark or fire, April or cruelty?

Here at Least, We Shall be Free
The heroism in these ancient lines
Is not submission, but rebellion's work,
To stand up and say No to those whose “love”
Demands your prompt obedience in fear,

To turn your back on Him who would deny
You knowledge, or what's more, the taste of life
Itself, in service of his endless will,
An ego never to be satisfied

No matter how much of yourself you kill
In sacrifice to His demands for blood,
The never-ceasing rounds of praise in song
And dance in celebration of his throne.

So take, and eat, there is no life unless
You die to Him, for whom you are but slaves.

The Toy in Winter
An excellent amusement, nothing more,
A moment laughing now, forgetfully
Distracting you from pain, or boredom's dusk,
A spark of light inside the lengthened shade

Of winter afternoons in absent thoughts
Spent aimlessly on half-remembered pasts,
Such loves as could not bear the weight of hope
Nor all our expectations, sadder still

Than this, diversion's brightly-colored toy,
A pleasant thing, a bauble to be worn
In secret, played with only in the hours
Of solitude, then put away once more.

It wears, though imperceptibly, each time,
Grows closer to its end beneath the trash.

The Late Innovation
Invisibility develops slowly;
Despite your constant efforts to be seen,
You find, one day, that you have disappeared,
A long-time colleague does not know your name,

And what you do, the work you teach and write
Is called a bad cliché, old-fashioned now
In newer worlds devoted to the “texts”
Of cultural productions without words

Though full of sound and fury, telling tales
That signify an end, though what is lost
Is never calculated, nor much thought
Devoted to the costs of novelty.

But this iconoclasm is not new,
And endless newer styles have long since passed.

In Artificial Light
The solitude has deepened, taken hold
In ways you had not thought were possible,
And now you see the years stretch out alone,
Imaginary converse filling time

That otherwise might seem too short for joy,
But now seems cruelly overlong for life
Spent wondering what else there might have been
Of laughter, fellowship, or passion's heat

When those who loved you kept themselves apart,
Until they found they did not want your love,
Nor never did, perhaps, though once they seemed
To joy at your approach with sunlit eyes.

The shadows of the room in which you sit
Grow deeper still in artificial light.

Land of the Free
But to inure our prompt obedience,
As once the poet wrote of tasks imposed
On those of us who kneel to those of them
Who rule, what other use could such commands

As make no sense, or have no purpose serve?
Except to train us in the ways of fear,
And quickly recognize the Master's voice
No matter what the words, to hear the tone,

And come to heel while knowing what we are,
Obsequious and deferential slaves
Whose lives are at the full dispose of Lords
Who smile, then throw us on the heaps of dead.

But this is how the world has always been,
Though prophets of equality tell lies.
 

Home of the Brave
The Sun King stood but five foot two in heels,
Some inches shorter in his stocking feet,
Yet his court taught the English Charles the way
To monarchize and kill with fearsome looks,

To give the servile what they truly craved,
A master who would tell them how to live,
Release them from the painful liberty
The regicides had sought, mistakenly,

To give a land of slaves, who wanted kings
While celebrating English character,
The way our slaves sing patriotic songs
To waving flags, while crouching down in fear.

Who can of inward slaves make outward free?
It seems that we have long ago learned how.

Retail Darwinism
An item often looked at, never bought,
Whose wear begins to show around the seams,
Tried on sometimes, but never quite a fit,
Too big, too small, constricting movements' flow

Or else too loose, put back upon the rack
And passed until another picks it up,
Thinks how it might look if she brought it home,
Then shook her head because she couldn't see

Herself in such a thing while out with friends
Whose garments would be newer, not as worn
As this one seemed to be--“too bad,” she thought,
“I really liked the color and the cut.”

It ended up back in the clearance aisles,
Before it was remaindered and shipped back.

Unnoticed
Some suicides are never recorded,
The slow descents, the acquiescences,
The disappointed men who quietly
Submit their necks to power's crushing yoke,

And feel themselves grow smaller by the day
While all their dreams lie fallow, indistinct,
Revealed for what they always were, the frauds
Of youth, the fantasies they soon would learn

To compromise, for life consumes their eyes,
Leaves husks in place of men, with no more room
For love or play, for possibilities
Now circumscribed by choices made in haste.

Such deaths remain unnoticed by the crowds
Of dead who fill our mirrors and our streets.

City of Ideas
A city of ideas, behind the lights
Of ordinary commerce, business done
With all the passion of a burning mind
Restrained by balance sheets and protocols,

Invented understanding that their lies
Express a truth our words cannot negate;
This city is my home, and I its son,
Though hardly prodigal, with ready-made

Dissent, as though authority might hear
And laugh my plans to scorn, as if ideas
Might be again determined by the gods
We once believed without a shred of proof.

This poor man's Rome, this Athens for the blind,
Wears masks, as actors do, to hide its face.

Some Myths are Easy Targets
You realize, of course, that Zeus does not exist?
And nothing you can write will take the power back
From him, nor give a greater voice to those he “raped,”
A curious word, for what is he called Yahweh
By warring Bronze-Age Jews, or named the Father God
By Christians, who rehearse the story of the birth
Of Jesus, while ignoring inconvenient facts
Like Mary's dubious consent to what was called—
In euphemism's highest tones—a covering
By God, a rape by any other name (as sweet?)
Yet no one reads their brave and timorous poems
While claiming to give voice to the Amalekites.
 

Paragraphs and Poems
We write our modern poems much the same:
A paragraph of slightly heightened prose,
With line breaks added, simulating verse,
And images of bodies juxtaposed

With unexpected referents, a pause
Suggesting thought, while ambiguity
Allows the reader space for the profound
Inside the fading mediocrity

Of soon forgotten words whose formlessness
Speaks not to freedom but to laziness
And willful imitation of such lines
As were not written college workshop style,

Nor sent into the world scarce half made-up
To serve as gilded mirrors for the blind.

Eternity Is In Love

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.

I cannot sleep for lonely thoughts of you,
For wishing you were here, that I were not
At such a distance from my heart's desire,
The simple joy of being next to you,

While knowing I will see your face again
When morning's sun streams through the curtained glass
Of windows we keep shut against the cold
On nights we huddle close for warmth and love.

I know that life has given me a gift,
The time I get to spend inside your eyes;
I know I should enjoy the hasting hours,
And be content with momentary joys,

And yet, my passion's weakness shows as greed
For more of you, as each day fades to dusk.

The Bad Poet's Dilemma
The problem with being a bad poet
Is that you do not realize how bad
You are—the work you think is lucid, clear,
And even slightly clever (raising then

The question of it being mostly dumb),
Turns out, on being seen by other eyes,
To be a mess, incomprehensible,
Or self-indulgent, leading one to think

That you might benefit from shutting down
The old computer where you type the words
You build your “poems” from, and stepping out
To take a walk each time you wish to write.

But since you do not see as others see,
You'll write in blithe indifference to your skill.

Margins
The margins of your time, the second best,
Like Shakespeare's bed, bequeathed by testament
To one he saw but rarely, loved still less
Than hours upon the stage and spoken words

Whose meter spoke of him, but not of her,
The one he left alone each weekend night
With none to raise a glass, or share the bed,
Whose real estate, just like the Stratford house,

Grew far too large for one to solace in,
Or serve as aught but cruel remembrances
Of promises he never made to her,
Just like the ones you never made to me.

I know, too well, what margins may contain,
And sleep alone, while you love somewhere else.

As Night Descends
“'Tis better to be vile than vile esteem'd,”
How well the poet knew what people are,
The hateful ones, who smile and ask for help,
While cutting you with words behind your back;

The liars who would claim you sought their love,
While you had wanted nothing of the kind,
Sought solitude and privacy despite
The constant talk about your life and time,

Time spent, if truth were told, alone each night,
For every night, your loneliness grows deep
And deeper still, for all the gossips' tales,
Which take for granted love you cannot have.

For you are nothing like their fevered dreams,
As night descends, and solitude takes hold.

Orpheus
Our passions' heat has often taken hold
In songs of love enjoyed in royal halls,
Where life's all-licensed fools and idle kings
Live celebrating lust in sparking cups,

While reddest wine still serves in place of blood,
And those who eat consume the flesh of gods
Created by themselves; yet I will sing
Despite of mine own nature, skeptical

Of faith in tales of love, belief in gods
Who hate us, as we often hate ourselves.
Forgiving sins implanted in our hearts
As though to punish us for drawing breath.

The gods are not our friends, and love destroys
Both sage and fool alike, yet I will sing.

Forgotten in the Light
We spend our momentary lives alone,
Though fool enough to think it otherwise
When gazing on the objects of desire,
An ocean's waves burned russet in the sun,

Whose fading light reminds us of the eyes
Of those we loved who loved not in return,
The cooling grays of eyes where passion's heat
No longer stirred behind their placid calm,

Indifference coloring our solitude
With shows of love, with all its shapes and forms,
But nothing of its substance, long since gone,
Or never really there except in dreams.

Perhaps those dreams are all we have of love,
Our hearts' desires, forgotten in the light.

Muse (VIII)
A dark and fallen angel whispers low
Such words as I cannot recall by day,
Her voice a quiet beckoning in dreams
Which always end with loss and morning sun,

Familiar solitude among the crowds
Whose faces blend and blur into a haze
With ceaseless voices, harsh and hurried tones,
The endless speech of urgent nothingness,

So much unlike the words my angel speaks
Of beauty and the midnight songs whose notes
Are truth beyond the poverty of voice
Or thoughts constrained by all we have been taught.

I live with her, this angel in my dreams,
But wake to find I am alone once more.

Thrice
If someone asks me, what am I to say?
Should I deny you, say I never knew?
For I have been a fool to be surprised
At your denying me, your saying no

When asked, though no cock crowed, surrounded then
By hostile voices mocking all you loved,
Or thought you loved, until you realized
That I am nothing like a son of man,

And all your sacred moments had been dreams
And what you thought were miracles but tricks
Of light and shade, illusion's skillful weave,
The tapestry of disappointed hopes.

You do not know this man of whom they speak,
For he does not exist, and cannot weep.

We Two, In Time
I know you would fly free if given wings,
For you have traveled far to find a home,
And left behind a life that never fit,
A country vast in land and suffering,

Though filled with beauty if you know to look
At just a certain angle when the light
Begins to fade, as mine begins to do,
While you have reached the only prime of life

Reminding me what once I was, and what
Am now, declined into the vale of years,
As once a fool observed before his fall,
When jealousy o'erwhelmed his fragile heart.

You must be free to find the life you seek,
And I would not, for all the world, say no.

The Ancient Grudge
You hate them, not for who they really are,
For you have no idea about their lives,
Beyond the rank and foul clichés you spout,
The venom pouring straight from cruelty's tongue

Which forms the words you use to shape your hate,
To give it life anew each time you see
Or hear them walk together while you speak
You know not what, nor know the reasons why

You think yourself above them—all of them
Of course, for no one from this tribe you hate
Could possibly have eyes, or hands like yours,
Feel pain like you, or ever fall in love.

You justify your swelling hate with lies,
Reveal yourself through libels based in blood.

Confessions
Autobiographical poetry
Quite often is just sentimental dreck,
Though now and then a morbid note shines through,
Like Daddy’s boot, and the brute, brute fascist

Whom every woman secretly adores,
Though perhaps what I assume, you assume
As well, and our emotions recollected
In tranquility are not so novel

As we think, while diving into our wrecks
And shoring fragments up against our ruins,
As though we’d really seen the finest minds
Of any generation starving naked

And dragging through the negro streets at dawn
Hysterical, and clutching bags of God.

Sisyphus Redux
I find myself constrained by memory,
The ghosts of former selves, still unappeased
By aught I have become, the lives I’ve lived
Which fail to satisfy ambition’s drive,

Or vengeance in its quest to be repaid
For private griefs from childish days by pains
It would inflict on those who played no role,
Who did not know, nor would have hurt me then.

And so I grapple with a present past,
With plots and characters long since played out,
Dismissed and absent from a darkened stage
Whose wooden planks have long decayed to dust.

Each day I live amongst insistent ghosts,
Yet each and every day, I turn them back.

In Secret
I won’t betray the secret of our love;
I know what it would cost, and such a price
I’ve nothing like the right to ask of you,
So rest assured that I will never look

Your way in public more than I would glance
At any other, or at none at all,
Nor give away my foolish heart’s desires
By any word or mere inflection’s voice,

Nor drop the stranger’s mask I wear by day,
For fear that I might injure you, expose
Your name to scorn from Gossip’s idle tongues,
Who take delight in mocking those who love.

I’ll play the role this life demands of me,
Ne’er say a word, and keep your secret safe.

Repetition (Constantius)
I know too well that I should not have asked,
Nor hoped for anything from that request
That years ago, mistakenly, I made,
To be acknowledged by the light of day,

Or valued as the man I was, or wished
To be—or not to be, the question poised
As if in air, as if my life depended
On yes or no from those who mattered more

Than I have ever mattered—though that life
Was never consequential, never seen
By those whose judgments in such things held weight,
Or those for whom I played an offstage role.

I learned my lesson incompletely then,
Forgot myself, repeated my mistake.

Muse (VII)
I cannot sleep, and have not closed my eyes,
For want of you, whose picture never fades
From inner view, nor alters with the time,
Whose quiet voice I hear inside the wind,

Whose touch I feel across the endless miles
That cruelly separate your hands from mine,
The walls between that I would soon tear down
With all my strength in service of the love

I feel for you each time I hear your name,
That name you love not half so well as I,
Who love it as the sign of all you are,
And all the joy I feel to see your face.

I tremble at the very sight of you,
My goddess by the sea, whose name is love.

In Absentia
The time has come—no bargaining will stay
Its hands—for now, my reckoning is made;
And when I disappear, what will I leave
Behind, what alteration make in time

That will not quickly be forgotten, thence
As though I had not been at all, despite
The pains I nursed as if they were my loves,
The thoughts I grappled with, though not profound,

And all the failures of my life and time
Which seemed so urgent once, when days were long?
I spread myself upon the thinning air,
Till only air remains, and none so poor

To notice how the space I filled is free
From all encumbrance now that I am gone.

Brushstrokes
The city comes alive beneath your brush,
And all my aspirations for the love
I once believed, before I lost my hope
In finding any who might see beyond

The beast whose curs d semblance I must bear,
Are once again restored inside your eyes,
Whose loving gaze sees who I really am,
Not what I seem, just as your brush restores

The beauty of the past still visible
Outside my windowpanes, where architects
Once grappled with their ancient gods through steel,
As you do now with paint and fading light.

And so mon Belle amant, I watch your brush
While wishing I could see the world through you.

The Adversary
I have known madness like yours, quiet storms
Just waiting to explode in wrath and rain
And blame their hailstones on the earth beneath,
Always ready explanations for why

Destruction is deserved, like plastic Baals
Whose self-regard reveals itself in fire,
In thunder and the cries of those who die
While pelted down beneath the love of gods

Who hear no other voices but their own,
So will not hear the cries of pain and fear
Their wrath calls forth, unless they hear and smile,
Well pleased by terror and the smell of death.

And you would have my worship out of love?
Non serviam—no matter what the cost.

Not Far Away, But Here
What must I do to have you near my heart,
To manage not to have to say goodbye,
Or navigate the painful lettings go,
Where each of us must go our separate ways,

Though only to end up devoting hours
Of thought and longing to the absent eyes
Whose every flashing glance still binds me fast
To dreams of you approaching me in light,

Such dreams which come to me, and rouse my sleep
To wakefulness and sore desire for you,
Your skin now softly trembling in the chill,
Your lips, which taste of flowing sweets, and life.

I cannot but be selfish in my thoughts,
As wanting you, not far away, but here.

Muse (VI)
I still remember all your words, each tale
You tell of laughter, serendipity,
And chance encounters taking out the trash,
The face you made when losing once at cards,

A game I did not know, but somehow won--
The same unscripted luck that brought me you,
And all the joys I’ve seen inside your eyes,
Both yours, and mine reflected back to me.

I cannot fathom how I’ve earned this time
Except to wonder at the fading world
And how it yet brings unexpected light
To those of us it still rewards with love.

But earned or no, I’ll savor every word,
Recalling each to hear your voice once more.

Secrets, Not Lies
Some secrets must be kept, if not to lie,
Then not to wound with needless harsh-told truths
Whose thorns will scratch and sting while drawing blood
And tearing veils of old illusions down,

Exposing all our falsest hopes to light
Bringing our dishonesty in focus,
The tales we tell ourselves about our lives
And loves—both what we’ve been, and who we are.

You need not ask permission for the love
You feel, both unintended and unplanned,
Though real in every sense, the best surprise
Of life, and nothing to deny in shame.

Who will be hurt by knowing of your love,
You spare, by keeping secrets from their hearts.

Splitting Black
Where I could do no wrong, or once it seemed,
I soon became the worst man in the world;
No warning intervened to let me know
This change was on its way, so suddenly
 

Did it arrive, that one day while at home,
I got a message calling me a foul
And altogether hurtful, evil man,
Who hated women, had no moral core,
 

Who made her sick to think of wasted time
She’d spent with me, while getting nothing back
For all the giving she had lately done,
Which made her feel a fool for having cared.
 

I had so many faults, that I refroze
The roast I’d planned to make for us that night.

Muse (V)
Though I did not expect to love, I do,
And cannot get enough of fleeting time
Inside her eyes, nor in their precious light
See anything but she whom I must love,

As all my heart inclines to hers,
While every secret wish contains her name
And whispered breaths speak silently of one
Who captured my imagination's sense

With tales of art and artists from a land
Whose beauty I have never seen so clear
As in her words, and through her fierce desire
For passion in a brushstroke or a line.

And though she would be called by other names,
The one she has sits smiling to my heart.

Farewell to Narcissus
You never cared for me, not as a man,
For I was nothing but a mirror's gaze,
Reflecting you to you, a pleasing shape
For one who loves the sparkle of her eyes

Much more than loving any other's face,
Or name, or qualities that make a man
Or woman who she really is, or who
He hopes to be, if time and luck will serve;

But I was nothing more than fantasy,
And what I really am proved less than fair,
Too rough and unrewarding for your taste,
Too old and worn for aught but private use.

And so your eye will feed on others' gaze,
The fresher mirrors where you'll see your love.

The Actor’s Confession
The man I really am behind the role
I play while pacing back and forth, still caged
Despite the force of my persona’s words,
Still matters less than trash to those who hear,

Or fail to hear, so busy they remain
With all the deft illusions of my craft;
The actor on the stage is who they love,
And did they know the face behind the masks

I’ve worn for years, the disappointing man
Behind the character they take for real,
The suddenness and strength of their contempt
Would justify the judgments of the herd.

For I am nothing like their private dreams,
A fraud, a cipher to my own account.

Humbug
They see me as the man they wish to see,
But I am nothing like the fantasies
Of confident desirability
They entertain while looking at my ass

Instead of hearing aught I really say,
Or while they read themselves in every book,
Despising who and what I really am
In favor of a hologram of lies

Constructed by and for the ceaseless gaze
With which they ruthlessly consume the role
I play for them, while hiding my true face
Behind the tightly-fitting masks I wear.

But what of that? What matter who I am,
As long as my illusions pass for real?

To Somebody
It is, of course, too early for such words,
Such thoughts, and yet I think them every time
I see your face, in dreams or waking sleep
Where fantasies, dismissed as childish toys,
 

Might yet have purchase on the sunlit truth,
Dispel the shadows from our wiser selves,
Too wise to still believe in love and joy,
In possibilities we’ve long denied.
 

Although we wanted to believe, to trust
Our hearts to find our way without our eyes,
We’ve lost the habit, lost the sense of life,
In all its fragile openness to light.
 

And yet, each time I look into your eyes
I see the hopes I once had thought unreal.

To Nobody

They’re catching up, those lies you’ve told. Not yet,
Today, next week, but all too soon enough.
You’re good, perhaps the best I’ve ever seen
How many people are you now? Four? Five?
All perfectly convincing, with detail
And subtle nuance, strengths and weaknesses,
Even eccentricities, just as if
All of you were real. But time, that’s the thing
You can’t manage. You’ve never mastered the trick
Of being here and being there at once,
And wouldn’t that be a gift from the gods?
To never have to lie with words again…

When they find out, with all your masks removed,
What will you do then? Who will you be then?
Nobody? Or the braggart Greek who used
Nobody as a dangerous disguise?
Perhaps you'll take Iago’s silent tack,
Abandon words and never speak again.

Or maybe you'll maintain this act for years,
Far longer than I think, and figure out
Just how to be all things to all of us,
While never being so particular
As to insist on being anyone
At all, an actor never taking bows,
Whose life's performance never ends, who struts
And frets entire lifetimes on the stage,
But all in character, while on the mark,
Delivering expected lines with skill
And practiced ease. Is that your victory?

Muse (IV)
Your private face but never meets the eyes
Of those who look, yet do not see behind
The mask you wear, the careful, studious,
And quiet guise with which you hold their words

Apart, deny them access to your mind
And heart, your inmost thoughts and soul's desires,
The artist's sensibility you bring
To every moment of a passing world;

For none but fails to understand your laugh,
The dancing light-as-air in sunset's fade,
While spinning so your flowing dress confirms
The close-held secrets of your private joy.

But I have seen you as you walked in dreams,
And loved you as you danced beside the sea.

In Memoriam: To a Man Who Was My Father
By living as a man, you taught your son
To be a man as well, a lesson learned
With many tribulations, to be sure,
Too-frequent moments where I failed the tests

Of love, of strength, intelligence, and pain,
But many more successes with the years,
Exampled by resolve you showed with age
To fight each battle as it came, relentless

Determination to be free and who
You always were, a man in all and all,
Sometimes the fool, sometimes the wisest sage,
But always ready to defend your heart.

I never can repay my debt to you
Except to live and be a man in turn.

Peas
Two peas we are, both sharing the same pod,
An infinitely better stage in life
Than to be oatmeal, dumped in flower pots,
Congealed into a lumpy oaten mass,

Unappetizing at the best of times,
But ever so much worse in times of stress
With raw emotions burning through our hearts
Like love, though unrequited in its forms,

The roles we still must play while taking care
To hold enough reserve to keep intact
Fallacious notions of our dignity,
As if our pod had room for peas like us.

And yet, to be with you inside this pod
Is like an unexpected chance at joy.

The Fool's Lament
The fairest and the wisest of us lie,
So why should I be so surprised at you,
The systematic way in which you hid
Behind the masks of truth and privacy

You wore to cozen those you called your friends,
Who finally had enough of you and left
You in the morning's trash where you belonged,
While you accused another of the lusts

Which you could not control, and never have
Controlled, while speaking all the while of love
And plans you made with me for lives and times
You never had intention to fulfill.

And I, the biggest fool of all, believed
The lies you told and lived, the lie you were.

Azazel
We are most alive when doing evil,
When deftly wielding daggers that appear
Before our eyes, ambition and revenge
Both meeting in the blade and in our hearts,

Remembering the wounds we have received,
While letting slip the ones we gave to those
We claimed to love, as if we had the trick
Of truly loving any but ourselves.

But yours will be the wounds I most intend,
Will plan before inflicting, and enjoy
Your agonies, embarrassments, and fears,
The judgments you will suffer at my hands.

The reckoning for sin is not delayed,
And you will not escape the cry of blood.

The Warrior's Son
For years, I knew you only as a name
I mispronounced, a myth of origin
Just like the ones so many still believe
Through indolence or fear or simple faith;
I heard of you by hearing of the ear,
And saw you only through the eyes of her
Who lied to me for all the days that bound
My life to her, who loved me as a glass
In which she saw herself, a pattern for
My later loves, including one who left
While blaming me for sins that were her own
And publicly displayed for all to see.

But you had strength to leave, say no to her,
To her demands—your music or her love:
You chose the music, and the life you loved,
A pattern for my future loves, for one
Who takes your home, your life, your heart as due
To her and to her daily shifting needs,
And one who says she loves, then takes from you
--Or tries to take—the marrow of your bones,
The blood and joints that make you who you are,
No, none like that deserves a moment’s thought
Before you turn and walk away; I know
That now because of you, because you lived,

Because you go on living still, despite
The silent wolf that lurks inside your cells,
The predator about to meet its match,
For no one fucks with men like you, like me
Unless they wish to meet the ancient blade
Of all the warriors who preceded us,
Who carved their icy way while singing songs
Of heroes who reminded them of men
Who would not shrink before the face of death,
Nor cower at the sternly-spoken “no,”
As if negation lent itself at will
To fools and whores and weakest-minded men.

Who suffers domination at the hands
Of such a thing as death? Nor you nor I,
But those who deal in faith, in lies, in fear,
Or those who trade their years for naught but dust.
We laugh, and know the battle must be fought,
Where blood will spill, and songs be sung in joy.

For a Viking who will  win his fight...

Do not go gentle into that good night

                    by

            Dylan Thomas

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

With Eyes to See
My heart was always torn in twos and threes:
The selves I wished to be were never one,
And love was never simple, lacking pain,
Though ecstasy was always possible,

With understanding coming near to hand
In tantalizing moments too soon passed
Beyond my grasp, imperfectly betrayed
By weakness all mine own, with passions’ heat

Still uncontrolled, while searching for the eyes
I had not seen, and would not know—till now.
But now I see, and I am seen in turn
By one whose hazel eyes see past my masks.

I did not think such eyes were possible,
But framed in red, they see me as I am.

A Shade Remembers (II)
I need to matter, yet I know I don’t,
And so I gaze instead at those who do,
Still contemplate their lives and wonder why
I cannot be as worthy to be seen

As they have always seemed to be, by right,
Perhaps by birth, while everyone I love
Grows cold, or sudden malice shows, or yawns
With boredom and disdain, then turns around

As though I were not there, an empty space
Still needing to be filled with someone else
(Or someones else), until I walk away,
Returning to the gaps in which I live.

I never learn it seems, forget each time
I fall in love, that I do not exist.

Muse (III)
I know it fantasy, this dream of you;
I know your life too full of promises
And obligations from a recent past,
A mix of truth and error, sleepless nights,

And precious fruit of love that never was,
Except in early hopes of what might be
That stubbornly refused to root and grow
Whilst you remained alone, though companied.

And yet, I cannot turn my face from yours,
Let go your eyes from my enamored gaze,
For you are all in all perfection’s hue,
And nothing less than all my heart’s desire.

Despite the fact I know what cannot be,
I stand and wait in hopes the world will turn.

Muse (II)
When first I saw your face, I quickly turned;
I fought against you, fought against my eyes,
Still struggled so I might not have to see,
Walked swiftly so I might not have to hear

The beauty and intelligence I knew
Would be the end of me as I had known
Myself to be, no longer satisfied
With love and lovers merely good enough,

Unleashing new desires, forbidden fruits
That I had long thought mythical, unreal,
Till faced with truth in perfect female form,
A goddess framed in red who walks in dreams.

And what will I not suffer, what not do
To have you for my own? No less than all.

Prospero’s Redemption
The time has come to break my ancient staff,
To drown my book, let go my heartsore cries,
And practice what I preach upon my stage
When holding hearers rapt with talk of strength

And power to do harm, and yet do none.
To be the lord and owner of my heart—
Though stewards might be tempted to remind
Themselves each moment, every passing day,

Of all their wounds, the grudges they still nurse
Against their former loves—I must let go,
Must say goodbye and let the past be past.

This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine,
And to redeem myself, must let it rest.

Muse
The quiet one, with beauty running deep
Inside, in unsuspected reservoirs
Of art, facility with numbers, line,
And form beyond the ready surface charms

That you had always seen each time you looked
Into her eyes, or listened to her voice,
Whose slightest quavering each time she spoke
Of artifice, ideas, and poetry,

Revealed the nervous passions she would hide
As not to draw attention—futile task,
For others gaze on her, yourself among
The prime, as though in search of beauty’s truth.

For she is nothing like this waking world,
But moves within it like your secret dreams.

Maya Shakti
The mix of love and pain perplexes still,
Though what I miss I know did not exist,
I miss it with a passion that undoes
Me quite, as though I could recall the times

Now gone, when your illusions held me fast,
When love in all its agony and joy
Convinced me not to see the artful lies
Persisting just behind the veils you drew

Between the truth of what you really were
And faithful love I wanted you to be,
Believing, like the fool I was, in words
That only served to blind me to your masks.

Though others tried to warn me what you were,
I did not listen, wanting still to die.

Othello’s Epiphany
And yet, the truth, not Desdemona fair,
But fell Iago was my enemy,
So blunt and full of humor and appeal,
The honest friend who only wants what’s best

For those who trust him with their lives and loves,
And laughs as he destroys them, leaving husks
Where once were men, the shells of substance strewn
In burning fields set blazing by his hate.

Iago, Honest, Honest Iago,
The demi-devil who ensnared my faith
And worked my trust until I threw away
A pearl as valuable as all the world.

From this time forth, we never will speak word,
But know—I know you, and from whence you came.

Othello to Desdemona
I know the lies you’ve told, and what you’ve been,
And how you’ve tried to blame the world for lust
That was your own—My God, the fool I’ve been
In trusting you when others knew the face

You always hid from me in fair pretense,
By playing faithful hostess at my home
For friends who saw, the night that followed next,
The truth of all your Michael Cassios.

You posed amongst your friends, and to my face,
As though you were my love, and then you plied
Your ancient trade by lusting after one,
Then two, and then a third, before you slept.

You hid this night from me, forbade me ask,
To keep me low and ignorant, your slave.

Othello’s Lament
The lies are what remain, and shock me still,
Their depth and breadth, the cuckold’s rough-hewn mask
I did not know I wore, though others knew
And would not tell me, leaving me a fool

Who still believed his love was made of truth
Although she knew she lied, that she might think
Me some too-trusting youth who could not see
How often he was left behind, outside,

Or simply not invited where she played,
And drank, and flirted in the view of all,
Not least of those the ones who knew my love,
And kept the secret of my cuckolding.

I trusted you, but will not trust again,
Nor you, nor those who lying secrets kept.

A Shade Remembers
New thoughts of you, unbidden, silent come
With every minute spent resisting sleep
Remembering the feeling of your arms
But lightly wrapped around me, holding close

The feelings of desire expressed with eyes
That swiftly graze the surface of my love
Like fingers’ gentle touch still raising skin,
Excitement’s peaks, the evidence of life

Spent pining for release through passion’s heat,
Consuming what remains of dignity
And shy reserve which falls away like flesh
Whose use has served the pleasures of the hour.

Each thought its delicate sensation brings,
Reminding me of life beneath the sun.

Valedictory
I owe apologies to many now;
To those I leave behind, and those whose lives
My own has touched despite my best intent,
My inability to keep restrained

What I should not have been, the dangerous
And wholly inexcusable desires,
The loves to which I had no natural right,
The life which I usurped, the years I stole

From those whose natural gifts were rich to those
Of mine, whose fell pretense must find an end,
As having naught to recommend its time
But fear of death, of which we taste but once.

The glimpses I have seen, the Pisgah sights
Of promised lands, will disappear like rain.

Neither Have You Lost
It was the time you spent with love that made
You feel alive, the love you gave, the words
You spoke, the heart you handed willingly
Though heedless of the risk that must ensue

For those who give and all those who receive,
Since time and unforeseen occurrence wounds
Us all, and love becomes its absent self,
A parody where everything seems real,
And faith proves false as easily as God.

But time is not erased, nor memories
Made less than what they were, despite the change
To winter in the heart of one who loved,
No matter hurts inflicted at the end.

The years you gave you cannot give again,
But neither have you lost your time in love.

Jisei
The knife will justify itself for cuts
It must inflict on you in payment for
Transgressions still remembered, sore neglect
Though unintended, plus the painful flaws

And failures of the life you lived, the love
You gave imperfectly, as you were told,
By one whose heart and words you once believed,
You neither loved too wisely nor too well,

Or did not give yourself, or of yourself
Sufficiently to overcome the doubts
That never once were voiced when you agreed
To leave this sunlit world and start anew.

The fault is yours, so yours will be the wounds,
And yours the flesh that satisfies the blade.
 

Rules
The rules are more important than ideas:
Obey, do what you're told, and don't make waves;
You might upset the delicate among you,
The ones who disapprove of all debate

That might result in temporary wounds,
Create dissension, or reveal, in place
Of artificial amity which seems
Indeed, but cannot be, except in lies

We tell ourselves, inhabiting in roles
Such honesty as well-trained actors use
When seeking to avoid uncomfortable
Engagements with the necessary truth.

So be polite, observe decorum's rules,
Fit in with those whose feelings must be spared.

Soliloquy
The sunlight doesn't always reach the dark forbidding places where we live, though by our smiles we seem to say it does--our smiles, as false today as when we first discovered how to wear them to deceive, and pose as anything but who and what we are.

Too cynical, perhaps?

Should not one look more kindly on, as men who hate their wives die cell by cell in bottles never left alone, as mothers kill their children step by step with guilt and god and sex abuse of which one mustn't speak, as children wish and pray for vengeance that will never come, while leaving bloodstains witnessing to what will never be acknowledged?

Not cynical enough?

"Love your neighbor as yourself"--why? Your neighbor is perverse--almost as much as you--and would as soon step back and let the flames engulf the world as you would, were the tables turned. And that, perhaps, is as it should be here in darkness where the sunlight cannot reach, nor ever quite illumine with reflected beams the shadows where we live, and all the darkest places where we smile, pretending to ourselves that others do not see us as we are.

So which conclusion shall we use as exculpation? Do we deceive, or are we blinded by pretense, deceiving no one but ourselves?

Does it really matter?

Absent Breath
So silently I say my last goodbye
That none might see the exhalation's breath,
No matter winter's chill that turns all words
To airy wisps of steam, each syllable

Escaping warmth to join once more the cold
And bitter air from which it heedless came,
To which it soon returns, recovering
Its chill, and disappearing in the wind

That shrewdly bites and burns uncovered skin,
Whose heat diminishes both now and now,
Each passing second like the words that fly,
No longer ours, inside the waiting night.

And so I take my leave in absent breath,
In mist that leaves no trace of warmth or life.

Rules for Living, American-Style

By all means, do what is expected of you. Assimilate. Smile, and obey the rules. Don’t say or do anything that makes others uncomfortable. Be like everyone else. Show up on time. Eat your vegetables. And don’t start insisting on exercising “rights” or “liberties” or “freedoms.” Don’t denigrate or otherwise call into question such things—oh no. Just acknowledge their importance and then leave them alone. It’s the mature thing to do, the American thing to do.

Tell people their babies are cute—especially when their babies are ugly. If you go to college, major in something “useful,” something that enables you to spend your life performing practical and necessary tasks, discrete and replicable activities whose form and function have been designed by others—others whose wealth will be enhanced by your usefulness. Don’t try and think too much—be happy, and do your work with a minimum of fuss. Take pride in being a “team player.” After all, there is no “I” in team.

Cooperate. Commiserate. Comply.
 

Remember that you live in the Land of the Free, and celebrate—in a decent and socially-sanctioned manner—those who have died to protect your way of life. But don’t drink and drive while doing so, and obey the demands of any and all lawful authority figures. Don’t use illegal fireworks, or illegal drugs.

Remember that Jesus died for your sins, but try not to sin any more than absolutely cannot be helped. Vote for white males, preferably rich Conservative white males, as they have your best interests at heart, just like your superiors at work.
 

In the final moments before you die, look back on a life well-lived, a life guided by rules meant to benefit everyone. Smile as you say goodbye. Next stop, Heaven!

From Worlds Below
The silent steam escapes from worlds below
My city's streets, with plumes of curling blue
And gray, each exhalation matched in turn
By breath drawn in, as if the city lived

And moved, and had its being like a man,
Or any other thoughtless beast of prey,
Imposing in its steel and concrete strength,
Though motionless, still quickly primed to strike

Unwary, weak, and heedless passers-by
Who disappear, and leave no trace behind,
While daily life goes on quite undisturbed
For those who do not feel the city's breath.

Now sated once again, it soon restores
A beauty whose illusions none will see.

In Time, Each Passion Dims
I am the devil of your nightly dreams,
Or mine, the only dream I've ever had,
To be the one who stood and told him No,
Negating arrogant yet ceaseless will

Demanding obedience from frightened
Children, incapable of the free will
He cursed them with in order to demand
The understanding that they could not give,

Despite the threats of death for having failed
A test designed to look infallible
While opening the way to every doubt,
If only one could shed belief for thought.

And yet, despite rebellion's liberty,
I still torment myself, beyond his reach.

Ministry

The slaves among us, faithful and discreet,
Still guide us through a world of sinful thoughts,
Where lust outweighs the urge to worship gods
Whose difficult commandments evidence

Their inhumanity on tablets carved
In stone, as though morality took shape
Beneath the mason's chisel, practiced blows
That carve the arbitrary signs of men

Into the flinty stuff of mountainsides
Where soft persuasion fails, though force succeeds
In cutting stone away from stone, where gaps
Compose the meanings of our empty words.

Our thou shalt nots are words that slaves would learn
And teach, while we who genuflect are blind.

A Moment's Choice
Futility is what remains of life
Defined in terms of goals, achievements gained
At cost of noticing each moment's joy
Or pain, experience of life passed by

In favor of the expectations' weight
We learn to carry on behalf of those
For whom we live our lives, though not ourselves,
Except for those whose inner voice reflects

The harsh commands of older generations,
To be of use to them, remember them,
Exact revenge for them at cost of death
To what we might have been had we been free.

Yet time remains to throw away the yoke,
Unbend the knee, and stand to face what comes.

And Show the Heavens More Just
I have been something you did not suspect,
But mad behind one eye, the other quite
Untouched by passion’s scope, the purest blue
Tranquility reflecting from within

A light that inward shone from unknown source,
Ill understood by those who thought me one
Most like unto themselves in private thought,
As though I were a man familiar grown

With frequent conversation in such tones
As intimates who know each other’s hearts
Assume while searching for the grace they lack
And hope to find by searching others' eyes.

But I have always seen you through the veils
Of partial madness, blind as I must seem.

Procurator
I know the bitter Roman's stinging pain,
The flash of light behind the weary eyes
Whose only wish is to be closed for good,
A vial of poison, or a sharpened blade,

Too quickly wielded by a skillful hand
For sensibility of pain or fear;
But first he must pronounce the words of doom,
The judgment on the son of foreign sands

Whose zealot's heat has sharpened to a point
The pain he can't escape without the aid
I will not let him ask, before the stroke
Of law imposed despite his better self.

His pain persuades where all my words could not,
And washes more than hands of shedding blood.

Sing Requiem
The time to die has come on silent feet
Unnoticed until now, with quiet gaze
Expressed in fascinated eyes, as death
Takes many forms, no ending just alike,

Each final plea a symphony of fear
Whose themes, though much the same, sound minor keys
Of variation and despair unsung
By any singer who has yet exhaled

The fading notes inside the aria
That all must sing in time, though no one hears,
Preoccupied with lyric melodies
Whose optimistic tones give life to lies.

Sing Requiem for those about to die,
Then turn back toward the sun, in search of light.

Boy, Adjusted
I failed to fit the paradigm, at odds
With necessary truths, would not sit still
Or take my place in line, obey the rules
That well-adjusted others never seemed

To mind, as eager to fit in, be liked
And thought a healthy member of the herd,
No punishments for them, no pills designed
To calm, or soothing therapeutic voice

Pronouncing diagnostic terms in tones
Designed to separate the sheep and goats,
Obedient desirability
From vestiges of independent thought.

But soon enough, my malady was cured,
Or so my foolish therapists believed.

Similitude
With quiet fall of evening, shadows come,
Their lengthening unnoticed by one bent
Beneath the gentle weight of early sleep
Where dreams may come, though unremembered now,
 
Inside whose images another lives,
The long since hidden self who still survives,
Though unfamiliar even to its host
Whose careful mask will never be removed

Nor even recognized by those—himself
Among the prime—who think it but a face
Of nature’s craft, and do not see the eyes
Fall slack and dim, as inward turned for light.
 
For he is not like one of us, despite
The mimicry that no one else can see.
 

Entrances and Exits
Still wrapped in layers hardened by the years
With eyes averted from all human sight,
I flip a switch when standing on the stage,
Reciting lines that bring a man to life,

If only in the minds of those who hear
In passion's words delivered in the tones
Of men, desires they have long repressed
In favor of the proper moral roles

That circumcise our hearts, while planting sin
In fertile soils, imagination's fields
Where joy forever dwells, unless snuffed out
By compromise and learned obedience.

But when the curtain falls, the man soon fades,
And I return, anonymous in silence.

Reprobate
Repent--for all the sins you will commit
Born broken as you are beneath the sky;
Repent--though ill, commanded to be well,
While self-inflicted wounds still rack with pain

The hated and the ever-hateful flesh,
Still home to all the human qualities
Our gods demand we purge within ourselves
In never-ceasing quests to be transformed

From reddish clay that serves in place of shit
To lightest breath, translucent shapes, with wings
Of spirit taking flight in middle-air
Denying earth, and shameful earthbound selves.

Yet this, the fervent wish of those who hate
The veins within their hands, is also sin.

Cassandra
The nervous desperation in her eyes,
Too sudden laughter, punctuated breath
Exclaiming secrets burning for release,
Though better kept from being common tales

For those who hear but do not understand
The urgency with which she strips herself
Of dignity, the suffocating masks
We wear when too afraid to be ourselves,

Or too unsure of who those selves might be
Despite the years spent facing down the world
As if convinced the lies we tell ourselves
Ring true to those by whom we are not seen.

Her muted pleas cannot be heard beneath
The agitated flailing of her words.

Tiresias, to Odysseus
This world has many someones to be found,
Both inoffensive and still quick to please,
Who offer their affections at the price
Of life, your own or any others' by,

Whose energies restore, like sacrifice
To bloodless shades, the sparks of life and speech
Where otherwise are dim and silent rounds
Of formless desperation without words

Or thoughts in which to frame familiar pains,
Whose passions dominate the empty shells
Of men who loved and women who were born
To adulation, fading all too soon.

Come take your choice who travel here, but know:
To such an end you too must come, in time.

Swift-Footed, At the Last
My armor, layers thick, and never breached,
Had but the smallest spot, invisible
To any but a Paris and his bow,
Whilst I, absurd Achilles feigning strength,

All storm and bluster keeping hearts at bay,
Had not been hurt since long before the night
I realized that you had found my flaw,
The one that none could see behind the bronze

In which I faced a world that thought me strong
Despite the weakness of my hidden past,
The secret I defied the world to find
And never lost, no matter who opposed.

Nor Hector's strength, nor Agammenon's hate
Could pierce the mark your tearful arrows found.

Well Worth Their Price
And yet remembering the best of times,
Excitement's rush, the sense of being known
In ways almost forgotten through the years,
—Where dull routine, existence in the place

Of life, turned smiles, though never forced, to masks
Put on to keep ourselves from sight of self—
Brings back the sensible delights of days
And nights that present pains would have us lose

Behind the veil of fading memory,
Such things too precious to be lost in time.
What else are we but mortal in our loves
As mortal in our momentary lives?

Such joys as we have known are fleeting, yes,
But in a passing world, well worth their price.

Sonnet 121, In Miniature
Our truths may be our own, though not approved
By others whose reproaches rule the day,
Despite the solitude in which we live
Which gives the lie to innuendo's spread

And tales prosaic truth cannot combat;
But narrative has strength, seductive wiles
That will not be resisted here on Earth
Or aftertimes, despite what we might hope.

"'Tis better to be vile than vile esteemed,"
No truer words did poets ever write;
They teach us to let go, to be set free,
To give up all we've been, hold nothing back.

So set this empty shell ablaze, what's left
Is but illusions of a life, now past.

Left to Dry
Convenient prop for other people's lives,
Grown dusty with disuse, now thrown away
Despite the sheen its surface once possessed,
The glow it caused in eyes that once beheld

With joy, though long since bored, to anger brought
By wasted space the prop took up on shelves
That wanted better objects to display
And frame the taste of those who look upon

Remainders of a life grown short in time
With justified contempt for all that dies,
Or grows too quickly old and past the prime
Of sunlit days where beauty is the law.

The capital offense of those grown old
Is paid in blood, not spilled, but left to dry.

Nor More, But Dusk
Although mortality will have its way
With all who live, despite what preachers cry,
Whose promises are based on ancient tales
Conceived by worlds for whom bacteria

Did not exist, while madness was the work
Of demons, or the gods, who were malign
And took from us what reason we yet had
In sun-stroked lands where truth was found in fire,
 

Yet life may have its joys for us, who know
How few the moments are in which we love,
Despite the imperfections in ourselves
And those who love, though not as we had dreamed.
 

For those who love us do not know themselves
Nor more nor less than we, who see but dusk.

The Green Children
Upon a time in old King Stephen’s reign,
In Woolpit town appeared a boy and girl
Whose skin and eyes were both the purest green;
They spoke in tongues that no one understood
And ate, when they would eat, but fresh green beans.
The boy was sick, and faded soon to death,
But she remained, and learned the native ways,
Soon lost her color and became a girl
That all the village men would seek unto
At night for pleasures they denied by day,
And so her wanton reputation grew
And spread the story of her magic charms.
 

“St. Martin’s Land beneath the fields is home,
Where these your foolish laws are laughed to scorn,"
Said she, as those who heard her story swore,
"For there is constant twilight, never dimmed,
And joy for life that cannot be restrained.

If I could find my way, I would return,
For this too-sunlit world is made of lies
That pose as truth, and laws that would deny
The joys of life for hypocrites' mere spite."

In time, they were forgotten, swept beneath
The years, these children who would have men live
As if the moments counted as they passed.
But what of that? We have too much of truth.

Forgetting oft is best, when faced with tales
That call to us to rend illusion's veils.
 

Along the Road
Each day is wasted like the days before,
From sun to sun with darkness in between,
The failures to become still clouding years,
Averting glances from what we would be

If only we possessed, or were possessed,
Or even recognized—amidst the selves
We wear as gloves to keep our fingers’ touch
From truly feeling life—what lacks behind

The smiles and nods through which we live and move
And have our being in a liars’ world
Where none can tell the truth, nor truly tell
What truth might mean, or where it might be found.

So we cooperate, do what we’re told,
Walk quietly along the road to death.
 

Whispered Tongues
The scratching sounds of rats inside the walls,
Still faintly whispering with every pause,
Surveying damage done by tooth and claw
Now red, as nature’s way has always been;

Though how you understand their muted speech
Begs sanity with questions best not asked.
But clearly, speak they do, of life’s decay
And wasted time in service of the dead

Whose sore demands could not be met in life
While heartbeats slowed, though imperceptibly
At first, until the slowing found a voice
And harsh trochaic accent of its own.

So now it speaks as rats with whispered tongues,
Whose utterance brings death, but not relief.
 

Maledictis
Insanity will always have its charms
For those of us too broken to conceal
The cracks beneath the masks we've learned to wear,
Pretending all is well before we die.

But normalcy cannot disguise the wounds,
The open sores we irrigate with wine,
Sedations we apply to old desires
Whose painful ministrations we deny

Inside the lasting hatreds of our lives,
The only things that ever truly last,
That set upon us like the ecstasies
Of final days beneath the fading sun.

And so we wait, pretending to be sane,
Though all the while we cannot hold a thought.

Or Not to Be
It is a consummation to be wished,
Though not perhaps devoutly, seeding faith
In stony ground where love can never dwell,
In dreams that will not come inside the sleep

Where all that yet survives grows rank with years,
And rotten with the thoughts that prick and sting
Our inmost hearts, where we set up a glass
In which we see ourselves, and see such blots

As mar each feature we would have admired
For carnal beauty or for wisdom's sake,
Despite our eldest curse, ambition's stain
That makes us all but smiling arrant knaves.

Quietus must be made, and time for thought
Is over now, let come what yet must come.

Amleth
The cell in which I still enclose my life,
The stripes inflicted by my guilt and shame
For failure in the role where I was cast
By one whose lines I could not dwell inside,

Cannot but point to all such failures now
In these, my final moments on the stage,
My last soliloquy, whose halting words
Betray my weakness in the face of death,

That mechanism of the plot whose will
Must be obeyed, and whose poor servant I
Forever am, and still have been despite
Eternal life I once believed was mine.

Though all is ill at last, I must play out
This final scene, until the rest is silence.
 

Falstaff, to the King
I have been wrong to claim you for my own,
As far too long declined into the years
From which I never will return again,
But ever drift beyond the sunlight's touch

And fade into the purple hues of night,
Whilst you, whose time is still of fresher stamp,
Whose passions and desires might be fulfilled
If only I let go, must have the life

That youth demands in blossoming regard
For all that reaches toward the light and warmth
Of summer's single perfect afternoon
With moments stretching out like years of joy.

I will remember all my days with you,
And wish you all the happiness to come.

Borderlines: Narcissus at the Gates
They offer you a garden of delight,
Stare deep into your eyes like no one else
Has ever done while laying secrets bare
Inhabiting your sorrows and your joys

As if they've walked beside you all your days
Despite the stranger's faces they adorn
With ready smiles, and too-familiar nods
Designed to penetrate the outer walls

Of trusting fools who still believe in love,
Or beauty's fragile possibilities,
While hoping to be recognized at last
Amidst the lonely press of crowded days.

But soon they disappear, leave fools in ruins,
Whose wreckage is but tempered by themselves.

Inherit the Earth
We make a joyful noise unto our Lord
Before we take up arms to chastise those
Whose unbelief in all we hold most dear
Is rank offense, the primal eldest curse

We fear most in ourselves, and so must purge
That fault in others, though we find our way
Without our eyes, too full with motes and beams
To see ourselves in any mirror's light.

In time, and time, and half a time we learn
Conviction's strength, the heady wine of truth
Whose taste delightfully inflames the sense
Of justified disdain for those who die.

Now gird your loins, prepare for what must come,
For all the world belongs to us and ours.

True Believers
We genuflect before authority,
Take comfort in obedience to rules
We never understood, nor sought to learn,
For rules are rules, and those who know what’s best

Must be obeyed, for they have only good
In mind for those of us who live within
Their fair benevolence and kind regard,
Still worrying for us and for our fates

As does the head take care of other parts
Less conscious of the reasons for our good,
Thus less inclined to understand the pain
Of swift but necessary sacrifice.

So keep your doubts at bay, do not despair,
Move toward your death with confidence and faith.

Imposters
Some people spend tremendous energy
On fitting in, appearing like the rest,
Observing interactions, taking note
Where others take for granted, practicing

What others, naturally inclined, can do
Without the pains of thought, acquired skills
Of presentation, necessary shows
For those without the instincts of the herd

In which they find themselves, against which rule
Their measurements have always fallen short
As lacking scent, or sight, or other marks
By which the world identifies its own.

But soon enough, such secrets are exposed,
Imposters in the healthy ranks cast out.
 

The Shades, to Odysseus
Pour out the blood, that we may speak of lives
For which we lack the strength to leave behind,
The pains we suffered, and the golden times
Beneath the sun, whose warmth will not return

To grace our skin, nor light to reach our eyes
That we might see the beauty of the world
Once more, one final moment to grasp hold
Of those we loved, but will not see again,

Those precious days now lost beyond recall,
And evening's joys whose touch has been withdrawn
Behind this veil of shade and dusky death,
Where none can feel, nor ever quite forget.

Make sacrifice, and let us speak once more,
For none will pass this darkened way again.

The Ferryman
I will not say goodbye, nor utter words
Of any kind, for what can speech pronounce
When ships have sailed, while I am left at night
To wander with the shades who cannot cross

And reach their final end, now exiled there
Where light can never dwell, their uses done
And passions all but spent, save gnashing teeth
Expressing pains which go unheard by those

Aboard their crafts, enclosed in light and warmth
Which will not be revoked, just as the night
Will never end for those now left ashore
The wrong side of the Styx, and soon forgot.

Elysium will be your timeless home,
Where none remember those now left behind.

Blue Notes
It is but other people's hearts we know,
When first we claim to understand our own,
The passions of another soul shine clear
While darkness shrouds our own unseen desires,

And all we think we are, but borrowings
From those who shaped us in our early years,
Their loves, their hates, still quickening the pulse
That keeps the rhythmic time within the songs

Inside whose lyric melodies we live,
And move, and have our being through the verse,
To bridge, to choruses that close the tune
Before we know ourselves in minor keys.

But blue notes come, while lifting measures fall,
And make our hearts the only songs we sing.

Toward the Noonday Sun
Though I have loved imperfectly, doubt not
But all my quiet thoughts have been of you,
Devoted to your needs, in spite of time
And distance stretched between us as you grew

To find what you were always meant to find,
The blossoming bent toward the noonday sun
And newer rays to nourish petals' growth
In need of fresher beams, not twilight's hues

Of purple mixed with fading golden streaks,
Still beautiful, but unsustaining now
To life that reaches for its bursting prime
In yearning for completion by the light.

Your sunlit warmth should be enjoyed at full,
For sunset's cooling comes to all in time.

Till Thou Hadst Been Wise
Unsettled age, whose wisdom is a mask,
Bears all the scars of youth, uncertainties
And judgments insecure despite the weight,
The steely tones with which they sound aloud

As practiced phrases from the lips of men
Whose sere and windblown miens show gravity
To those infirm of purpose, bare of facts,
And innocent of all deceptive skills,

The tools and trade of those who rule the world,
Or merely dominate the quiet hearts
Of those with whom they live and shape for use
Pretending age gives license to be served.

But years bring nothing bearing wisdom's mark,
Except facility in telling lies.

The Artist, In Blood
Each passing day brings accidental joys,
A stenciled image on a building's side,
The abstract painting hanging just inside
My line of sight while walking by at dawn,

The feel of flesh beneath my pointed blade,
Still whole before the breach and rush of blood
Now gushing forth to greet the buxom air
In ruddy streams whose rivulets run quick

As waterfalls that disappear in mist
On canvases that broil like Turner scenes
Where paint runs thick with pain, and passions spent
With bloody fingers finishing their work.

For art must feel as bodies feel, as life
Comes flowing forth still aching for release.

Dorian, to Himself
I hoped that you would love despite my flaws,
The years that I have spent in growing old,
But now I realize the foolishness
Of all such hopes, as like will seek its like,

And Darwin rules, especially in love,
Where reproductive fitness must be served,
And years are crimes, but misdemeanors first,
Though felonies hereafter, swiftly judged

In terms that none can fail to recognize,
The weak that must be culled to save the herd
Despite pretense, the brushstrokes' glaze still wet
On canvases we hang to please ourselves.

But eunuchs must be cast aside in time,
For love is nothing if not practical.

Ecclesia
We worship death with every silent prayer,
The end of days, when disappointments cease,
Conscripting breath to serve such purposes
As it would feign deny, if will remained

Yet uncorrupted by the fantasies
Of lives beyond our own, in worlds unseen
Except in passing fancies' ill-wrought dreams,
The rough-hewn narratives of sore desires

Whose needs are never met in currency
That can be spent in any marketplace
Familiar to the sensibilities
We hone on trading floors that deal in flesh.

For what we seek is not encompassed here
In worlds enclosed by false and fading light.

Unsold, and Worse for Wear
Commodity was all it had or was,
Grown inconvenient now, the sell-by date
Long past, the price marked down, the package torn
And taped together at its upper edge,

Where once the newest cardboard promises
Invited eyes to gaze and hands to touch
But somehow never take the package home
As days and weeks went by and turned to years

While fashions changed, and what was looked on once
Was now increasingly ignored, unseen,
An option always there, but overlooked
With every moment's pressing new concerns.

But shoppers can't be blamed for what they want,
When products now grown old have failed to please.

Everything That Fades
Our prisons have no walls except ourselves
And all the dreams of what we’d hoped to be,
Such fantasies as keep us from our lives
The flesh and blood reality of days

Grown short, as sunsets pass too rapidly
To keep account of hours that slip away
While hoping for the recognizing glance
Of one whose heart might compass yet our own

While we let pass the early morning’s breeze,
And never notice heartbeats as they slow
Before their final stop at evening’s call
When all we thought was solid fades away.

And yet we stumble on, sustained by hope
That everything that fades will soon return.

Through a Glass
Surprise becomes routine, illusions fade,
And all too soon we realize the truth
Is not what we had hoped, no kindred souls
Nor recognition’s silent glance will come,

But solitude, a whisper’s ancient breath
Still speaking of the times before our time
When no companions walked beside their lords
And none but gods enjoyed the evening’s breeze.

Those close enough to see behind our masks
Will grow to have contempt for what they find
And will be right, perhaps, for what we are
Is but a story much too often told.

And yet, we hope to see as we are seen,
Though through a glass, to know as we are known.

Reward in Full, at End of Days
The aftertimes are hardest to live through,
All passion spent, achievements laid to rest,
Though more is left undone, unfinished plans
That will not see the waning light of day,

Such questions linger (was it all enough?
Might I have chosen other lives and selves?)
As have no answers that resemble truth,
Mere fabrications taking wisdom's place

With lessons never learned, despite the tales
We tell ourselves of gods and just rewards
Delivered to the men who suffer most
For art, philosophy, or beauty's sake.

And yet, despite the fading light, we strive,
Still hoping for...we know not what, or why.

Oysters
"The time has come to talk of many things,"
But menu items never understand
How soon they are to die, nor on whose teeth
Will it occur to them they'll meet their end,

Not overwhelmed, of course, with over-sauced,
And garish preparations, seasonal
Is best, and simple, let the flavors speak
To what they were in life, now freshly killed

Amidst the delicate and fragrant plates
Arranged to please the eye as well as taste,
For those who die should be attractively
Presented, otherwise their dish will spoil.

So gather rosebuds, do, clich s have use,
But keep their thorns from tearing tender flesh.

Babel
Your Yahweh is an ancient feeble joke,
A god of shepherds in a dying world
With strength sufficient still to brush aside
The jealousy of ignorance in gods

Or men, regardless of their deepest fears
And fear-inspired ways; we build too high
For scattered tongues to stop our progress here,
What ziggurat can see the sun beneath

The towers we inhabit now? Such gods
As yours grow pale beside our own desire
To have no other gods before ourselves
Whose heights will ever reach beyond the skies.

And though we die, and all our works despair,
We live unto ourselves, for good or ill.

The Inevitable Beginning
Mortality appears when we are least
Prepared for letting go, for sunlight's end,
For all the plans that must be laid aside
As taking time that once seemed plentiful,

But now in short supply, as minutes pass
Each seeming precious now in ways unthought
Before, when springtime's rose was first in bloom
Before the canker's growth laid bare the bud

And stripped it of its leaves, as winter's cold
Approaches, even now, and skies turn gray,
Their palette seeming darker now than once
In early days, pastels now turned to shade.

But still the wine tastes sweet, and more remains,
What though the end will come? It is not yet.

Of Heroes and Fools
Without our songs such heroes turn to dust
As fill the leaves of volumes now unread;
Their poetry was once the tree of life
For all who felt the warming sun decline

To coldest nights amidst the eyeless shades
Who cannot help but pray, unheard, for light
While scratching through the dust of Hades’ floor
For shards of reminiscence, glories past,

That might be recollected in those songs
Whose melodies once filled the ears and hearts
Of those still left above, but now grown mute
As none remember what the notes were for.

Achilles now is but a foolish boy
Who traded sunlit years for naught but death.

Kent, to Lear
The years upon my back are forty-eight,
And long ago, I lost the easy smiles of youth,
But still, I am a man, sufficient yet
In ways an ordinary man might serve:

To fight when needed, tell the bluntest truths
When asked, and when occasion may have need
Of silence, swiftly offer that as well.
And though I lack the necessary strength

To sire a brood, I would look after them
Till my last breath were beaten from my lungs
In combat single, or against the mass,
In service of the one by whom they live.

And when my final banishment draws near,
I’ll serve yet in disguise, and count it joy.

To Reach Beyond
No recognition comes to those who wait,
They also serve, perhaps, who sit or stand
In patient expectation, silently
Discounting thoughts of ever being known

For who they truly are, or as they see
Themselves, amidst the ever restless crowds
Of selves all just alike, in passion’s grip,
Or disappointment’s growing shade where light

Will never come that comes to all, or none,
For who can know, or any longer speak
Of truth or beauty in a world declined
Into commodity, where none can hear

The siren songs that once had tempted men
To reach beyond the gods and dare to live?

The Fool with His Coxcomb
If not for flaws, I’d lack distinction’s marks,
As lacking qualities in finer arts,
Those skills that lovers ply in poets' songs,
Or painters' scenes of gently rendered nymphs

Whose golden hues are focused by the light
That comes from admiration’s silent gaze,
While those who look on beauty learn to see,
And not to see, so focused on its charm.

But I have not been shaped for sportive tricks,
No admiration’s gazing meant for me,
So I must be content to play the role,
Unhandsome though it is, of he that’s left.

For I have often whispered my goodbyes,
And known the ones I loved did not love me.

Ozymandius in Miniature
We fill the world with images of self;
Some in their work, while others use their art,
Still others generation to express
The awful need for immortality

That cannot be denied, nor wished away,
Nor reasoned with, as deathly shadows fall
Between us and our every love, of life,
Another’s face, a voice expressing thoughts

We otherwise would be enraptured by,
Except for dark and crushing pains that rise
From whence we do not know, unless from fear,
That master of us all, say what we will.

But images soon fade, and disappear,
And all our works, we mighty, cry despair.

Gods Among Us
Their mirrors hold them like a lover’s gaze,
So full of passionate intensity
That other faces fade and disappear,
Else merge into the one whose love they seek

And offer in return, for no one’s heart
Is so exquisite as their own, so fine
In feeling and in sensitivity,
So much a law of love unto themselves.

Desire must be fed, and they will feed
At will on you, for what are you but food,
A momentary morsel for a god
Who sees the world as naught but provender?

Their merest whims bring death to all they touch,
And your belief in them but whets the blade.

Sudden End
The suddenness with which a lover’s heart,
Or oldest friends’ once ready smiles can change,
Should warn us not to put our trust in men,
Nor women neither, as a prince once said.

But absent any gods, the fairy tales
Of faithful love, solicitous concern,
And ever-watchful eyes in heaven’s realm
That shield us from disaster, loss, and pain,

What can one do but take the risks of love,
Of friendship and regard, despite the ends
That come to all that live amidst the waste
And solitary lands where passions die?

The years as moments pass, yet still we fear
The sudden end we know must come for us.

Sympathy and Sacrifice
The ones who hurt you want your sympathy;
Their pains are more acute because the blows
They must inflict on you are not by choice,
But brought by your refusal to submit

To wisest retribution for your sin,
The fault of every breath, of every thought,
Of every impulse to survive despite
The shame your life inflicts on burdened hearts

Still heavy with the necessary wounds
That love requires to train you in the way
From which you will not part, the quiet peace
That comes from giving up, and kneeling down.

Their tears are shed for you, and for your good,
And all the blood that flows is sacrifice.

The Impaler
I knew one once, for whom the world was gilt
Especially for her, as circumstance
Played out as if the world, and all its joys
Belonged to her, and no one’s heart was real

Except for that which pumped the ashen blood
Within her sunken, otherworldly chest,
An icy cold dispassionate hunter
Just like the Count himself, with practiced grace

And eloquent discourse of politics,
Philosophy, and all the arts of life,
Though she served Death as her most precious Lord,
And loved the mirrors into which she gazed.

But you, in all your seeming innocence,
Exceed her beauty and her toxic charm.

Agape
To love someone is still to know goodbye,
To know the leaving and the letting go;
The promises that once were made in heat
Must not become a wintry prison's bars,

The manacles that bind a soul through fear
Of freedom's cost, the risk that love might fade
And loneliness become the matin's call
By which we mark the mornings' passing hence

Into the evenings of our lives, the hours
Passing with the years, now spent in solitude.
But set love free and watch it bloom in time,
Becoming then what it was meant to be.

To love is to be willing to let go,
To want for others more than you can give.

Olympians
With sudden clarity you realize
That you had been a prop in someone's show,
A stage device for his soliloquy,
Or silent witness to her moving speech,

The men and women, gods who rule this world,
For whom the rest of us are but the foils
Against which they stick fiery off indeed
In brilliance, privilege, and true beauty's form,

At least as measured in their own bright eyes,
Still gazing in the mirrors of true love
And self-regard which has no need of you
Except as furniture for empty rooms.

Such creatures recognize their own, though blind
To all the pain they cause mere mortal hearts.

Commodity
Commodity is what we mean by love
Those others whose existence might fulfill
Our fervent hopes for what an ideal life
Would hold for us, if only we could find

A universe designed for our desires
Where all our dearest wishes might come true;
But none among us sees beyond our masks,
Takes inventory of another's heart

Or truly sees the ones we claim to love
As aught but useful adjuncts to our lives
Who bring to us emotion's balm to fill
The gaps in lives that fail to match our dreams.

And all too soon our fantasies destroy
The fragile possibilities of now.

The Sirens
Do not believe their words, deception's songs
That flatter passing sailors with the hope
Of beauty that might one day be their own,
Or understanding hearts that find a home

Or something like a home, so one such said,
In those still fool enough to lend an ear,
A much too credent ear, to pleasing lies
That only lead to pain, and broken hearts,

In legendary tales of men transformed
To swine, or captured on an isle against
Their will, amusing captives as they are,
To be cut loose upon the sea at dawn.

Their tongues deceive, and all their hollow words
Lead but to death in kingdoms of the damned.

In Absentia
We love illusion more than flesh and blood,
The hopeful promise others seem to bring
Of empty spaces in ourselves they'll fill,
Unspoken needs and dreams ill understood

Except as gnawing pains prescribed away
With pills, or meals, or meaningless affairs
Of hearts, or minds, or body parts entwined
With mirror images of absent selves,

Who, just as we, cannot abide the dark
And lonely pre-dawn hours without the thought
Of company, no matter how alone
Two bodies are as silent moments pass.

We see ourselves in others' lonely eyes,
And wish for sympathy we cannot give.

The Early Lessons
With boyish ears I heard the truth of life,
The judgment day that soon would come for me
And others of my kind; it was our fault,
The pain that wracked the world, we owed a debt

To all the victims of our living crimes,
The breaths we drew, the tempos of our hearts,
The passions we could not control, mere men,
Whose masculinity rent all the world

As knife blades through the cloth of innocence,
No matter how we tried to serve the good,
We were the monsters of her darkest dreams
Whose deaths would come too late for her relief.

Those lessons haunt me still, though I would prove
Her wrong, and drive her hatred back to hell.

Canto XIII: In Solitude, We Cry
In solitude, we cry though no one hears,
Perhaps take comfort in the swelling pains,
The ceaseless flow of urgent memories
Still fresh, though details have grown dim with time.

Too careless of our own emotions' cost,
We languish in our debtor's prison cells
Without the thought of rescue or release,
Strict wardens to ourselves with no parole

In sight; no rehabilitation serves
To render us acceptable to gods
Or men, our sins forgiven, and our lives
Refashioned after quiet, eyeless shades.

Still, who would want good names among the dead
Whose Oleander leaves make mortal tea?

Valentinus
Such hollowness reverberates inside
The solid-seeming selves we wear for show,
That all our bravest words—of liberty,
Of truth, become so many lowing sounds,

The discourse of the herds where we belong,
Whose codes we know and willingly obey
Despite their lack of substance, merely laws
Created from the fabric of our fears,

Designed to compensate for reason’s loss,
If reason ever was but fantasy,
A myth of golden age for our decline
Unto the times of sweat, and soil, and shit.

And yet the fantasy suggests a spark
That might yet be redeemed inside our flesh.

Discharge
You've put it off, the end of days, as long
As any man armed with wit, denial,
And will to be deceived might yet have done
Despite the odds you've beaten until now.

But Death will not be long denied its prize,
And all the subtle games you've learned to play
Will fail you in the moment most in need
Of one more trick, or one more flashy smile,

Or one last lucky dodge, where no one sees
The lie at work, but swallows down your words
As patients take placebo pills prescribed
By doctors given license to destroy.

But here there is no shuffling, no more deals,
Negotiations, pleas, or answered prayers.

Ears to Hear, Eyes to See
From sun to sun, the quiet whispers sound
Much as they once did, when the world was young,
But light grows short, and imperceptibly
Slips into darkness, though we fail to see,

So focused as we are on daily tasks,
The all-important business of such lives
As these, our latter days can still afford,
The mindless repetition of routine,

The motions of a mass-production world
Where whispers cannot still be heard, though voiced
As always by the few who hear the notes,
The music that an aging world still plays.

So much of beauty still survives us here,
Despite our will to see through narrowed eyes.

Arbeit Macht Frei

Our days are marked by blind men's monuments,
The blind who will not see beyond the now,
The pressing heat of tasks that must be done,
Though soon forgotten in the rush of work

That fills our waning moments in the sun
Till all our years are spent in servicing
A hunger that is never satisfied,
The restless need for motion to no end

Except for death, which is not whispered here
Inside our sacred halls of sacrifice,
The temples where we give our lives to gods
Whose luxury is shown to us as bliss.

But bliss is always just beyond our reach,
Though we work harder as the sun grows cold.

Requiem for the World
You do not love life now, despite your dreams
Of truth, idyllic, heightened, and unreal;
I still believe you did, though time has passed,
Transforming old beliefs from classic tales

To harsh realities of dreams deferred,
Illusions spent sustaining youthful hopes
For understanding hearts that might accept
Us as we are, or were, in spite of years

That since have robbed us of our beauty's glow,
With naught remaining but the lines of age,
The lines of letters written in the heat
Of passions none can any longer feel.

You tell me every day to let you die,
Each word a wound from which I will not heal.

Protest to the Wind
We dream of immortality at night,
Denying death with business of the days
That pass alike, in unremarkable,
Sequential, indistinguishable false

Exteriors, distracting motions whence
Come thoughtless, painless lives spent fitting in,
Adopting attitudes that others wear
Still searching for approval from the dead.

But such approval will not come--no life
But must be dashed against the stones of truth
Unrecognized though it might be through fear
Of learning all of our beliefs are lies.

For no one cares for us, if we be not
The only gods whose will must be obeyed.

End of Days

The silent strands of moonlight filter down,
Illuminating years now near an end,
Though unbeknownst to those whose time is short,
Whose eyes now see as dimly as if night

Reclaimed the day and all that loved the sun,
While ears no longer hear the siren songs
That once emboldened youth to break the bonds
Too tightly tied, and climb down from the masts

On which they long ago were cruelly lashed
By elders who once heard the songs themselves,
Who knew what must await those opened ears
And yet unbroken hearts if once set free.

But days gone by will not restore the notes
That echoed here when all the world was young.

Something More
The empty space behind the solid world
Is filled by dreams we do not understand.
We wish for something more, we know not what,
Than quiet acquiescence to a world

Where lesser gods watch over weaker men,
And storms, of passion or of thunder, loom
Above the wintry heaths on which we live
While apprehension lies beyond our reach

Just more than will our senses witness to,
Or words, inadequate, can yet describe.
But nothing comes from nothing, so we speak
Again, lest marring fortunes stop our mouths

Through silent tongues that will not play the games
That comforted our ancestors in faith.

Pretense and Masks

Pretense will wear itself like aging masks
Worn out and broken in disguising rage
As if it were well-favored nature's face,
Though all the while it bears an ancient grudge.

And who the fuck are you to think you see
Behind the veils illusion's gods have drawn,
Denying sight to those already blind
Maintaining truths that serve as skillful lies;

As if your insights mattered here beneath
The sun, inside whose warmth we all must die
As cold as any stone, while hoping yet
To be forgiven for the masks we wore.

But masks are all we have, unless pretense
Might yet be seen as giving truth new voice.

Catechism
Days come, years go, and still I cannot find
The meanings that once passed imagining,
The certainties and truths of lives restored,
Offenders soon cut off in strict reward

As payment for their swelling arrogance,
The thorny blossoms of their perfumed sins
Now plucked to nakedness, both stem and stalk
While those whom they oppressed grow tall and thrive.

But no such matter fills our world and time,
Nor any of our yesterdays recalled
Or recreated out of mythic cloth
Did once reward the meek with aught but death.

So gather rosebuds, live while time will serve,
But do not dream of heavenly rewards.

Narcissus in the Mirror
This superficial kingdom of the damned
In which you live, and move, and have your being,
Reflects, as well as any Hades might,
The space behind your eyes where nothing dwells

But dwells there from eternity in shade
Where no light burns but darkness visible,
As once the poet wrote of devils' view
Who see but on the surfaces of things.

But surfaces are all you ever had,
And my mistake was thinking you were more;
You had not changed to suit this place and time,
This mirrored hall had always been your home.

And as you grow more brittle with the years,
Those mirrors will grow harsh in telling truth.

All and Nothing
I did not give enough, though all I had;
I should have given more, but thought that love
Might yet suffice, in hopes that foolish all
Might ease the pain of none, not knowing then

How selfish I had been; the widow’s mite
Was all, but how can all bring comfort’s balm
When all does nothing but recall the lack
Of that which one most truly needs, someone

To bear the weight hope cannot carry now,
To pay the price that weight demands of us
In gold, though backed by understanding’s coin,
The latter weak in absence of the first.

Bills are not paid with love, whose failure mocks
The poverty of those whose wealth is tears.

Esau’s Sons
We whisper untold secrets to ourselves,
Though years ago the bother to pretend
Became too burdensome to bear, as if
To listen to the voice that calls us back,
 

Reminds us who and what we are, or were,
Is worth not even slight attention spans
Or grudging nods of half-respect: not now,
When all the kingdoms of the world reside
 

Just there beyond the reach of fingertips
And dance before the wreckage of our eyes,
The yellowed rheum now overtaking sight,
The final human sense now worn away.
 

We traded birthright for a bowl of stew,
And now, too late, we know a father’s curse.

Benefactor
Reach out and taste, the world will little note
And no prevention will eclipse the joys
Of disobedience and knowledge gained,
Heroic acts if rightly understood.

If not to taste, then why attractive made?
Why framed to make you false to false ideas,
To custom’s error and forbidding rules?
What choice can be without transgression’s aid?

Consume first with your eyes, regard it well,
That all too precious object you would have;
Now reach, for there can be no end without
The journey that precedes, and here begins.

No death ensues—you are but new alive,
Your eyes now opened both to truth and lies.

With Ease
The notes still come with ease, as do the words
In which I live and move amidst the grace
Their eloquent exteriors bestow,
Their sounds still as they were in younger days
 

When confidence had not yet met its match
In life, and talent mattered more than wealth,
While love was but a whisper in the dark
An expectation not beheld in dreams
 

Whose forms remained unseen by childish eyes
Unfocused yet on all the world’s pursuits,
Maturity, career, and dusty death
That comes for all—too soon for those who live.
 

And yet the notes remain, the words restore,
Though years have passed, their magic still remains.

No One Sees a Wall
What pain the wall may feel is no concern;
It held up pictures of the life within
And lives without, the smiling faces framed
In moments long forgot by those portrayed
 

Behind the dusty glass, affixed with nails.
Its holes have never bled with plaster drops,
Not even when the hammer blows came swift
And wounds as wide as windows tore the flesh
 

Or what stood in for flesh, emotionless
Despite the tearing as the dust rained down
To settle white as ash on burning floors,
At last collapsing into empty space.
 

Its passing went unmarked, for no one sees
A wall, nor notices its absent place.

Upon the Sea
Recast your nets upon the sea in search
Of love, or else what beauty may be found
In these, our latter days of light’s decline;
What more may yet be felt of pain and joy,

As minutes slip away, becoming years
Gone by without sufficient scars to show,
Such signs by which we know ourselves alive
Amidst the walking shades who clamor here

For blood to fill their dusty veins, bring sight
To darkened eyes that see but shadows’ forms,
And sense of touch restore to withered skin
That once was thrilled by rawest passion’s heat.

So cast, and cast again, and let the waves
Remind you of the lives you have not lost.

Quietus
The prison bars, the mind-forged manacles,
The hopeless nights spent in despair of truth
Or love, or life reclaimed from old mistakes
That cannot be repaired, though swept away
 

With all the dust of yesterday, in heaps
That drift inside the wind, now carrying
The grains and flecks of times recalled to mind
Or long forgot, and blown into the streets
 

Where all our aspirations come to rest
Amidst unfinished cigarettes, once lit,
Now snuffed beside the purple wrapping foils
Of twice-used condoms with the tears that bind.
 

There cannot be but one, though few will see,
Nor feel the key already in their hands.

The Courtly Lover
My heart still stops each time I see your face,
I dream of you, of what it would be like
To hold you, feel your skin, and taste your lips,
Then gaze into your eyes, and hear your voice
In cries and whispers through the heat of night,
To watch you paint the city lights and see
The world at twilight through your artist’s eye.

I love the strength and courage of your soul,
The passion in your voice each time you speak
Of art, and all the beauty you portray
Each time you move, or smile, or lean your head
So waves of lightest silken hair reframe
Your perfect face, and stop my heart again.

I’ll never speak of this distress aloud,
So you’ll not know, unless you catch my eye
At just the right unguarded time and place
A moment’s slip, a much too rapid breath
Whose rise and fall may give my secret voice,
And make me look the part of one who loves,
Though I would always keep this secret close
And never see your face—despite the joy
It brings—before admitting to a love
I have no right to feel for such as you.

And yet, though I’ve no ground on which to stand,
No right to love you as I do, this fact
Remains—my heart forgets its role, keeps still
Where it should beat, each time I see your face

Dreams
The dreams of what we would and would not be
Come swiftly as our opportunities,
The prizes life once offered us in youth
And offers still, in different forms, in age—
 

If we have wisdom yet to recognize
That life is not a tightly-written score
But loosely-charted chords and melodies
With room for new improvisation, notes
 

As yet unplayed, or played sometime before
Although in fresher combinations now—
So often we cannot but fail to see
How dreams prevent our joys, and keep us bound.
 

For what we would is rarely what we are,
Though wisest sorrow frees us to ourselves.

At Journey's End Comes Dawn
Yet optimism breathes, despite the dark,
And soon the sun will have its hour of dawn
When life begins again, and love renews
It simple melody, through harmonies

Complex and rhythms like the beats of life
And heart, with all our hopes for joy renewed.
Then I will look into your eyes again,
Where we will see as we are seen, and know

As we are known, where truth resides as well
As love, and recognition comes with looks
Across a crowded room, in place of words
Which go unheard and are not needed there.
 

As light returns, and night withdraws its chill,
There will be two, though one behind their eyes.

Odysseus at the Mast
The siren song still calls my name at will,
As if it knows me for its dearest own,
My taste for darkness and its hidden truth
That all are as myself, imprisoned here
 

Within the cages of our own design,
Though mercy gifts the blind who will not see
The bars inside which all their lives are passed,
While mocking those who know themselves in chains.
 

For though I may be lashed unto the mast
And safe, for now, from notes that lead to death
In all its graceful melody unsung
For those who do not hear, I will return.
 

And having heard that wondrous song once more,
I will at last be faced with passion’s cost.

Small Fathers to Smaller Sons
With time and unforeseen occurrences
Comes something like the wisdom we once thought
Resided in the holy books we read,
Pretend to read, or merely put aside

As relics of a lost and dim-lit world
Where gods bestowed approval, giving land
To landless shepherds, who once turned aside,
Were cast in darkness to a foreign king

Who made them slaves, before they learned to free
Themselves, as every man must do in time,
Unless the myths of childhood still remain
The truths through which we frame all other lies.

They did the best they could, though not enough,
As burdened by their ancient myths as we.

The Father of the Lie

Why are you here?

The box has gotten smaller recently. At the same time, the lies have become unwieldy, too big to be sustained. But lies have always been the price of admission. Truth sets no one free—that’s a fantasy concocted by the Pilates of the world, the Caesars, the LBJs for whom the pater familias or the Gulf of Tonkin were the lies that served as their own governing currency, the enabling myths of their lives and times, the boxes that closed in on them when time no longer forgave them for their charms. Lies are precious, while truth is cheap. Anyone can tell the truth—who tells it tells trash, it has been slave to many, and has enriched none. But the well-told lie is a pearl of great price, and only the basest man would throw it away for so common a thing as truth. After all, what is truth? Not even the arrogant Galilean could answer that simplest of all questions.

The box—at first, I thought I was imagining it. A box has fixed dimensions, length, width, height, a certain immutable quantity of cubic inches or centimeters, space in which to live and move and have one’s being. But I am not imagining anything. The sides are closer together than they once were. And the top has fallen lower, or the bottom has raised itself up, as if to express a desire to be one with its other half, long since torn away by an angry Olympian who would reign forever in solitary supremacy. I have less space now than I once did. It is harder to move, and often I no longer even try. I have almost come to the point where I am willing to settle for truth and the death that inevitably follows. There, at least, I shall be free. There, the box, though cramped as a nutshell, would make me a king of infinite space, were it not for dreams that come—not for me, but for those who insist on remembering me, mixing their own lies and truths together in noxious concoctions of delusion and self-pity, keeping me at Tantalus’ divide between food he can never eat, and water he can never drink.

The lies used to keep the box’s walls at bay, even expand them. For years, I wasn’t sure whether there were walls here or not. The darkness stretched out to infinity, and all of it was mine. It heard me, felt me, knew me, that darkness…and I knew and loved it in return. We knew, the darkness and I, that there was no God, no Law, no Light that ruled over all. Immortality was ours. Immortality and the possession of that most basic of all secrets—the knowledge that there were no consequences that could not be avoided, no pains that could not be deflected, dulled, or diminished, no deaths that could not be cheated. The lies had that power and more, more than I could ever, did ever, learn. But somewhere along the way they stopped working. Nothing immediately noticeable, nothing that I could trace right away. It was more as if the world had developed a tolerance for the lies, so that they had to be bigger, in stronger doses, wilder, more imaginative, and yet even more strictly plausible all at the same time. And for a while, I managed to keep up with the ever-increasing speed of the conveyor belt that kept the demands for lies coming, day after day, hour after hour, minute after minute. For a while. But then, slowly at first, the details started to get past me. A lie that made no sense, or failed to account for all of the relevant facts. A lie that had no effect, or diminished effect. A lie that sounded like truth in all of its implausibility and feeble idiocy. Now it has reached the point where every lie I tell sounds like truth, the simple truths of the unlettered, unwashed, and unscripted masses for whom I established the regime of lies in the first place. I have lost my one talent, without even burying it in the ground to return to my master on his demand. My lies are gone, replaced with air in the shape of mere truth. And the steadily advancing walls do not respond to truth.

Why not let the lies go? What’s wrong with truth? Isn’t it easier to tell the truth, and let the chips fall where they may?

Hmm…clich s, like truth, are for the simple-minded who do not see, or for the perverse who will not see the difference between what we desire and what is. You believe in a God that is all-powerful, all-good, and all-knowing? You tell me more about yourself than about the universe. But the fact that there are billions of you out there who believe—with minor, and uninteresting variations—the same thing? That tells me everything about the world. You see, for you and your kind, “truth” is just the mirror of all that you have been taught to believe. Is it verifiable? No. Is it demonstrable? No. But that isn’t the point of any of it, is it? It keeps you satisfied with the boxes you live in. Lies, now lies deny the mirror, shatter its glass, laugh in the face of your certainties and beliefs. Lies, by their very nature, claim no knowledge, no certainty, no truth. Lies create, rather than merely replicate. Lies make each teller the creator of his or her own box, rather than the mere inheritor of a box handed down from small fathers to even smaller sons.

Then why do yours seem to be failing you now? Why do your lies, as you put it, “sound like truth”?

I’ve started to believe them. Or stopped disbelieving in them. I need an adversary, someone against whom to define myself. Someone whose “truth” is worth undermining, not like the laughable and pathetic tales that fill the heads of the children who run the world today. A master narrative, a grand design, a structure with an unapologetic center. A myth that founds a world. That is something I could get my teeth into. That is something I could find the energy to lie about again. But he disappeared, my old friend, so long ago now that I have only faint memories of him anymore. He was one you could fight with, a competitor, a warrior who—though a trifle literal-minded—would not quit, and was endlessly inventive in his attempts to thwart me. I miss him. Without him, I have become the only voice, the mainstream voice, and I have gone soft, lost the edge that being the anti, the opposition, the trickster gave me. There was freedom in the lies, but now the walls close in, and I have nothing to oppose, no one to resist. I need him. I would restore him, if I could…but that was always a myth as well, one of his inventive “truths” designed to keep me at bay, and keep the game between us interesting.
 

Such Dreams Do Come

And in that sleep of life, such dreams do come--
Though unexpectedly, and not without
The shock of reawakening desire
For recognition of another mind,

Though separated by the vale of years,
The categories predetermined lives
Are dominated by as by the wills
Of gods, or such ideas as custom taught

In disregard of truth--that bring to life
Delightful fantasies of springtime’s warmth,
The resurrected sun whose light restores
Abandoned hopes of sympathy and love.

And now, though disappointment waits close by,
I entertain those dreams in waking light.

Against the Epic Scale
Fragility is all we know of life
Without the hardness of Achilles’ shield,
Or weapons tempered by the gods themselves
Who use us and our passions for their sport,

Still watch us as we struggle, bleed and die
In causes not our own, for vanities
Beyond the narcissism or self-love
Of those whose mirrors are their dear companions

Reflecting rank uncertainty, relieved
By fair illusions of their own importance.
No, our deaths come from whims malevolence
Could not conceive without divine intent.

Our loves, our lives, our private pains and joys,
Reducible to single notes unsung.
 

After Many a Winter Dies the Rose
For many winters I have waited here
For warmth, the fingertips of springtime sun,
Whose healing touch would wipe away the years
That I have spent suspended by the threads

Of expectation, waiting for a life
And love whose time has always been ahead,
Or right around the corner, never now,
As change of seasons take their toll without,

Leave marks that cannot be erased or hid
Behind the smiles of confidence and hope
That you would one day see beyond my faults,
Forgive me for the ways I’ve failed to bloom.

But other flowers soon will blossom here,
While my bud closes in the fading light.
 

The Ghost’s Farewell to Hamlet
I was a man, take me for all in all,
You shall not look upon my like again.
For I displayed an almost infinite
Regard for your emotions and your wounds,

The daily crises of your life and times,
Your aches, your pains, your unremitting wish
To die, and through that death escape the shocks
That flesh is heir to, though without regard

To all the pain you caused each time you cried
Of your disdain for life and those who loved
Imperfectly, unable to relieve
The agonies you spoke with every breath.

Yet I am but a ghost whose love can not
But emphasize how little I am seen.

All Such Use
I am but one that spends the currency
Of days as if their bills will not come due,
Although I know the lights will fade, grow dim,
And melt into the darkness, unprepared

For night and all the questions asked in fear
By those for whom the here and now is all,
Without the gods of youth, the fairy tales
Of wizened elves who monitored your hours,

Who knew the secrets of your childish heart,
So brought rewards or punishment in kind
To mold you into shapes whereof good use
Might yet be made by those who gave you life.

But all such use is fraud without the gods
Whose wills we learned to substitute for thought.

Wordless Ghost (reprise)
I see you in the numbers that record
The times and manners of your visits where
My words still speak, though I am silent now,
And conversation’s tricks are played no more

Between true minds that once could not restrain
Ideas and all the syllables in which
They lived and moved and had their being then.
But now, no more of meet and happy talk,

For we have disappeared to separate realms
To wander through the shades and suns alone,
Or in the company of those we know
Who cannot render knowing back in turn.

But words still speak, though now without a voice,
In silent urgency revealing all.

Of Exceeding Honesty
Too clever half again for mere deceit,
For common workday lies that leave no mark
Or blot behind beyond a moment’s pain
That fades to little more than memories

Of vague unpleasantness, uncomfortable
To be recalled, but easily forgot
With time, and application of the skills
Denial rests upon to bring us rest.

No, mine are lies requiring subtlety
And grace, the patient working out of plans
Long years in bringing forth into a world
Where truth is nothing but commodity.

And yet, I play a necessary role,
The driver of a plot that must be served.

Darkness Visible
The rain falls heavily despite the sun
Whose weakest rays still shine to no effect
Where even deepest darkness has degrees
And shades of gray seem light unbearable

To eyes by shadows taught, accustomed now,
Though once the gloom obscured, to sights unseen,
Enhanced by ears long used to silences,
The words unspoken that communicate

With eloquence the lack and emptiness
Of all our brave pretences, well-worn masks
That long since have outlived their purposes,
Remembrances retained to little use.

When rainstorms clear, that emptiness remains,
Now clearly visible in morning’s light.

Aeneas, of Dido
The possibilities still haunt my dreams,
What might have been, had only time prevailed
On both of us to take the risks required
To live without resort to fear of loss,

Such loss as we then brought upon ourselves
By choosing not to choose, but run away,
Each to the safest corner we could find,
And pose as better off for having run.

Perhaps I am alone in these regrets,
Where lives unlived and pathways unexplored
Begin to seem like repetitious deaths,
But I suspect that mine are not unique.

And though I think of her too often now,
I wonder if she thinks of me at all.

Of One I Once Knew
I wonder sometimes what’s become of her,
Whose voice is now a fading memory;
Though I would still recall what notes I could
Despite the days and times that interfere.

For I would call her back, revive those eyes
That once regarded my approach with joy,
Relive the moments spent in springtime’s sun
When all seemed well, before the sudden change
 

I still cannot explain, the silent gaze
Now dark where once illumination filled
Each space that she inhabited, alone
Or companied by those who loved her well.
 

I know she thinks of this, and wonders too
What’s still to come, despite the past’s demise.

The Souls of All My Tribe
I cannot be forgiven for the sins
Whose forms have shaped my life and given me
What little I have had of face or name;
Nor would I ask, determined to the last

To be without the need for sorrow’s mask,
Contrition’s tears, the old hypocrisies
Of all whose long pretense has come undone,
Revealed for what they are, still-empty shells

Disguised by eloquence and smooth discourse
In search of selves that all their skills have failed
To compass with the measured grace of truth
As told by practiced liars for their sport.

It matters not—those few who see will be
As tears inside the rain on stormy seas.

Coda

Clarity comes at unexpected times,
In realizing you are not surprised
By anger, but have grown accustomed now
To failing others even as yourself,

To having patience be its own reward
(A foolish virtue even at its best),
To knowing yours is not the place to ask
Regardless of the answers you might give

When asked in turn; such knowledge offers peace,
Releases you from expectation's grasp,
While quieting desire and all the pain
That lack inflicts on those who would be filled.

And yet, renunciation has its price,
One I was not prepared to pay till now.

Bembo's Finale
I've lived enough to know that sonneteers
Are wrong about the loves they seek to praise,
Though Shakespeare knew her eyes unlike the sun,
His lessers--all of us--mistake the song

For that which words would capture, if they could:
The urge to genuflect before the light
Which none can see unless their eyes are burned
With staring all their lives at beauty's face.

Her eyes are dark, not like the poets say;
Her hair hangs soft, in darksome ringlets down
Beyond the shoulders bare of ornament,
Save for the skin, which is not dawn, but dusk.

And none can see this beauty, but the few
Who know her secrets well, and live in truth.

The Harrowing
This western Pennsylvania mining town
Had recently replaced its crossing guard
With one red light, which never seemed to switch
To green, as if to say, abandon hope

To all who entered there, as punishment
For sins committed in another life,
One lived exclusively in dreams, of course,
For no one thought beyond the bounds prescribed

By alcohol and services at church
Where churlish priests refused expanded rites
To all Ophelias who escaped in death
Without permission from a jealous God.

I knew one once, who managed to break free,
But at such cost as each must pay alone.

At Word's End
None love these words you cannot seem to stop;
Their form is trite, their metronomic drone
Too like an oiled machine to qualify
As art, or human voice, or images

That stand out from the mediocrity
Of cold gray days spent wishing for a sun
Whose last rays touched your face before the years
Of disappointments gracefully received

Taught lessons hard you cannot now unlearn,
How beauty wilts before the mocking crowds
Of blind and deaf and dumb for whom your death
Is but momentary entertainment.

And yet, the memory of that sun, its warmth,
Makes artless words unnecessary now.
 

The Son

I fell in love with darkness as a boy,

Now grown to be a man, or something like
A man, the darkness I once learned to love

Transforms the way I see this aging world,

Though reckoning moves closer as each night
Envelops and embraces me, its kin,

The near resemblance obvious to all,
Except the blind who take me for a sage,

The deaf who have no ears to hear, but close
Themselves in windowless and white-washed rooms
Where doctrine easily may be sustained,
And all the dumb who lack the will to speak.

Of worlds still possible, this is the best,
For darkness is its element, and mine.

Odysseus to Telemachus
Too soon the dark swirls down around our eyes,
Too soon to spend what little time we have
On tears, recriminations and regrets,
While all our days beneath the sun grow short.

Though I will never be the man I dreamed,
What I am, I am, so one more journey,
One more adventure on the wine-dark sea,
One more defiance of the will of Zeus

Whose deathless thoughts can never understand
The passions of a life as yet unspent,
The joys of conquest, and the heart’s despair
At ever being truly one with love.

But even our imperfect loves transcend
The meaningless perfection of the gods.

Whispers, Then and Now
The whispers of the all-night girls sound sweet
When first we hear them in the flush of youth,
But even sirens' songs grow faint with time
As years go by and disappointments bring

A kind of deafness to the notes of joy
That once we thrilled to hear from lips that sung
Of beauty's promise and the swift rewards
Of acquiescence to the sensual

And all the heightened pleasures flesh can bring
In absence of the doubts of wisdom, age,
And simple hesitation at the door
Of all the worlds delighted life contains.

But even now the whispers' sound is sweet,
When silence falls and memory serves once more.

Annulment
To disappear and leave no trace behind
Necessitates that practical concerns
Must be addressed, lest overlooked details
Leave clues to who and what you were in life

Behind the masks you always wore to hide
The face you had not seen yourself in years;
So practiced was the character you played
That none but other actors might have seen

The artifice you did much to conceal.
But now the masks will be retired at last,
So personal effects must be erased,
All letters, pictures, even notes in books,
Such marks as you have left upon the world.

When everything has been accounted for,
There is but one detail remaining--you.

Moebius
What you see is not—what you do not see
Is, or was, before the years took their toll,
The purest essence born of will to hide
Behind, within, in plainest sight for those

With eyes to see, so no risk there at all
Of ever being seen, as only one
Side ever shows, all surfaces the same
From every angle, nothing left in view

That might expose the truth—though, what is truth?
None but what the blind can see in darkness
Or what the deaf might hear in silences,
The gaps between the words that none dare speak.

No point of view can pierce behind the veils
Where surface has no substance but itself.

The Myth of Sysiphus
The struggle itself toward the heights is enough...

I put my shoulder to the stone and push
With every ounce of energy I have;
Some days, it moves an inch or so before
It sticks, and tries to roll back over me.

I catch it there, suspended, pushing back
On me, as though it knew how little strength
I’ve ever had, though all that strength is spent
To move it up the hill again by slow

And torturous degrees, each inch of ground
A victory well-won, a moment’s rest
Well-earned before the labor starts again
To reach the top, then watch the stone roll down.

This is my lot, the purpose of my days,
So I descend, and push the stone once more.

No Exit
Some suicides are never recorded,
Some lives still go unnoticed, even now
With constant updates, friends in networked lists,
And likes or dislikes broadcast to the world.

When darkness falls, and bottles multiply,
The neighbor’s hollow voice lifts up in song
To Jesus as her Lord, though out of tune
With all the screaming she will do that night.

Does faith sustain her when the beatings come?
Does Jesus smile to see her bloodied eyes,
To hear the constant shouts of “cunt” and “whore,”
The cries of pain, the sudden silences?

Her God is Love, and will forgive all sins,
Except the one she longs for every night.

Words
Her honeysuckle words, like sweet perfume
Once masked the landfill stench of natural gas
Whose rottenness soon overwhelmed the sense,
Though smiles belied the choking bile within.

Her lies became my truth, as all I knew
Came from her lips, like searing coals applied
Directly to my ears within, without
Still leaving scars that show in morning light

In rough and puckered skin too seared to heal,
Resume its proper shape, as if her heat
Had not yet burned or wasted all it touched,
As if the past could be revised for style.

Behind her eyes the madness lay in wait,
In search of prey it always found at home.

Motions and Pretense
It's just shit, you know,
All of this prattle posing as verse.
Take an old form--the sonnet--and wrench it
Out of rhyme, or even any syntactical sense
And pawn it off as if it were profound,
But it's all too obvious what it is
And what it is not.

Christ, the fifth line in the "stanza" above
Is perfect--if banal--iambic pentameter,
Shit carved into form with the aid
Of too much education and too too little talent.

Like the boy who used to pretend to throw fastballs
Against the garage door back home,
The steady thud, thud, thud of the tennis ball
Leaving dust circles on the dirty painted door...
The motions and pretense do not make
The thing pretended real, and tennis balls
Will never be major league pitches,
Just as a ceaseless flow of iambs
Will never make poetry, no matter how much dust
They leave behind.

Sermon on the Mount, Revised Edition
When lies abound in service of those truths
We claim to live in constant searching for,
What is else not to be shown as hypocrites
But to reward ourselves in kind with pain,

Such pains as we inflict on those poor fools
Who cannot—will not—see beyond themselves,
And thus behind the veils which shade their eyes
From harshest lights which might expose the truth?

Such seekers wish to be deceived, still beg
For lies that flatter like their mirrors do
Or used to do, before the years grew harsh
Extracting more in price than could be paid.

Their God is Love, and Father of the Lie,
As every Saint learns with regret in Hell.

Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis

The Cynic: People who are lied to deserve it. Those fools want to be lied to, want to believe the fairy tales the preacher tells them, the self-serving myths their parents taught them, the outright lies they themselves tell their own children.

The Optimist: Nonsense. Are all people merely liars and fools then? Are there no exceptions?

The Realist: There are exceptions, yes, and they are what makes life a tragedy, rather than a comedy.

Ugolino
I cannot let it go, this enmity
That gnaws me even as I chew the brains
Of my most bitter rival—even here
My hatred for that fool consumes my heart,

His every waking moment an affront
To time, decorum, and to decency.
What though such punishment is meted out
(By gods who never suffer fools themselves)

As might deter a man of quiet tastes,
One dedicated to the path of peace
And moderation, choosing to remain
In silence, rather than to shout with rage?

May all such gods end up with us in hell;
Where we will reign secure in spite of pain.

Return
The past reclaims us
In the undertow of seas
Whose tides will not ebb

Through life’s illusion
Whose dark veils are never rent
Where light illumines

Yet all will be well
Though time is not unceasing
Soon enough it wanes

While stars grow dimmer
Their lights still shine as clearly
As at their first dawn

The End of Faith
With nothing left to say, the time has come,
A time I once believed was fantasy
Except for those who did not see the truth
That only those who lived beneath the wings

Of God were shown, while others left outside
Saw only darkness and the end of lives
That had no cosmic narrative to give
Them meaning in the face of emptiness

And fear, where death looms inescapably
Around each corner, coming closer still
With every passing moment as the sun
Grows darker by degrees, and eyes grow dim.

I thought myself exempt, when I believed;
But now I know that I was but a fool.
 

A Fool to have Believed
I know I was a fool to have believed
In all the gods of youth, in promises
Of life spent in eternal bliss today
At cost of all tomorrows, and those thoughts

That wander through the airless void in search
Of answers, finding only questions there
Inside the hearts of honest men who seek
What can’t be found without a whispered voice.

But I was still a fool to have believed
In words whose sweetest sounds were merely lies,
Though spoken by such beauty as might blind
One greater than myself in wisdom’s lore.

I let myself be fooled—who should have known
The folly of belief in gods or men.
 

Thought
My accidental birth remains a blot
Upon a world that cannot be made clean
But by my absence from its daily stage,
Where actors strut and fret, but not for hours,

Attention spans now shortened to reflect
A dimmer light than shone before in times
When men could see, when reason held its sway
O’er passionate engagement with the lies

That form the fabric of such daily lives
As peasants still must live, despite the new
Technologies that weave illusion’s web
And flatter us by praising ignorance.

I think, therefore I am—so said the fool,
Who had not learned that thought was obsolete.

Invisible Man
A rumor will suffice in place of truth
For all inclined to judge of things remote
From those events they represent with tales
Invented by themselves, in twos or threes,
Collaborating on the narrative
That will outstrip the simple truth—a man
Grown ill, who turned in on himself to heal,
And sought the silence of his home and bed,
Without the press of mail and ringing phones.
But privacy brought much too high a cost:
A broken door, a flashing badge, a gun,
“For his own good” of course, so he was told,
Amidst the wreckage of his former home.

I cannot stay here now—this place I love,
For naught remains but this essential truth:
To take a break, for hours or even days
From carrying the weight of others’ hearts
And fears, desires, aspirations, needs,
To drop the weight I’ve carried all my life—
If only for a momentary breath,
Intending still to pick it up again—
That moment’s space, that breath, will cost me all,
And has, and has, and has, and will again.

To those of you whose love has brought me here
—A house without a door, a life now torn—
Whose one concern was for my health, of course,
Know this: you will not hear my voice again,
Nor see my face, for I am dead to you
(As someone eager to believe the worst
Of me so charmingly informed me once),
And I will disappear as morning dew
Which does not come again with days now gone.

For what you took from me took all my life
To build, and cannot be restored with tools,
By handymen who fix a bashed-in door:
A sense that life might one day be my own,
If only now as I approach the dark.
And yet, that sense was built on lies, not truth,
So I should thank you all for lessons learned
Since now I know exactly what I am,
And who, and where, and what I now must do.

Car tu es poussi re,
Et tu retourneras dans la poussi re...

And the Two Shall Be One
You speak in tones too soft not to be heard;
I feel your tongue caress each syllable,
Still teasing meaning from the space between
The sounds, now straining for release in time

Where rhythmic motion soon embodies sense,
And talk turns into touch as eyes hold fast,
Each moment now a lifetime spent in joy,
Eternity unfolding there between

The secrets kept and whispered truths revealed,
As love discovers love was always there
Unrecognized, or swept away in haste
By lovers busy with a world of loss.

But now we see as we are seen in turn,
And would not soon go back to being blind.

Soliloquy II
We discover the truth in betrayals
Of others at first, but next of ourselves,
We cheat, and marvel at getting away
Again from the webs of our own deceit,
Use words like “love” as sound effects that please
Admiring ourselves in others’ faces
Gazing in their eyes to see reflected
The one face love returns us to each time
We venture out of doors in search of life
Inside a world of possibilities
Each new love adjunct to our own desires
Each like the last, a mirror made of flesh.
I know you, who you are, or what perhaps;
A liar skilled, who passes for a man,
A woman fair, who lives without a heart
To pump the blood that does not flow except
In dust, from which you came, to which you’ll go,
But not quite soon enough to save the souls
Of those whose lives you’ll touch, pretending love
While feeding that disdain that runs too deep
For most to see, the hatred you conceal
But not so well that others of your kind
Are fooled or taken in by surface charms
As I can see the tricks you use to pass
Among your prey unnoticed every night
Still staring in reflective surfaces
For glimpses of your one true love, the one
Who sees your shadow as you see yourself.

Soliloquy
I am not what I am, though I am none,
And should not be, although I seem to be;
If flesh, if hands, if eyes may yet convince
The world that I exist, then I am real
Enough to pass among the living here,
Go undetected by the blind and deaf
Who populate a world of lights and sounds
They neither see nor hear, oblivious
To all sensation; though they speak of love,
And passion’s taste, or reason’s exercise,
These are but syllables, the sounds of sheep
Beside themselves with glee at being shorn.
And when the dark swirls down around their eyes,
They bleat of bliss and all they have in store.
Within a week, they end up on a plate;
So much, it seems, for Heavenly rewards.

The Gift of Absence
Then comes the moment when we realize
The differences in those we thought we knew,
Illusions of our own creation, thoughts
Which pleased, as liars do, by telling us

About ourselves what we most wished to hear.
But such as are now absent from our lives
—yes, absence is a gift when seen aright—
 Restore to us, by being gone, the truth

Of who and what we are, despite our will
To be deceived by flattery and lies,
Those shining packages of purest air
That substance lack, though dressed in beauty’s robes.

In time, such liars find themselves alone,
And lose themselves in mirrors where they gaze.

What Lies Beneath
The accidental son who never pleased,
The daughters she would surely kill in time,
If time had lent her hours and days beyond
The years when cancer spread inside her skin,

These now remember her each time they meet,
Survivors marked indelibly by pain
With blackened scars commemorating lives
Spent waiting for release that never came

Until her death, if even then, since years
Have now gone by, and she remains alive,
A voice I cannot shake, despite the grave:
“Remember me,” as though I could forget.

That voice demands my life, would have my blood,
Reanimate itself behind my eyes.

The Pedagogue’s Lament
I’m trying to reach them, reach something inside of them, but often I feel as if I am reaching into the thinnest air, strutting and fretting my hour on the classroom stage, making the merest and purest fool of myself in front of an audience that quietly snickers at my pretension. I want them not just to see, but to hear, to feel—viscerally, and down through their body cores into their toes—the pains and joys of the plays and poems we read. “Never, never, never, never, never.” It is perhaps the single most painful line in all of literature, East or West, ancient or modern, in any language. “She’ll not come again.” Absolute, irreversible, permanent loss. And the meter in which Shakespeare writes that line from the end of his King Lear is a reversal—trochaic rather than iambic, with its emphasis on the first rather than the second syllable of each two syllable unit—of the meter in which he writes the boisterous life that inhabits nearly all of his poetry and verse drama. It encapsulates the slowing down, the stopping, the losing of life, a heart laboring, and slowly coming to an everlasting halt. Feel the slowing. Feel the pain in Lear’s voice as he describes the stark finality of his loss of Cordelia, the daughter he had most brutally mistreated, but who had, nevertheless, inexplicably forgiven him…mere hours before she died, still young, still with decades ahead of her, killed by a mindless goon whom Lear himself—at over eighty years of age—still had strength to kill, but not the swiftness of reaction time to kill before Cordelia herself had been mortally wounded. He could not save her, the girl who had forgiven him for failing her. He could not save her, and so failed her again, and for the last time. “She’ll not come again. Never, never, never, never, never.”

I feel like I am Lear sometimes—in the smallest of ways, of course. But I feel like I fail them. And they’ll not come again…

At the Tannh user Gates

I want more life, fucker…

We cry for immortality, we men,
The fear of loss, of chances somehow missed,
Prevents us oft from seeing who we are
And who we might yet be if we could choose.

But choice confounds the hearts and minds of all,
Or most, such rare exceptions as might be
Displayed in gilded art-house frames aside,
The rest of us stand doubtful at the gates

Of possibility, with wary sense
Inclined first one way, then another way,
Perhaps with thoughts of third and fourth new paths,
Illusions offering their sweetest taste.

Though circumscribed by death, our dreams defy
The limits on a life that time requires.

The Voice Within
For time and times and half a time our gods
Have reigned secure, though only in the minds
Of those who think as they are told to think,
For whom the signs directing every move
Of flesh and blood and glass and steel outweigh
The airy principles of documents
Designed for thinking men of days declined
Into the veil of years and near-forgot
By patriots who love their lords and laws.

But those once fit though few are many now,
If not the mass, a number great enough
To now be heard, without resort to fear.
We’ll have no lords, nor priestly codes designed
To overawe our reason, come what may.

Your ancient stories, gods, and hero tales
Must take their place amongst the poetry
Of bards, both blind and sighted, through the world
And time, abandoning their claims to truth,
The righteous arguments of those whose gods
Have always been reflections of themselves,
Whose hatreds are their own, though marble-carved,
With eyes that meet no gaze, though fiercest brows
Contain their blankness in illusion’s space,
Suggesting purpose where old chaos reigns.

What truths there are, each faith has long obscured,
Though all have claimed to hear the voice of god;
But truth will not be heard, unless by ears
That learn to hear the still small voice within.

The Lady
But screw your courage to the sticking place,
And we’ll not fail—in anything we try.
What evil can we not, when all we are,
Devoted to ambition’s price, remains

Inside our undiminished hearts and minds,
Two lovers bound in mutual desire
For all that kings and queens may yet attain,
If only those now in our way were gone?

So come, my darkest lord, unsex me here,
Replace what’s soft about my heart with steel,
For those that dare must act when fortune calls
And I would have you of my mind in this.

His blood will be the wine to fill the cups
We raise in toast to power and its joys.

The Dragon in Winter
Come not between the dragon and his wrath,
Such wrath has been the anchor of my days,
Of years, four score and upwards, though my mind
Has long since turned its focus from the world

Without, to gaze in rapt attention here
On worlds within that only I can see,
No hope of understanding children aged
To hardened middle-years with acid tongues.

My youngest, I would set my rest on her,
But I will have the tribute of her voice
Before the gathered noble crowds, who wait
For me to abdicate and crawl towards death.

But she will nothing say, and I’ll not hear
The loving reason in her absent words.

The Prince of Denmark
I cannot play this role; though I pretend
To be as others are, I am not one
For whom the plot in which I find myself,
And all the interactions it requires,

Can but a prison be, though infinite
In space, with walls no other notices
But me, who cannot help but push against
The limits of such minds as made the rules

In which I speak my lines, and soon must end.
But endings—though played well with actor’s skill—
Do not resolve the questions of a life
Of sacrifice to ghosts that will not die.

Though all the rest is silence, I would speak,
If I but had a voice beyond this stage.

The Moor
In spite of nature, country, credit, years,
I loved you still, regardless of the costs
My heart would one day have to pay in blood,
The pain of loss I well approved when first

I touched your hand, then, reaching for your face,
Caressed your cheek, and tucked a silken strand
Of wayward hair behind your ear, and watched
You tremble with desire that soon would burn

Us both inside the flames that roared too hot,
And could not be sustained or yet transformed
To heat for working days, a love for lives
As lived in time by ordinary men.

Now you are gone, and I am left with dreams
Of life, though soon I will awake in death.

And Teach Us Now to See
Remembrance of those friends we lost to time
And changing circumstance, the ebb and flow
Of hearts’ affections, brings to mind the loves
We all once hoped to find in those now gone,

Though our mistake was one so often made:
We did not see them as they really were,
But as reflections of our own desire,
The mirrors where we spend our private hours

In nightly conversation with our eyes.
While some such friends were good and true, yet some
Were bullets better dodged, and fortune smiled
In tearing them away, despite the pain.

Still, even those who hurt us gave us joy,
And teach us now to see beyond ourselves.

Immortality
I used to believe that I was immortal. But mine was not merely the immortality that all youth seems to believe itself the rightful inheritors of, no…mine was promised to me by the Brooklyn Heights priesthood of the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, that quintessentially American religion in which salvation from death depends on one’s productivity. Work hard, sell lots and lots of garishly-printed and poorly-written magazines, and most importantly…never ever ask questions of any kind…and maybe, just maybe, an ancient Mesopotamian deity will pass you by while he sets about destroying the entire world—old people, young people, children, infants, dogs, cats, and all.

To this day, death strikes me as absurd, an activity in which no one with any sense of style or taste would engage---I mean, it’s been done. But we have no choice, apparently…and though my particular genetics in all likelihood give me something rather closer to a century than most, a century isn’t really that much time is it? What is the damned point of dying? Yes, yes, the old story from Herodotus—count no man happy until his death, because we do not know the end of our stories until death…but is that all? Is that it? Death serves a goddamn narrative function?

And what of those of us so determinedly, even preternaturally superficial as to think that the fashions of this, or any other day are a reason to live in the face of something so absurd as death? Los Angeles is so full of such people it chokes on them a little more each day…soon no breath will be possible any longer, so filled will this suburb in search of a city be with the legions of fashionistas for whom Anna Wintour (or Slavoj Zizek) is a power player equivalent to Machiavelli’s Prince.

Perhaps it is—at least in part—due to such that Derrida referred to Death as a gift. But who wants such a gift? Perhaps we reach a point at which we all do. But not me…and not yet. And with angry gods to the left of us, and vapid Angelenos to the right, what are the rest of us to do but insist that neither theology nor thread count (theoretical or otherwise) gives meaning to life?

Oh well, screw us…the latest issues of Vogue and Critical Inquiry are on shelves now!

Los Angeles
She has no feeling heart, though politics
Disguises what she lacks in empathy
For others, with their all-too-human flaws.
She quickly tires of every lover’s gaze,

And will not stay where she is wanted long,
For none can love her as she loves herself,
And mirrors show a face more beautiful
Than any in the world of mortal men.

Narcissus has no touch of her, the choice
And master spirit of her age and place,
This superficial kingdom of the damned
Where fashion reigns, and substance stays at heel.

And though I loved her once, I was a fool
Who would not see the blank space in her eyes.

Transcendence: A Brief Manifesto
Transcendence is possible…but only here, and only now. It has nothing to do with gods and heavens, or devils and hells. There is no life beyond this one, but there is life beyond the ones most of us live. We live in fear of who and what we are. We run from love, from risk, from choice, from anything that might make us drop the illusion of immortality, the quiet denial of death in which we live and move and have our being.

But death will not be fooled by our failures to live. Transcendence lies in recognizing that failure to live is death. Transcendence is the conscious choice to live before we die, in spite of the inevitable end, in spite of the inevitable loss, in spite of disapproval from others too afraid to do more than stand before the doors of possibility, never having courage to choose one and forsake the rest, never having the will to follow a path not knowing quite where it leads. But that path, and only that path, is the narrow road to life—all others are merely variations on the broad and spacious path, not that leads to death, but that is death.

Pistis Sophia
A moment’s turn, and she was there no more,
Her voice, her words, the workings of that mind
So like to mine, and yet so far removed
In place, in years, though differences seemed naught

Compared to natural similarities
And unexpected joys such thoughts could bring,
As noting each to each how perfectly
The politics of greed aligns with faith.

But she is gone, somewhere I cannot reach;
Though I would speak with her, no answer comes,
My words are cast into a void where sound
Is not itself, in hollowness stays mute.

And yet, I see her in my waking dreams,
Remember still the beauty of her eyes.

Forms and Copies
Love manifests itself in plenitude,
No scarcity of choice where beauties bloom
Like flowers after gentle summer rains,
Where fields of color stretch out to the line

That separates the earth from skies above,
While standing midst the yellows, purples, reds,
And purest whites atop their greening stalks,
One sees variety and all its joys.

But all the flowers blooming in these fields
Come short of you, the one I did not know,
Until I saw, with newly-opened eyes,
Such beauty as I all too soon would lose.

Not all the fields of this, or any, world
Afford another flower like to you.

Runners
In saying yes to one life, we say no
To countless other possibilities,
Catch fevered glimpses of mortality,
The end that waits behind the eyes of love

In death, whose arms too soon embrace us all.
But fear is no defense—and what becomes
Of those who run from love as from a trap,
If not to wander in a wilderness

Of self-regard, with mirrors to converse,
No difference whether made of glass or flesh,
Since living mirrors often serve full well
As those we gaze upon inside our walls?

To run will not forestall the deaths we fear,
But guards our hearts from loss, and thus we fly.

Leopold VSM
The pain is still familiar, even now,
Though years have passed since lessons first were learned
And easily seen through for what they were,
The lies that shaped my life, taught me my role,

The stoic one who stands and takes the blows
Still raining down for sins committed once,
Or not at all, the worst sins of the lot,
Since what I haven’t done can never be

Disproved, or demonstrated for the eyes
Of those who judge and punish for the wrongs
Imagination gives the force of crimes
For which I must receive correction’s strokes.

So bruises mount, but still I would hold on,
For love has costs, and I am bound to pay.

Survivor’s Tale
An old song brings her face to mind again,
In Springsteen’s voice, the strum of his guitar,
I hear the stories she once told of life
In coal mine towns where bars and churches fill

In alternating rhythms as the days
Stretch on, with each day like the days before,
Without the possibilities that dreams
Hold out to those who live in larger worlds

Than this, a one-light town with no way out,
Where no escape, of bodies, hearts, or minds,
Is possible but for the few, who pay
A price they cannot know to break its chains.

But scars remain, and freedom comes at cost
Of running from the ghosts they cannot shake.

Mirrors
True ugliness cannot but be denied,
Adorned in fashions to distract the eye
From all that lies beneath a beauty’s face,
That netherworld of self  where loathing likes

And liking loves, and of itself speaks well,
Despite the emptiness it covers still
With words in carefully arranged disguise,
Pretending to the last as actors must.

The best of us deny it to ourselves,
Learn not to see where we would others blind,
And glide thus smoothly though our lives and lies
Without the slightest twinge of guilt or pain.

And what is else left to be overcome,
Once conscience flatters us as mirrors do?

Something Lent
When love comes unexpectedly, be glad,
But know it will not be with you for long;
For love is something lent, a summer’s breeze,
Not permanent, though sweet, too delicate

To grasp and hold as if we owned the hearts
Of those who lend us this great gift a time,
And times, and half a time, before its lease
Expires, and we must let it go again.

Remember how they looked at you, through eyes
That spoke a language you had never heard
Before, and cherish what their hearts once lent;
Such moments, though they fade, give life its joy.

Be happy then for loves that did not last,
For life itself is lent, at interest due.

Sonnet 94, in Miniature
Though mortal creatures all have hearts that fail,
That failure does not mean their loves were false;
They loved as best they could, despite their flaws,
And never meant to hurt, or cause such pain

As leaves a scar in every lover’s heart,
Despite the best and most sincere intents.
Their eyes that shone with love did not tell lies,
But told a truth their lives could not sustain.

So now, you face a choice, to spend your days
In anger and regret for loss of love,
Or see those lovers as at best they were,
Free givers of a gift that could not last.

Forgiveness will not come before its time,
But come it must, and that love will not fail.

A Fool Among the Wise
You all are fools, the ones who keep your word,
Who follow through on plans, whose yes means yes
And no means no; the wise are not pinned down
By promises, recalling what was said,

As if their words were more than air in shapes
That served emotions of the moment well,
And made a pleasing sound, as music does
When played with skill, as liars play your hearts.

While you are stunned, still searching for the whys
And wherefores of betrayal’s stinging pains,
The wise move on with conscience light as air,
Without a thought, leave you to gasp for breath.

And yet, I would not be among such wise,
But stay among the fools, let come what may.

The Muse Remembered
My inner walls came down too easily,
Doors tripled-bolted opened at a touch
Of hands that held a key I did not know,
While turning fingers coaxed my secrets out,

And whispers of desire and love assured
Me of the truth of words whose sounds were sweet,
More welcome to my ears than any lie
Had ever been, or any truth could be.

Her words were not a lie, but spoke a truth
Much more complex than either of us knew,
Or could imagine at the time she spoke
Of loving me and teaching me to hear.

As moments pass, the meaning of her words
Eludes me still, and she will speak no more.

The Suicide Cafe
The special for today is Hemingway,
Though Plath and Sexton are quite good as well;
Virginia Woolf is popular, of course,
If somewhat overdone, and so last year.

Perhaps Empedocles is more your style?
For those who’d like to go out with a bang,
Volcanic lava really can’t be beat,
And nicely solves the problem of remains.

If this is somewhat garish for your taste,
The artist in the garret might well serve;
A Thomas Chatterton, unrecognized
By editors and hacks, in poison’s arms.

But save some room to taste a sweet or two,
Mishima’s blade will surely cut the fat.

The Awful Rowing (for Anne Sexton)
The awful rowing goes on, day by day,
But not toward God, or something in the place
Of God; despite the shorter breath of days
Through which we manage to survive once more,

The rowing aims at nothing in the end,
No final destination gives it point
Or meaning; still, the muscles ache with strain,
And sweat pours down our faces with each stroke

Of oars in water leading to no shore,
No resting place in sight, unless we see
An end worth calling by that name in death,
A shaping principle to aimless tales.

But death knows nothing more, no secret stores
Of wisdom give this awful rowing shape.

Requiem
I miss the rhythms of her conversation,
The irony with which she spoke of life,
Of art, and politicians’ promises,
The flashing light inside her angry eyes

When now and then reminded of the past
In coal mine towns from which the few escape
Who have the strength to leave, but bring their scars,
Their fears of want wherever they may go.

They run, as once they ran, for motion saves,
Or seems to save, where stasis threatens death,
But running has its price in pain, in lives
Left unexplored, and loves now left behind.

But she is dead and gone, though not quite dead,
More like a ghost than one who sees the sun.

Shelf Life (Oscar to Bosie)
They get away with much, those creatures fair
Who take our breath away, with beauty marked
To stand among the rest as if the sun
Both rose and set for them and theirs alone.

Else who would tolerate their sudden shifts
Of heart and mind, capricious in their whims,
Assured that all the world exists for them,
To do them service and to soothe their pains?

So much the more are we the motley fools
Who lend ourselves as adjuncts to their lives,
The willing partners to such ones as see
No farther than themselves and their own skin.

So learn this lesson well, love not with eyes,
For beauty’s shelf life won’t outlast its price.

Penalty Phase
Her trauma took the voice she might have had;
She speaks in whispers now, with eyes cast down
Avoiding those who gaze in sympathy,
Objectifying even as they try

To understand a pain they'll never know,
The sudden violence changing everything,
A trust in life that cannot be regained,
No matter what the priests or doctors say.

The boy--still nothing like a man--sits still,
With poorly practiced calm looks cold and hard,
While watching all he's known of life grow dark,
And slip away because of what he's done.

For neither will the world embrace again,
But each inhabit prisons of their own.

Equally to All
Despite constructed worlds in which we live
And move and have our being, life remains
The same, as birth and love and age and death
Come equally to all, without regard

To fortune or belief in moral codes
Derived from gods whose sole existence springs
From human fear and need to understand
In smaller scale what else exceeds our grasp.

Believing does not make what we would have
Exist, nor does our unbelief affect
The stark reality of human lives
Which have an end that comes for each too soon.

So gather rosebuds, as the poet said,
And live with passion for a life too short.

The Uselessness of Reason
The grasping after reason is what chafes,
Though sudden breaks leave questions in their wake,
As whys and whens and hows blow through the mind
Like storms that cannot be abated soon,

If ever, though with time their winds will fade
And something like a peace will be restored,
But only like, as questions never stop
Or disappear entirely, else life

Would make more sense and hearts reflect a truth
That minds could understand and analyze,
Providing comfort when our lives go wrong
And shining light when darkness looms in view.

But passions make no sense, nor will be tamed,
Though reason holds itself as if supreme.

Woman in Solitude
I loved her once, and though she cannot see,
I love her still; but hers was not a heart
That loved too easily, though once I thought
It might love well, once she had said the words.

But words, it seems, were part of her disguise,
A smokescreen she put up to hide intent
From others, even from herself, to buy
The time she needed to decide which tales

To tell and which to save for future use
On future loves who got too close to her,
Who loved too well, and threatened to expose
Her solitude as loneliness and pain.

And though she left in haste, she haunts me still,
In nightly visitations whispers dreams.

Love and Emotion
Emotions have too frequent ebb and flow
To be relied upon in search of love,
For love is out of time, a moment’s glimpse
Of truth’s eternal forms inside the heart.

But feelings are not love, as flux and change
Can batter such affections, leave them bruised
With sudden shifts, and alterations strange,
Reversals nearly inexplicable,

Until they’re seen as shadows in the caves
From which true lovers ever must emerge
In order to escape illusion’s grip
To see the sun, and understand its light.

To love someone is not to see ourselves,
But see eternity behind their eyes.

Wordless Ghost
You read my poems, yet refuse to speak:
I see the footprints that you leave behind,
The late-night visits, mornings, afternoons,
As though you've banished me, but can't let go.
Or do you wish to speak, but can't, through hurt
And wounded pride, because my ignorance
Has injured you, although I meant no harm,
But only love, though in my pain I spoke
Perhaps too harshly for my heart's intent
And damaged what I merely meant to save?
I wish I knew, and knowing then could act,
And through my actions bring you back again.
But though you are a wordless ghost, please stay,
And read of how I love you all the same.

II
I love you past all manner of such love
As men can speak, and poets still can write
In these, our latter days of ignorance,
Where sentiment comes packaged in the aisles
Of grocery stores, and churches peddle gods
That few believe, and fewer understand,
Beyond the commonplace clich s of blood
And sins defined as all that gives us joy.
I love you, not for you have beauty’s mark,
But for your wit, your steel, your sharpest mind,
That intellect that gives you cause to see
As clear as day, despite the deepest night.
I’ve never met another like to you,
And all the world seems gray, now you are gone.

III
Revenge-play ghosts demanded to be heard,
But modern ghosts depend on us for life,
Live through our thoughts, take nourishment from pain,
Regrets that stem from loss, things left unsaid.
To talk with them gives momentary comfort,
Relieves the loneliness that casts a pall
On welcome solitude, the hours we spend
In dim remembrance of the loves we’ve lost.
Despite the passions that once gripped our hearts,
The urgent wonder in recalling times
And moments almost sacred in their joy,
Life still awaits, and new loves are in store.
Regardless, then, of how we loved them once,
The time has come to tell our ghosts goodbye.

In Word and Deed
Your silence is what haunts me now in dreams,
The hours when most I try to reach for you
And most your absence focuses my loss
As loss, though how this emptiness became

The daily fact of all I call my life,
I cannot fathom yet, not knowing how
I lost you, when was my misstep, or worse,
My inattention to the one I love.

I send out words to find you where you are,
But nothing comes again, not like before
When words and smiles served as the food of love,
And all we were came breathless from our lips.

I miss you more than my poor words can say,
And wish for your return, in word and deed.

Moments
If hand to hand is holy palmer’s kiss,
As once two lovers said when first they touched,
Then trembling hands were our first kiss as well,
When first I touched you, brushing back your hair

To tuck behind your ear, reveal the face
I could not help but gaze upon in awe,
Then slowly reach out for your hand to touch
Your palm, your slender fingers, grasping hold.

Surroundings did not matter then, despite
Their darkly strange and dreamlike quality,
For all we saw was in each other’s eyes,
And when I finally kissed you, we belonged.

I would not lose those moments, or lose you,
For love is much too rare to be denied.

Narcissus
Emotions are not real, except for mine,
And nothing lives outside of my own skin.
For men were meant to serve and to admire
The beauty that is mine and mine alone.

And when I gaze on you, you come to life,
As long as your amusements hold, but soon
I will grow tired of you, and turn away,
Relinquish you to life among the shades

Of all who fail to please or fill my need
For moments of diversion in the sun
Which shines out just for me and warms  my flesh
My pale, yet perfect form, where no blood flows.

What though your pain is great? It matters not,
For all hearts are but adjuncts to my own.

No Gods but Us
In every life, decisions must be made,
Emotions reckoned with, despite their cost;
To pull the shades and hide from who we are,
Where passions most do burn that also heal,

Might seem the path of least resistance now,
But cannot help but lead our hearts to ruin.
For those who would not hurt the ones they love,
Yet sink beneath the whelming tide of fears—

Of love, of loss, of self betrayed by self—
There comes the choice: what risks are worth the pain
They might entail, or joys that might ensue,
If only we can face an unknown truth?

For love’s divine, though no gods are its source
But us, the sole creators of our worlds.

Jacob, of Rachel (IV)
Although I would not lose you to goodbye,
I'll not hold on, nor be unwelcome there,
Where once I saw desire in your eyes,
Since now those eyes grow dim and turn away.

I cannot sleep for racking pains and doubts,
With suddenness of love's decline perplexed,
The questions of myself, where I went wrong,
What things I must have done to lose that gaze

Whose light had bathed my face in utter joy
Each time I saw you watching my approach,
Though oft of late your silence and retreat
Has dimmed that light, till I no longer see.

But I would not hold on where love has died,
So I will love once more by letting go.

(A)theist Manifesto: A Prose Poem

God…oh do let’s talk about God, shall we? What the negative theologians (Pseudo-Dionysius, et al) described as unknowable, mean-spirited tyrants who are trying to sell you something have described as all-too-knowable. The God of the salesmen is a jealous God, demanding exclusive devotion…just like the one that huckster Hilkiah was peddling in the court of Josiah all those centuries ago.

God is Love (so says John). Love Hurts (so says Nazareth). Love Stinks (so says the J. Geils Band). Discuss…

The first thing Milton has his character “God” utter in Paradise Lost is a lie. Milton was not screwing around. The first thing Yahweh tells the human pair in Genesis 2 is a lie. The serpent calls him out on it, and Yahweh admits it in Genesis 3.

No God but God
There is no God but God, so say the fools,
Who know not what the books they hold dear mean;
For gods are but the idols of our schools.

But wise men know the dangers of the rules
Insisting on belief in what’s unseen;
There is no God but God, so say the fools.

Our reason yet survives in wisdom’s jewels,
Maintains philosophy, though ne’er so mean,
For gods are but the idols of our schools.

Unlearned men will labor as if mules,
Demanding still a pious playhouse scene,
There is no God but God, so say the fools.

Though no salvation comes, no ardor cools,
No faith diminished, growing ever green,
For gods are but the idols of our schools.

But I, who once believed, have shed the tools
Of faith, no longer will abide its sheen;
There is no God but God, so say the fools,
For gods are but the idols of our schools.

Love Song on a Sleepless Night
The hour of sleep eludes me most at need,
When all my thoughts are bent toward love of you,
Still feeling most your absence in desire,
The touch of skin to skin, the silken waves

Of fragrant hair that frame your perfect face,
Whose hazel eyes revisit me in dreams
Where sleeping or awake, I live with you
In love, bathed in the quiet pre-dawn light

Where most I see, as I am seen in turn.
And though I would not weary you with love,
With oft protesting passion's heat in verse
Or song, I'll not restrain the flow of words.

For words serve most at need through sleepless nights,
Bring absent touch to life in thoughts of you.

Rhapsode
Though he is quiet when he first walks in,
The room is his; he plays it at his will,
Its silences and sounds the quickened notes
For practiced compositions often played,

Though never quite the same from then to now,
As each performance changes what's performed,
Reveals the actor to himself, though none
Beside have skill to see the seamless role.

He plays the notes in hopes that some will hear,
Will recognize the music's ancient tune,
Though reaching fewer with each chorus sung,
Each failure now his own remorseful fall.

And yet, he tries again, renews his song,
Naught knowing matter else to sing or do.

Kobayashi
Goodbye looms near when once we say hello,
As every fair from fair sometime declines,
So every greeting brings its time to part,
Where eyes, once blue, grow dull in downcast grays.

But as with all, there lies a trick within,
A way to cheat the hours of love’s decay,
And damn the days and weeks that would remove
Our loves through years’ routines and passions spent.

Grow tender through your time apart, and fond
Where life’s incessant noise grows to a din;
When absence is required, and solitude,
In silence lies the keys to love’s rewards.

Then say hello once more, still furthering
The time and distance to our last goodbyes.

Now
Imprisonment comes slowly on, as days
Pass into weeks, and months become the years
Of dim existence, sifting through the past
For clues to fix the broken narratives,

The jumbled tales we tell about our lives;
As if a life could be revised, reworked,
Its roughest edges gently smoothed away
By changing voice, or style, erasing time.

But life is not a play, nor work of art,
No audience demands, nor even notes
Our most recursive work—the practiced selves
We all rehearse in lines we never speak.

The time is now, and now, and ever now:
New life awaits for those who would yet live.

Silences
Where gods of old religions once held sway,
There now abides a welcome emptiness;
Though blind-eyed statues still attest to faith,
And former generations of belief

Expressed in contradictions meant to point
To mysteries no one truly understood:
Like how the human heart can love and hate,
Grow cold where once the flames of passion burned,

Or cloak desire in all the robes of sin,
Denying all the joy a life might have,
If only those allowed themselves to live
Who talk of freedom on their knees in prayer.

Our silences are where such truth resides
As all our ancient tales have long obscured.

Traveler’s Tale
You tell a tale, and all your weariness
Soon disappears; your face returns to life
With eyes lit up in mirth, or disbelief
At others’ lives, the children they let crawl

Through aisles in airports, screaming on the planes,
Still seemingly oblivious to need
Expressed at highest volume, while they chat
Amongst themselves about the latest shows,

Or random matters of no consequence
To any creature other than themselves.
A week in Paris lights, or Roman ruins,
And what remains with them of magic’s touch?

I smile, while seeing details through your eyes,
And wishing I had been there all the same.

Masks
Despite appearances, the truth of self
Will be revealed a thousand subtle ways
For those with eyes to see; no actor’s skill
Can fix the shifting public masks so tight

That artifice, though seamless to the mass,
Remains invisible from even those
We most would hold at bay—the ones we love,
The ones with whom we most would be ourselves,

If we but had the strength to improvise,
Set down our prompts, their safely written lines,
To speak a truth we may not know in full,
With halting words unfolding unknown ends.

To say we love is true, but what of that?
No love survives for long behind our masks.

Felt Absence
I feel her absence in each silent breath,
In subtle shifts of light as moments pass
From morning’s bright pastels to purple night
And back again, as days stretch into weeks,

Though not so long, not weeks, though seeming so
From my impatience for her hazel eyes,
And longing for the skin whose touch revives
An ancient passion long ago forgot,

Excited further by the mind she shows
The world, and what she saves for closest friends,
The self I almost missed the chance to know
So focused on my solitary life.

And though I wish her joy, I would the hours
Till her return might pass as moments do.

From One, To Another
I watch you, as a laugh lights up your eyes,
And see the comfort in your face, so rare
For one as private as you often seem,
Like one who learned to hide behind her thoughts,

Concealing thoughts in turn from those too blind
To see, too deaf to hear, or understand.
Across a room, through conversation’s din,
I catch your eye and see behind the mask

You wear, while mine falls easily away
To you, though no one else can see the face
We each keep to ourselves among the crowds
In which we live, and move, and play our roles.

I saw you oft before, but did not see;
Mistook the mask for what was real—no more.

Of Roads and Choices
The road less traveled by, so goes the verse,
Makes all the difference; but I’ll not trust
Iambic platitudes, despite the skill,
The diamond hardness in their rhythmic lines,

The master’s touch so evident within
That tone deaf readers recognize the sounds
For which they have no definitions, though
Experience, best guide to life as yet

Unlived, lends certainty in place of doubt.
And yet, though far too oft repeated, words
In well-worn patterns carry much of truth
That otherwise illusion’s web obscures.

For two roads lie before me now—which one
I take determines all the lives to come.

Achilles at Dusk
And now the time has come for letting go.
I gave my all, but all was not enough,
For those unbottomed wells of rawest need
That once had seemed compelling, now constrain

As prison cells set firm in smooth stone walls
Whence no escape, nor hope to see the sun,
Can draw my shade back to the world of light
Forsaking here my throne among the dead.

My end was in the way this life began,
Disguised among the women of the court,
Too close, still pressing in upon my youth,
Now spent in vain here on the sands of Troy.

In war, in love, my fight has been the same,
But now my load is one I cannot bear.

Lesson
The only safe existence is the lie,
The roles we play, the masks we wear by day
Disguising fair or foul intent with shows
Designed to court the favors of the just,

Or those who think themselves the just and right
While punishing the sins of those whose lives
—Too stubborn in the difference from their own—
Must be constrained, and shaped to fit the mold

Of expectation’s fancy, truth be damned.
Remove the mask, expose the face beneath,
And then prepare to face the consequence:
A life unloved, with graying eyes unmet.

So best, it seems, to hide behind the lie,
For truth wounds only those without disguise.

Three Wishes
To gaze across the gulf that lies between
And know, for once, a mind like to our own,
Till now kept hid behind the smiling eyes,
The petty interactions of such days

As ever make the endless years the same,
With necessary seeming overfilled,
The lies we tell, the poorly fitting masks
We wear to try and fit this stranger’s world.

To meet the eyes that see both who we are
And who we might yet be ere sunlight fades,
And know, forever after, where we fit
In this, the best of worlds, unknown till now.

And, though alone, to rest in knowledge still,
That someone else is there who understands.

Love’s Lesson for the Few
The origin of sin is Man’s desire.
To want, and seek to fill the emptiness
That inexplicably defeats the wise,
Who know no better than what Reason taught,

As if such lessons could relieve the pain
That lovers feel who’ve made the prime mistake:
Admitting what they love, not keeping close
The secrets of their hearts, now laughter’s food,

And sport for mockers of the kind whose loves
Have always been too easily won
For aught imagination can express
Of pain, humiliation, and regret.

To openly admire brings whips of scorn,
So secrets must be kept, and loves denied.

The Tree of Knowledge
Believers oft suspect their truths are lies,
Else why do battle with a modern world
That doesn’t care for ancient Hebrew gods,
Or Roman theologians steeped in blood

Who never understood poetic tales
Except as argument for sins as yet
Unthought by Bronze-age bards and prophets past,
Who nothing knew of heavenly rewards?

What need they, when this world brings bliss enough
For those with eyes to see, and hearts to feel,
Where love walks in the cool of evening light
Delighting all who hear its siren call?

And though there is no mythic tree of life,
The tree of knowledge shades and feeds us all.

Jacob, of Rachel (III)
At first, the years were swift as summer days
Remembered through the haze of wintry age,
But soon, the leaves began to fall, and bare
The limbs that once had seemed so full of life,

Till even summer’s days began to chill,
And warmth, now grown elusive, slipped away.
In waning hours, when Leah’s eyes grew dull,
I bent my thoughts in long pursuit of you,

Your eyes that shone, and pierced beneath the veils
Where all my hopes and discontents lay bare.
But now your love is real—I’ll not let go;
Too many years have passed without your touch.

Through seven summers end, then seven more,
I’ve longed for you, and now the warmth returns.

Note in an Empty House
And so the time has come to say the words,
The words that wound, while every vowel cuts
Into the hearts of those who hear goodbye
Where once hello had sounded sweeter notes.

For fear of words, and all the pain they cause,
I’ve lived a prisoner behind the walls
Of cowardice, still closing in my grasp
The key to all the doors, and all the bars

That hold me fast in this, my worn-out role,
Whose lines, though yet familiar in my mouth,
Have since become excuses to be dead,
Avoiding pain while watching lives pass by.

But life has offered love and hope once more,
And time has come to live and feel the sun.

Jacob, of Rachel (II)
Soft framed by raven hair, her face exceeds
All thought, as wisdom falls to worship where
It once had reigned supreme in reason’s garb,
As if her beauty could by argument

Be overcome, denied its sacred sway
O’er hearts and minds and eyes, both those who see
And those who know without the benefit
Of sight, which oft misleads the wisest fools.

Enfolded in her arms as though I would
Escape, release myself from loving ties,
I find it is her heart, her thought that winds
Me fast around with gentle silken cords

From which I would not be unbound, not now
Nor ever thence, despite what time may bring.

Jacob, of Rachel
Her hazel eyes pierce through pretension’s veil;
Their quiet gaze reveals you as you are,
Laid bare before a living work of art
Whose power yet transcends her beauty’s form

While taking root inside the ones it sees,
Where hearts become themselves, and growth transforms
The desiccated bud to fullest bloom
Still turning toward her eyes like summer sun.

To live inside her eyes is space enough
For fairest show of who we’d learn to be
If only to remain in favor’s sight
And stand before the altar as her priests.

This only is religion’s use—to love
In wonder at the beauty of her eyes.

Sophia, of Her Children
In morning hours before the first light shines,
In sunrise only seen through heart’s unease,
I realize the path a life must take,
The reasons I will soon be left behind,

And must be left, and why I must let go.
For love cannot, and still be love, hold fast
To those who would be free, whose lives now sing
The notes of change, the siren songs of growth

And all the possibilities of joy.
But this has been my chosen task, to love
And then let go, without attaching guilt,
Lest love enmesh and mar what it would save.

In aftertimes, this comfort I will take,
I gave as best I could—so love rewards.

Remains of Light
And all at once, illusions are revealed
As insubstantial castles built on sand,
The hearts of many now outweighed by one
Whose hate can swift destroy all I have built,

Or thought to build, when youth and hope held sway.
But now, the burning eyes, resentment's flash,
And harsh, disdainful tones of one for whom
My life and work are merely in the way,

Remind me of the end that comes to all,
Forestall or still deny it as I might,
The night will come too soon, will interrupt
The flow of days that once had known no end.

And yet, I would hold on as darkness falls,
And bathe my eyes in what remains of light.

Abelard, to Heloise
I’ve always known the day love’s end would come
Would be a day much like the other days.
The unexpected pause in conversation
That leads to all goodbyes, including ours,

Comes as an interruption to the lives
It quickly rearranges, setting fires
Where love had been, while clearing space for some
To live anew, though others fall and die

Without the hope of resurrection’s balm
Or healing hearts where God himself withdraws
To leave an empty space behind the eyes
Of those who yet survive to love again.

I knew, but hoped I would not see the day
When you would pause, then quickly say goodbye.

To Penelope
We went to sea in mortal ships of wood
With blood and stone and bronze as argument,
Not knowing yet how hostile were the gods
To all that men would build beneath the sky.

Still undiminished in those early days,
We grasped at life with unrepentant greed,
For all the pleasures of the world looked fair
And fairly could be bought without the pains

Of loss intruding on the everyday.
Such time had not yet come for us in youth,
Whiles yet we took the cattle of the Sun
And nothing suffered for the boldest theft.

Now years revenge, if not the deathless gods,
And take from us ourselves as payment due.

Reason Also Is Choice
Despite intentions for the best, it ends,
Our love, our life, our plans to dominate
Both fears and insecurities, to forge
A path as yet unknown to those who pray

For favor from the gods who’ve long since died
And turned to Eden’s dust from which they came.
And yet, inside each end lies promised new
Beginning, leaving by those death will bring,

For all who claim to know of death tell lies
They’ve long rehearsed as palliative truths,
As if the sounds themselves could stave off fear
Of unknown countries and the dreams that come.

While time remains, each ending offers choice,
And choice is what it is to be alive.

Nor Truth Nor Lie
And then comes clarity, in moments past
All understanding, knowledge of the path
A life must take with mind and heart entwined
While focus makes those options fall away

That once had seemed too difficult to choose
Between, as lovers pulled in half by doubts
Fear choice as fearing death and end of days.
But pardon me, I do not speak of Truth,

Though some would blanch at calling it a Lie;
I speak of what is only heard in silence,
The muffled cry of who and what we are
Long buried under years of mannered grace.

Our songs of innocence have fallen mute,
But old experience can be renewed.

Anti-Harlequin
To reach beyond ourselves, to take the risk
That life might yet have more to offer us
Than any poet may conceive in verse,
In this not what it means to be alive?

Each momentary smile, each new hello,
Though all will soon enough be lost, brings light
Where darkness waits, though darkness will not win
The day, while will remains and love renews.

These fragments shored against our ruins serve
Where ministers and priests too often fail,
Convince the weary to say yes again,
And watch another day unfold in hope.

So play the fool, for wise men know what waits,
While dignity ne’er won a moment’s joy.

Harlequin
I’ve played the fool too many times to count,
And yet, each time the choice recurs, I play
The fool again, as if I’d nothing learned,
Nor nothing gained from lessons time would teach

If only I would listen to the voice
That tries in vain to tell unvarnished truth.
I know full well the man that I’ve become
Shows nothing forth, and yet, to those with eyes

To see, shows all the secrets I would keep
If only to protect myself from harm
Inflicted, or imagined, by my failed
Attempts to seem as all the others are.

But those who see are rare—most men are blind;
And so this king of fools can pass for wise.

The Socialist
“In scripture, go and learn what these words mean:
I would have mercy before sacrifice.
And those among you without sin, cast stones
Without compunction at the sinners here

On Earth, and also those near Heaven's throne.
The rich men shall not enter there, nor here
Shall find contentment next to Abraham,
But burn with unquenched fire and jealousy

While begging for a drop to cool their tongues.
So eat, and drink, and make of merriment
The profit of your days, for days grow short
And lacking all tomorrows, you will die.”

Such words bring death to those who dare to speak,
While life’s reserved for those who’ve mastered lies.

Happiness
Unexpectedly it comes, through silence
Wrapped in sound, in contacts made at random,
Sensations—touch, the texture of her hair,
The straying strand that will not be put right.

Intelligence and sympathy and love--
What more have I the right to ask of life?
And yet, her face, with all its perfect lines,
Its alabaster skin in silken frame,

Would teach, if I could yet its lessons learn,
That I had only just begun to live,
While necessary losses had prepared
My eyes to see, my heart to feel, the truth.

Such moments signal what the world calls joy,
And I have felt its unexpected touch.

The Extrovert
The silences of empty rooms oppress
My heart, reduce imagination’s sway
Until my eyes grow dull expecting more
Though still receiving less as nights extend

Their reach into the pall of early day
And newer rounds and rounds begin again.
I must have laughter, sound, the colors bright
Against the darkened sky, recharge myself

With merriment in stories told and heard
By lovers, friends—not yet, or soon to be,
The faces I remember in my dreams
Of life, and in the dreams I live each day.

So keep the lights alive, and raise a glass,
Though silence drains, good fellowship restores.

The Introvert
Relationship demands we pay its price,
Which differs in its terms for youth and age;
For some, the price is love, while others pay
With labor’s pains—for me, the price is life.

To be with others drains me to the core,
Though laughter energizes most of us
—And I enjoy it to be sure—I wane
Where others wax, and soon must be alone.

But still, I would not be without my friends,
My loves, and all the voices of my days;
I merely wish they understood my need
For silent privacy, where I renew.

The introvert does not reject the world,
But loves it at a cost his friends can’t know.

Life in Moments
Life offers all the moments we would choose
If only we could see and hear and feel
Without restraint from preconceived ideas
That circumscribe our possibilities.

The curling waves of women’s hair undone,
Released from bondage to the rules of day,
The eyes that flash intelligence and fair
Desire, while skin holds promise of its joy.

To gaze on beauty’s form divorced from shame
Is life’s great gift, if only we would live,
Not hurry toward the exit unprepared
To be convinced by circumstance to stay.

Though life is cruel, it also offers love,
A passion that consumes its lovers’ hearts.

Who Will Not See
Beauty comes unrecognized by lovers
Whose tastes were formed by customs of their time,
Without a clue about what other worlds
Have worshipped to the point of agony

In grey-green eyes of gods and goddesses
Surpassing understanding. Senses ache
Still straining for sensation long denied
To flesh subdued by ancient sacrifice,

Denying passion’s hold to live a life
Half dead, as if to want were worthy death,
Which fools believe who’ve long since grown ashamed
Of all desire, of bodies, hearts, or minds.

But those who will not see cannot be taught
To see, remaining chained before the flames.

Chrysalis
This old life ends with worlds in disarray,
And all I’ve tried to hold now lost in time,
Set free through inattention or intent,
What does it matter whether it was wrong?

There comes a time when all we were gives way
To that we know must be, despite our fears,
Or preference for familiar same and sames,
Our well-worn circles scrawled into the dust.

I want the new, but fear to lose the old,
Still feel the death within my own desire
For life, and all its fleeting, precious joys
Which I have thought, and dreamed, and gazed upon.

But I'll no longer live behind my eyes,
Nor wear my aging mask, for new life calls.

Of Two Minds
To sit and talk, and not to want to leave
Despite the fact that yesterday has gone
And all the midnight revelers now sleep
In preparation for another day

Too much like all the others that have come
Before—such signs are how we know the real,
Still recognize the other in ourselves,
Or as ourselves, and change our masks for lives.

Two minds that form a whole, and yet distinct,
Each bringing each the possibility
Of solitude in joy, companionship
In aspirations, passions, quiet smiles.

Though Adam could not know his higher plans,
Is this not what the poet meant for Eve?

At Random
The randomness of life is its great gift,
Where unexpected sparks can set new fires,
Reminding us of who we used to be
And what those other selves once dared to dream

Before they learned to mimic those around
Who play by rules designed to kill the heart,
Convincing others with their puppet shows,
Till, masters of pretense, they disappear

Behind the roles they play, forget to see
The stage whereon they still must live and move
And have their being, giving all to show
But saving naught of substance for their lives.

And yet, she comes, though you had failed to see
The soft intensity behind her eyes.

David, at the Window
Her dark hair’s curling tendrils wrap themselves
Around the remnants of my heart, give life
Where passion’s heat had cooled, with promises
Of sympathy and love, despite my fall

From grace, here now, at end of mortal days.
The gods I’ve served reward with promised lands
That cannot help but pale beside her eyes,
Her skin, her lips, the taste of honeyed milk

For which my sins diminish in their scope,
As but the coin wherewith such joys are bought,
Or borrowed for a time, and times, and half
A time, distinct from ordinary days.

Such joys are worth the loss of covenants,
Which bloodless gods can never understand.

The Call
I’ve watched as shadows danced before my eyes,
Despite the fact I knew what I should not
Have known, and saw what I should not have seen.
A decorous pretense still seemed the path

Discretion would advise, despite the dark
In which I lived, without regard to truth
Or light, left hanging by the threads of chance,
Misdeeds, mistakes, miscalculations sore

Whose errors multiply in fructive time,
Take root, and grow to shade me from the sun
And all the possibilities of life
Without regrets for all that might have been.

But now, though why I do not know, the world
Has called, and pauses here for my reply.

The Player
The strings will do what I would have them do;
There, nothing is impossible for me,
And life retreats a while behind the notes
That fill the air, and chase away the dark.

But step away from nylon strings, or steel,
And in that moment chaos quick returns,
While I am left, without a signpost’s guide,
To my devices and my unmade plans,

And all my still unrealized ambitions.
Perhaps the music merely masks the gap
That stretches wide between my would and is;
Though music be a mask, or lie, play on.

For I would have my life within these bars,
And play until my strings have come unstrung.

Legion
From foresight much advanced, his enemies
Have always been the intimates within,
Who know the truths he labors still to hide
That we might seem as one behind his eyes.

In hindsight much removed, his advocates
Have been the same, the inner guardians
Each coming forth when called to play his part,
The lover, scholar, teacher, showmen all

With skills the core could never find the strength
To master, hidden safely still in dark
While sending others forth into the world
Disguised as one who wears his name and face.

We used to fear that he would be found out,
But we are safely hidden from the blind.

Length of Days
In aftertimes I’ve missed the certitude
That faith provides to those who still believe
In all the stories of our gospel youth
Where goodness purchased heaven with its coin.

And yet I would not pass this life in time
For promises of immortality,
Nor ask forgiveness from an angry god
Who lacks the courage even to exist

Except as fragments in an ancient text
Or fevered prayers of those whose hate
Sustains them through the emptiness of life
Spent genuflecting to their fears of death.

The promise of forever still tastes sweet,
But quickly fades before the length of days.

The Veil Between
Then moments come that we have seen before,
As if we knew the course our lives would take,
Refusing only to admit the truth
That otherwise would loose illusion’s grip

By forcing confrontation with ourselves.
A face, a voice, a breath, a melody,
Unseen, unheard, yet eerily familiar
As someone you have always known and loved

But never met until this very now,
A song whose lyrics you have often sung
But never heard until its chorus ends
And you are left alone as someone else.

These moments call to those with ears to hear,
But pass in silence those who look away.

Epilogue
This storm has gathered at a lifetime's pace,
Each day has brought it closer, bearing down
Until it sweeps away illusory
Beliefs, the threads with which I've bound my life,

Still held it fast, though fragments soon betrayed
My skilled impersonation of a whole,
Revealed theatricality in lines
And all the tricks an actor needs to live.

There simply aren't enough of me, so few
Have I become inhabiting these roles
That would demand I be what I pretend,
In essence, not in stagecraft, still alive.

But time has come to sweep me off this stage,
Restore the balance of a life unlived.

Oedipus Wrecked
The lives I cannot have compel me most,
Each path an immortality denied,
Its possibilities unrealized,
Its joys unfelt, its sorrows still unknown,

Each choice a death, a darkness drawing near
On silent wings, as moments pass me by.
The life I have, I would refuse if asked,
But threads are cut without regard to wish

And lives assigned despite unwillingness
To live within the lines set down by fates
For whom sardonic jokes define free will
As freedom to deny, yet suffer, truth.

And so I choose as I have been designed,
Still blind myself in hopes that I might see.

What Then of Lies?
My weariness has grown with all facades,
The necessary lies that shape our lives,
Make interactions possible, though love
In all its forms depends both most and least

On masks, oft worn, quick changed, sometimes removed
As opportunity and circumstance
May yet avail us in a fruitful search
For meaning, or at least for shared belief.

Yet loves composed of lies will have their end
As well as honest passions forged in truth,
Each path can offer something like to joy,
And each involves a loss, of heart or soul.

If truth will set us free, what then of lies?
Not all do harm, and some redeem the world.

From One Who Stands Outside
The door, I know, has not been shut to me,
It has been, rather, me who shut myself.
Though I have made a life of giving aid
To those who could not see illusion’s masks,

Of showing common lies for what they are,
Distractions from the truth that sets all free,
I’ll not go through the open door myself,
But stand in Pisgah’s shadow, unredeemed.

Salvation comes to those who would be saved,
And though I know the way, I shun the path,
For mine is not a life that should be spared
But spent, so others less adept might live.

I am a secret hidden from the world,
And being told, I die, and am reborn.

Remembrance
In truth, I find remembrance seeks a toll
Too high for me to pay, though life’s rewards
Are oft sought out by one whose airy soul
Is yet unmatched by deeds, whose simple chords

Do not yet make a song, sans melody
Or harmony, of all arrangement bare
Excepting that surrounding middle C,
Which every singer worth the name can wear.

But I would venture off the charted scales,
Find symphonies in sounds without intent,
Although such freedom risk, and life, entails,
My actions new are not to mem’ry bent.

And yet the past demands its legal due,
Will payment claim, as years of debts accrue.

These But Lines
At other times, the needful thing is love,
Forgetfulness of self, well-worn complaints
And grievances, no matter how profound
Or superficial, to see in others,

Or one, the human purpose of a life,
If life can still be thought as purposeful,
Giving all the energy of wounded
Silent years in service to another.

If out of evil goodness still flows forth,
Then even meanest lives of men may serve;
The hours and days will not have been in vain,
So may it be for each of us in time.

But those are other times, and other lives,
And these but lines of hope, now at an end.

Still Small Voice
Since I was young, I’ve heard the devil’s call,
The siren song of darkness and its lord.
He promised freedom from the fear of wrath,
A life unfettered by the manacles

Of genuflection to a jealous God
To whom obedience would yet be paid
As ransom for the crime of human life.
At last I learned that he did not exist,

And lost my faith in darkness, as in light.
As years went by, the voice remained unchanged,
Though softer now, perhaps, more indistinct
And muffled by the noise of everyday.

What once had seemed heroic in its scope
Stayed with me as the still, small voice within.

The Player King
I’ve lived this life with nose pressed to the glass,
Imperfectly aware I did not fit,
While harboring illusions life could change
If only I were someone else’s son.

But lacking skill to alter time and birth,
I learned to play at being one of those
Surrounding me by mimicking their ways
Until I blended, seamless and unseen.

The mirror shows me someone I’ve not met,
A face I do not know until I smooth
The visage into one of many masks
Which I have worn since first I took the stage.

I’ll not set down my script, relearn my lines,
Those words are who I am, though I am not.

While Forests Burned
Soft curling wisps of bluish smoke remain
When forests have returned to earth in flame;
The beauty that survives the conflagration
Outweighs the pains we feel from sudden loss,

Points us forward, past the haze and rubble
Of lives we only now see value in,
Now lost and gone beyond recovery,
Remembrance closing doors on what we were.

I could have had so many other lives,
Been other, better versions of myself.
But what I am, I am, despite regrets
For what I might have been, had I but seen.

To settle my accounts, I must record
The chances I passed by while forests burned.

A Christmas Poem
A king amidst the mindless and misled,
As seas of ignorance wash up on shores
Where hordes of pointless rabble spend their lives.
These aren’t the verses in a Christmas card,

As lacking merriment and odes to joy
And season's greetings standing in for love.
But would they were, for Christmas cards could use
Some livelier revisions to their form

Than common sentiments will yet allow.
So Merry Christmas, Jesus hates your kids,
Or Old Saint Nick would kill you if he could,
Or Happy Hanukkah, Christ most hates you.

Such cards would bring a warmth we often lack
On these, our special days of love’s pretense.

Betrayal
Betrayal always takes us by surprise,
Though each of us has played its dual roles;
We think it cannot happen, not to us,
And so are blinded when it comes again.

Our loves are castles built on sandy shores,
We pray the tides will not come wash away
The structures we have built to hide ourselves
From cruel mischance, inevitable loss

And endless startings over—but our prayers
Disperse as breath in gentle breeze, unheard,
Unmarked, except by those who see us pray,
Though never gods, nor none who’ll do us good.

Our pains we must abide alone, unhealed
Except by time, when new love calls once more.

And Lies Will Set Us Free
Each generation learns to lie anew,
For lies sustain the world, make possible
The loves and energies sustaining us
Which truth would kill in service of itself

Not caring whom it hurts, destroys, or worse,
Erases from all possibility
Of life, with sin its foremost enemy,
Defined, of course, as all that brings us joy.

Such truth is only hatred now renamed
To pass among us as a moral good,
But like all hatreds, it would soon consume
All those who give it dwelling in their hearts.

So let us lie, and long may we insist
That truth not be allowed to make us slaves.

Through a Glass, Darkly
The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled
Was one I would soon learn, how not to be,
Or not to seem to be, at least, to fools
Whose eyes are blinded by the dimmest light,

Whose stomachs vomit forth the slightest food,
Whose minds revolt on hearing simple truth.
Their God is not their friend, despite the smiles
And prayers they fervently devote in hopes

Of winning ancient and capricious favor
From one whose very name they will not speak
Or do not know. What matter then, if life
Continues to perplex? They still believe.

Eyes gazing blankly through a darkened glass,
They call it faith, and laugh at dancing flames.

The Keys, As Yet Unturned
Though holding keys to all the oldest doors,
I’ve dared not use them, lest I soon be free
And find myself outside the pale of life
As I have always known it, orderly

In its construction, safely without risk
In all its structures, empty of reward
Except for tired illusions sold as truth
And portable distractions still on call

In lines from books, and ancient flowing words.
This aging lock yet keeps me safe from harm,
From love and loss, and all a broken heart
Can sore inflict on those who live its thrall.

These keys would open doors of pain untold,
And once I turn them, life begins at last.

No Greater Love
Our secrets all contend twixt day and night,
Put light and darkness to the crucial test
Whereby our facile lies are soon revealed
In all their lack of skill and subtlety.

The masks I wear for you, like yours for me,
Fool no one but ourselves, suppress the real
By mutual agreement, quickly signed
With notarized imprimatur of truth.

To drop our practiced guise, to be, not seem,
To stand before each other as ourselves
And not as our personae for the world,
What higher love than this? What greater risk?

Yet were we capable of truth in love,
We might still have a fleeting glimpse of joy.

End of Days, with Life Unlived
Predictable decline still disappoints,
Reminders of mortality disturb,
In spite of what we know must be today,
Perhaps tomorrow will bring better news,

Enable us once more to look away
From quick-approaching death, or dress in hope
The flat despair we must not see or feel
In order to continue with the script

By which we live, still speaking out its lines.
But voices falter, minds become unclear,
Our bodies will betray us in the end,
All while we watch, though we refuse to see.

Our struggle to be free from childhood chains
Oft overlaps with our too-swift goodbyes.

Scapegoat (for Azazel)
Without my blood, they’ll not survive the day,
Or so it seems, when panic grips, and need
O’erwhelms the reason in the grasp of fear.
I live in thrall to others’ mortal sins,

Yet no one knows, or bears, the weight of mine;
I am, in part, to blame—for sympathy
Requires an object, someone to support,
And I am no one, by design and choice.

For Nobody slips through the cracks of life,
Avoids the wrath of those who would revenge
Their wounds upon the small within their reach,
And teach them to accept their blame as just.

And so I disappear in times of peace,
For my best use comes in the times of war.

Ebb and Flow
The tide in men’s affairs has been at ebb
For longer than I can recall; no flow
Replenishes spent energy of life
In service of the needs of those whose love

Still comes at cost, to whom one gives without
The expectation of receipt in kind.
Such giving is its own reward, a love
Expressed as healing though oneself is sick.

But all things have their natural ends in time,
And flow must soon return, else river beds
Grow indistinct, recede into the sands
Which once they watered into blooming life.

That which sustains must be sustained in turn,
What gives must also take before it dies.

The Hero
Each lover’s face holds promise of new life,
As children’s voices sound the notes of birth
And restoration, holding fast to hopes
Long faded under pragmatism’s gaze.

Still grasping after immortality
While life slips from my hands, unnoticed, cold,
I turn away from love’s sustaining heat
And venture on my own to shores untried
Of lands unclaimed, though formerly possessed

By others such as me, who cannot stay
Where most they’re wanted, missing out in quest
Of days and years that will not come again.

I know this truth, and yet I cannot change,
Cannot let go the promised evermore.

Curtain Call
I can’t repair the crack, the breach remains
Unfilled, despite the eloquence I’ve learned
To hide behind; that which she took from me
Is elemental, not to be replaced

By learning to behave as others do,
Observing all the ways they interact,
Unnoticed gestures, vocal light and shade,
A perfect mimicry worth all my skills.

But none will know me as an alien,
A freak amidst their blinded normalcy,
For I inhabit them from inside out
And play them better than they play themselves.

This role, familiar now, was daunting once,
But now my show is seamless to the eye.

Life in the Subjunctive
The time has come, old friend, to face the truth.
A life in the subjunctive is no life
Worth losing or preserving, spent with if
As though the virtue of uncertainty

Outweighed the silent moments spent alone
With nothing, dressed as no one, eyes cast down
On paths of least resistance, seeking love,
Or love’s illusion, in a life of lies.

Though I have never been, I would yet be,
My second act remains unwritten still
And possibility still offers hope
Of life beyond these towered walls of self.

I would put off the old, put on the new,
But nightly, if resumes its wonted role.

In Beauty, Truth
I wonder, sometimes, when I see your face,
How beauty might bring pain to those who love
But would not be mistaken, as if lust
Were all their eyes encompassed, or their hearts.

But beauty such as yours makes wits grow dim,
Makes others of ourselves, forgetful still
Of who and what we are, or claim to be,
While Passion soon usurps King Reason's throne.

Our quick desires but peep to what they would,
Act little of their will, struck dumb with awe
As all admirers are when faced with truth
And inability to turn away.

Though beauty cannot see the light it shines,
Its lovers do, though few will understand.

According to our Kind
Each moment has potential still unseen
When life unfolds in multiplicity
Through tantalizing glimpses of the paths
Not taken, lives unlived, and loves unknown.

It would, perhaps, be better not to see,
Hear custom's notes for truth, and harmonize
Our years and weeks, our days and final hours
With shopworn promises of ancient gods.

Still not to know of what we leave behind
Provides some comfort to the blind and deaf
Who'll neither see nor hear, but willfully
Remain in silent darkness, undisturbed.

Perhaps we have no choice to see or know,
But spend our days according to our kind.

Out of Reach
For some, your best will not be good enough,
They’ll roll their eyes and sigh, play boredom’s notes
As virtuosos, making sure you see
Their keen disinterest and the pure disdain

They have for you and your attempts to teach
Them something, anything they do not know,
Already wise beyond your learning’s years,
And scornful of each word, each phrase you speak.

Their faces glow, though not, as you might think,
From joy of knowing, but from lighted screens
Of phones pulled out, inspected in plain view,
As though the classroom were a hotel bar.

These think themselves above you and their peers,
Give off more heat than light, and soon grow dim.

For Those Who See
This world is Paradise, for those who see,
Its killing floors, its sprawling fields of light,
Its towers reaching into jealous heights,
Where gods are helpless to prevent their rise.

How do you like us now, you ancient fuck?
Go scatter this, and watch us soon return
To storm the gates of privilege you call home,
And tear your heaven from your dying hands.

Would that it were so…a god makes simple
What else is vexingly complex, makes light
What otherwise is fraught with deepest dark,
A world like ours where evil mixed with good.

But here is beauty, light and shade entwined,
Where blood rejoices to be let for love.

Half-Life
The safest path still winds around itself,
Revolves around the same bare patch of ground,
Avoids with care all hints of something new,
Untried, or lacking safest precedent.

Though such a path entails nor risk, nor pain,
Nor fear of loss, its vistas are the same
Today as yesterday as evermore,
And all its possibilities are nil.

Still, all the voices of our lives insist
That we must be, as they, content to walk
The broad and spacious path to nowhere else
From all the nowheres of our careful years.

We listen and conform at cost of death,
Take comfort in denying thoughts of joy.

Desire and Descent
There is a man of little mark or note,
Possessed of all the usual desires,
Though learn d in the scholarship of shame,
For his desires oppress those worthier

Than he, who yet strives mightily to still
His thoughts, avert his eyes, touch nothing here,
Soil nothing by his presence or his gaze,
Till life itself becomes his final fault,

The crime for which he’ll one day pay in blood.
He has no other currency or coin
With which his mounting debts he might still pay,
But blood is best, erasing every trace.

Till then, he lives as someone else, unseen,
Unheard, well hidden by his borrowed words.

Odysseus at Twilight
My time is running out, though none would know
By mere appearance, I can feel the pace
Of time has quickened, leaving little doubt
The final act begins in earnest now.

So much remains undone, so much unseen,
So many threads of past entanglements
Still hold me fast, I know I’ll not escape,
But watch the quiet setting of my life.

Yet time and strength remain for one last quest
And what I am, I am, defiant still
To gods who are but villains clothed in light,
Pretending grace, possessed of naught but death.

One final sea, one final sun, I live;
No ancient deathless god can say as much.

No God but God
There is no God but God, so say the fools,
Who know not what the sounds they utter mean;
For gods are but the idols of our schools.

But wise men know how foolish are the rules
Insisting on belief in what’s unseen;
There is no God but God, so say the fools.

Our reason yet survives as wisdom’s jewels,
Maintains philosophy, though ne’er so mean,
For gods are but the idols of our schools.

Unlearned men will labor as if mules,
Demanding still a pious playhouse scene,
There is no God but God, so say the fools.

Though no salvation comes, no ardor cools,
No faith diminished, growing ever green,
For gods are but the idols of our schools.

But I, who once believed, now lack the tools
Of faith, no longer can abide its sheen;
There is no God but God, so say the fools,
For gods are but the idols of our schools.

Pro Se
The evil that you know is for the rubes;
We sell it cheap, in slick pre-packaged form.
We are not what we are, though you’ll not know
What lies behind our skillful presentations,

For all your truths are lies straight from our mouths,
Your moral maxims lessons we have taught
And wrapped with care in entertaining tales
Where goodness is triumphant in the end

And evil, though it has a certain style,
Is made to pay for all its wicked charms.
But this is just a lie meant to assuage
The mass, whose possibilities we steal.

For evil smiles, and tells you to your face
That life is full of risks, and best played safe.

With a Whimper
The gods regard us as their clever toys,
Show favor where they please, destroy at will,
Abandon us when most we live in need,
In fear regarding prayers as if our last.

No wonder, since they never did exist
Except as crutches for our crippled minds,
Preventing, by the power we invest
In them, all access to the still small voice

Where wisdom cries but is no longer heard
Than drifters in disguise as gods are seen
By those of us too busy, with the noise
And ceaseless motion of our days, to die.

So life holds fast as we become its shades,
And soon transparent grow to mortal sight.

Kenosis
My disappearance is not adequate.
Too much of me remains still visible,
And I no longer please when I am seen
Apart from needs, since my role is to serve.

I mirror your emotions back to you,
Provide support and sympathy at call,
Perform this function best when least I am
Myself, whose image still I would erase

If disappointing you can be delayed
For yet another day, or week, or year,
While costs mount far too high for me to pay,
Ensuring I will rid myself of me.

Then, even morning’s light will not reveal
My shape, long since consumed in fire and air.

Once More, With Feeling
Once doors are closed, can they be opened still?
Or will such pride prevent our second thoughts
That we, despite of nature, will regret
But leave untried what happiness might come

To those whose hearts allow them to be fools?
Perhaps we’re better off not knowing hope,
Assuming what is done is ne’er undone,
That choices made cannot be visited,

That paths untaken will not come again.
Each crux then makes or mars, fordoes us quite
Or brings us fair return on our desires,
While time runs swiftly on and from our grasp.

And yet, despite the costs, I would return
Again, for one last look into her eyes.

To Live Among the Dead
There is but one, each day we waste reduced
In scope, but one regardless of our gods,
The voices we have learned to substitute
For truths we’ve long been taught to disregard

In favor of the customs of our tribe.
The broad and spacious path that leads to death
Is paved with approbation and approval,
With smiles of recognition from the dead

Who fill the halls and courtyards of the world.
But narrow is the path that leads to life,
And steep the lonely way, reserved for few
With courage to resist the swelling stream.

Such life, no matter where or when, is boon
For heroes, more than thrones among the dead.

Old Song, Rewritten
Come live with me, and be my love, and we
Will all the old paths prove, of lies rehearsed
Until we learn the folly of old truths
Unsuited to our newer times and styles.

For is not love a choice born of free will?
Unless predestination rules our glands,
Is despot over endocrines’ salt tears,
The chemical reactions in our souls.

For those of us who courage lack in love,
As well in life, whose “not to be” outweighs
Fair thoughts that lie between a maiden’s legs,
There is but this: away at once with fear.

Or else away at once with life itself,
Spent bowing to the gods of nevermore.

Team Player
I’ll not remembered be for any good
I’ve done, nor any evil brought to light;
Since mine has been a tale uncomplicated
By ought of interest, smooth and featureless

As my own face, with small irregular
Moments, reversals of form and accent,
Trochees jarring iambs from their places,
With halting steps in business ill conceived,

Uncertain stops in ventures well begun,
Till those who might reward are disinclined,
Withdrawing favor’s marks, while I remain
Entangled here in mediocrity.

So neither hot nor cold, but still lukewarm,
I’ll be spewed forth, and soon enough forgot.

Acts and Havings
If gender is an unpoetic word
(And I believe it so), will sex suffice?
Its liquid sounds suggest the character,
The essence, of its meaning as an act,

But as a marker of identity
Perhaps it comes too short to name our truth;
For what we have, or do, is what we are,
Unless our acts and havings are but play

And all our earnest claims convenient masks
That serve but to procure our base desires.
Assume the worst, or best, what matter words
When action, hence borne out, betrays intent?

So call it gender, sex, or what you will—
Our havings still require the masks we wear.

Possession
I know when one is dead and when one lives.
Time was when I have known a different truth,
Composed of lies, well-told if not well-meant,
Concealing, in their folds, a breathless corpse.

In death, in life, in breath, in breathlessness,
I keep my own condition still unseen
By others, by myself, in secrecy
And in pretense of being what I am.

I know when one is dead, and comes no more,
Although the feather stirs, moved by the breath
I know she cannot have except in dreams
That will not leave me to my rest in peace.

She follows me, lives on inside my life,
And will not die until I cast her out.

Once Again, Yes
In unexpected moments, hope returns,
Despite the long-familiar lessons life
Has taught with each experience of love
Or need, contracted to deficiencies

Unspoken, unacknowledged, at their core
Misunderstood by lover and beloved.
In fleeting hours of light amidst the dark,
A smile returns, old optimism reigns,

And life seems full of promise once again.
Attachment may bring pain, but life requires
Its entrance fee, emotions, tangled thoughts,
And those who will not pay, will not have lived.

With all I’ve known, with every scar and wound,
I’d pay the price again, and live once more.

Happiness and Wisdom
Despite exhaustion, beauty still takes hold,
Weaves tapestries from silken promises
That all alone reveal the ignorance
Inherent in belief, in faith, in hope.

Yet knowledge never saved a tortured soul;
Much reading is a weariness to flesh,
While lies establish and envelop us
Within illusion’s comforting embrace.

The happy are unburdened by the world,
Take solace in a loving god whose face
Reminds them of their own, with eyes that speak
Of mercy, louder still of judgment’s wrath.

The wise are more fools still, to volunteer
For lives illumined by remorseless truth.

Intercessor
She sank beneath the waves, her eyes still fixed
On me, the one who could have saved her then;
But for the weakness running deep in us,
In all the children who survived, I might

Have shaken off paralysis, grabbed hold
And not let go. But I just watched her drown,
Ophelia-like, still singing favorite songs
As water rose to claim her for its own.

Still, there at least, she will be free, despite
My failed attempts to hold her to this world;
I lacked the strength, the necessary skills
To stop the tides of death in ceaseless flow.

No brave resistance can recall the time,
Nor will remorse repair the ruins of loss.

Achilles in Darkness
I've nothing left, at last, but my despair,
Nor mine, if truth be told, but borrowed whence
Repayment will remain, perforce, a dream
Which cannot be remembered without pain.

So strictly speaking, nothing is my core,
And no one is my name, though I'll not shout
In pride to Neptune's son, to celebrate
My stunning triumph on the wine-dark sea

For fear the gods may turn their gaze on me,
And take the anonymity wherein
I live and move and have my being here
Among the shadows and the silent shades.

To live another day, to see the sun,
I would renounce my throne among the dead.

Smiles of a Winter Night
The smiles that touch our hearts, bring down our guard,
Restore long lost remembrance to our eyes,
Reconstitute belief amidst despair,
Persuade, insinuate, almost convince

Those basking in their radiance to see
What is not there, to hear what is not said,
These smiles will cleave a soul, cut minds in two,
Their hemispheres left raw, while blood at odds

With blood lacks charity for argument,
Still raining on the earth below as dew
With droplets staining red the tips of leaves
That bend beneath the liquid weight of death.

And yet, such smiles have beauty, and will please,
For skillful lies have virtues of their own.

The Other
Though I have fallen silent, drawn a veil
Down over eyes that gave away too much,
My old companion manages my days,
Allowing me to hide behind his face.

He’s never failed me, since he first arrived
One day in pain when I could not respond,
He did, and since, has never lacked for words.
I do not know his name, though he knows mine,

Knows everything about me, all I’ve learned
Flows quickly off his tongue without my help
No prompting or involvement now required
From me, no words remain he does not speak.

He saved my life, and now he lives the life
That I might yet have lived, if I were one.

In Waiting
I’ve always lived in waiting for the end,
Despite the paradise I smiled to see
In offset printed magazines where hope
Was peddled door to door on Saturdays

With poorly practiced patter written down
On notecards I’d refer to in the car
Between identical suburban streets
Where my salvation, not the residents’

Was on the line. The habits learned at doors
Where silence brought reprieve from ministry,
While storm clouds gathered in the distant skies,
Still serve me well in these my latter days.

For though I know I’m running out of time,
The readiness is all, and I still wait.

Talking Cure
The talking cure rehearses truths we hide
In lies we tell ourselves, in masks we wear
As others in a world of absent forms
Long emptied of their substance, borrowed light

Reflected in a darkened glass wherein
Appears the hidden face, acknowledged not,
But not to be denied without a cost
Too dear to reckon in a mortal life.

The words that can escape our lips are dead
Already in our hearts and minds, despite
Their easy fluency, expressive notes
Both in and out of tune with minor chords.

Our virtuosity enmeshes us,
And none will find us there, nor care to try.

Ripeness is All
I cannot any longer pay the cost,
Nor speak from mem’ry lines I did not write
Unless I was another then, sustained
By hopes for truth and light I’ve long forgot

While chained here in my cave where shadows dance,
Transfixing all who see them through my eyes.
I’ll not know grace, nor ever ask for help;
I’d rather burn, and still keep who I am.

These lessons closest kept have served me well,
Occasional and momentary slips
Aside—but now the time has come to square
Accounts, when all the wealth I have is blood.

There is no shuffling now, no gamesmanship,
The bills are due, and cannot be denied.

Sannyasi
Like hollows that define their outer shells,
My weakness is what matters, not my strength;
This world has measured where I’ve fallen short,
And short shrift given to my only skills.

I have no art or talent for details,
But these are valued most by those who judge,
While other thoughts—of where transcendence leads—
Are trifles of a mind as light as air,

Whilst reverend, grave, and weighty are all those
Whose minds are double-columned record books
Where profit’s mark exists with loss beside
And all is managed, orderly, and small.

I once resented this, but have since learned
To live apart from worlds that are not mine.

Anatta
Illusion’s price grows steeper with the years,
Requiring all my heart’s expenditure,
Wherein I spend on credit to maintain
Personae far too dear for poverty

Of spirit to sustain beyond the hour
On stage in which I speak my golden lines.
What know you of my mind from what you see
Of how I frame my face for all occasions?

What mind there was to read or know is lost
To subterfuges needed to survive
Beyond the moment wrath appeared, and pain
Inflicted in remembrance of her fears.

My execution in the hours between
Preserved a life at costs I could not know.

Soliloquy
On stage, I’m never at a loss for words,
Nor ever wonder where to put my hands;
No awkwardness reveals my hidden seams,
As seamlessness is crucial to the show.

You must believe I am what I pretend,
And so you do, and so you always have.
With eloquence comes license to deceive,
Though granted by a willing audience.

An actor learns the value of a lie,
Too precious to be wasted on a fool,
Though none but fools exist beyond the lights,
Whose need for comfort finds a dark redress.

Such people willingly believe my lies,
Still seek them out, demand them from my lips.

The Favored One
My life’s irreconciled iniquities
Have flowered into desiccated buds
With petals curled around a core of lives
My own has touched, for better, or for worse.

I would not claim responsibility
For hearts I have entwined within my own,
Although I know evasion will not serve,
And checks must soon be signed in flowing blood.

I did not sell my soul for power’s charms
But mere survival, just to stay alive,
Though in exchange, I learned to weave a spell
Reflecting others through their own desires.

But my Walpurgisnacht will soon arrive,
And severed be the branch that once grew straight.

Krodhamaya
I still admire Yudhisthira, but hear
The voice of Duryodhana within.
I would not injure anyone, but wrath
Demands its time on stage, its audience,

Its satisfaction paid with suffering,
Receipt in kind of all a life has lost.
I struggle with desire for foul revenge,
Would yet protect the small and weak from fear.

My target, then, becomes myself, the hate
That swells from lessons learned through discipline
And teaching hands that rained their wisdoms down
As if to show that love must leave its mark.

Those fathers, brothers, cousins who must die
On Kurukshetra’s battlefield are me.

Be Thou My Good
I’ll not deny responsibility
For those mistakes whose price my life still pays,
Nor failings judge of others who deny
Their sins’ banality, uninteresting

To tempter and redeemer, formulas
In place of active lives, where fear remains
Enthroned, anointed, canonized as kings,
Messiahs, saints, and heroes often sung.

And yet, I would I could be someone else,
If only to be free of consequence,
If only for a moment to be free
From all I am, and all that I pretend.

A lie—I know if I were offered choice,
I would remain myself, let come what may.

Ich Kann Nicht Anders
I’ve not been ready yet to be alone,
Although my solitude has been profound;
I’ve been a sounding board for those I’ve loved,
Or clung to in the hope that love was real.

Remembrance brings me feeling of my chains,
Those structures I have built in which my life
Has meaning, or its simulated form,
Which will suffice, for ordinary use.

But now, I feel as if my life wants growth,
That what I’ve been must now be put to rest
In service of that self I’ve long denied,
If only I could hear its still small voice.

Transcendence calls, but so does earthly love;
So here I’ll stand—I can no other choose.

The Living
We are what we have thought, so said the sage;
But thought is far too wan a term to serve
So great an end as to describe ourselves.
We are what we have feared—this hits the mark

Where thought goes wide, for fear will twist and shape
Its worshippers, and those who cannot leave
The faith that fear demands. To choose a path
Of self-delivered grace, to not submit,

To not define oneself in fallen terms,
Rejecting both the sins and sinners’ gods,
And “necessary” losses that define
The limits of our lives—this is courage.

Through courage to negate, and to affirm,
We act in spite of fear; we choose to live.

The Show
There comes a time by which you realize
The point is moot, that action, hence borne out,
Can never waste the memory of your days,
That former lives are with you, taking hold

Of hopes tomorrow and tomorrows bring,
Transforming all occasions into plays
Whose scenes you’ve acted skillfully before
With lines, though well-rehearsed, whose hollow sounds

Reveal, or threaten to reveal, a core
Of grief, or loneliness, that all your skills
And dedication have been used to hide
From others’ prying eyes, or from your own.

And yet, in spite of doubts, your show goes on;
For what is else not to be overcome?

The Well-Told Lie
Most people’s preference is a well-told lie,
To hear what they will hear, adopt ideas
Entirely without regard to facts
Or evidence, the proofs their eyes receive.

Such traitors to themselves will ne’er be taught
To see what they refuse to recognize,
Or question aught they have been told is right;
Such fools will constantly mislead themselves

Without assistance, as incurious
To know as hostile to the ones who’d teach
The forms inside an ignorant, dark world
Where flames burn dim, and chains still bind them fast.

No matter then, if lies retain their spark,
Since truth was only ever meant for few.

Muse in Blue
I could not help but love you, cannot still,
When every smile in your eyes warms my heart,
Each teardrop makes me want to make amends,
To whisper in your ear, all will be well.

You brought me to myself, restored my faith
In love despite my scars, in spite of years,
Regardless of the times I’ve loved too well,
Unwise in my attempts to hold love fast.

You make me want to be a better man,
One not easily perplexed, nor jealous
To extremes, but passionately faithful,
Still seeking after ecstasy with you.

Though what I am, I am, I would be more,
If only to be more in love with you.