Tag: moody

Would You Be Free?

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(Prologue)

Would you be free?
Do you understand what you first must lose?
Freedom is not the successor,
or itself the destination.
It is the voice crying in the wilderness.
It is the revolutionary’s indiscriminate fire.
It is the transition,
perhaps not from worse to better,
but to that liminal precipice,
between sacred falsehood
and the sublime emptiness.
Do you understand what you will lose?
Can you be reconciled to its absence,
and create something new?
True, some think only to relish in the ruins,
but many wander in circles
through the ashes,
unable to create for themselves.
They hope to recover what they lost,
for they did not understand the cost.

(Would You Be Free)

What did I know of purpose?
I had not been one of the aimless,
or on the road to Damascus,
when there accosted, I found the meaning.
What did I know of purpose?
I had been born into it.

What did I know of comfort?
I had not been weak with despair
when lo, there the outstretched hand took mine!
What could I know of comfort
if comfort was never needed?

What did I know of fulfillment?
I was not trammeled with emptiness
and in a cycle of addiction
when I first drank the Living Water.
What did I know of fulfillment
when eternity was my inheritance?

What then could I know of loss
or what I had to lose?
How could I take for granted
what I didn’t even know was there.
My belief was not the product of my own contemplation,
or existential anxiety.
It had been instructed alongside my first words.
My faith was an abstraction,
grounded in the faith of those that came before.

Thus, as youth gave way to late adolescence,
acceptance was subverted by reason,
though not reason alone.
For faith had collided with love,
that first and foolish love,
which looks on tempests and is not shaken.
If our love was a sin,
what was left but heresy?
Ignorant of what was not outside,
I saw only the bolted doors of hypocrisy.
Could ignorance gamble a different solution?
I traded my birthright for a match.

Freedom’s light
spewed from the conflagrated steeple,
illuminating the precipice.
Then through the shattered stained glass
I saw purpose burn alongside hypocrisy,
comfort still nailed to the cross,
and fulfillment self-exile.
As the embers fell to ashes,
I understood the cost of disillusionment,
but not that this was a transition,
a point from which to start again.

Oh, those wretched years,
following our footprints in circles through the ash!
What was left but martyrdom for each other?
We asked too much of that fragile love.
We said “Be now my comfort! My purpose! My eternity.
How the weight of emptiness bears down in this uncertainty.”
But that love would only break, it could not bend.
We traded all for nothing in the end.

Lonely Things

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“I know the spirits
of the verdant forest,
of the quiet meadow
and the Alpine lake.”
I said.
“But what dwells here
in this desolation,
just east of the Sierras,
in this vast expanse
of sand and salt?”

Her gilded tresses
swept across her shoulder
in wild array
as she turned to gaze
on the monochromatic landscape,
washed out in the glare
of a merciless sun.
Her eyes fell from the
barren, jagged peaks,
to the sand and salt below.
We had climbed those mountains
before,
but God, we had never seen the other side!

“Lonely things.” She answered.
“Lonely things live out here.”

Unbeholden

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Fog hangs heavy over the highway,
draped like the cloak of some god
unbeholden to time.
For how strangely it keeps me in the present –
I drive perpetually into a startling newness.
As though memory and foresight were concepts lurking just beyond comprehension,
I cannot see what lies ahead,
or know exactly what it is I left behind.
Headlights flash into existence.
Taillights turn left or right,
disappear into the fog,
and my eyes can only follow for so long.
They vanish
like interrupted threads of thought,
or memories lost to time,
or possible futures forever altered by one conversation.
How heavy the fog hangs in the valley today,
but I do not wish it would burn away.
No, I would stay enveloped in this mystery,
in the startling newness of its self perpetuation.
Here, where neither regret nor foreboding can find me.
Here, alone and present.
I know the sun is still out there
– still looking for me.
For I see the opaque droplets of the mist
now shimmer with slivers of gold,
and know I must soon return
to the wholeness of existence
– the vast expanse of the blue sky.
The warmth of the sun will recall my hopes and my old sorrows,
and together we will cast long shadows as I drive home.

Familiar

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Leaning up against the door frame,
I watched you finish your makeup.
Pausing for a moment with your mascara,
you caught my eye in the mirror…
and smiled.
How domestic, how nostalgic
this moment was.
Yes, that smile was so familiar
but it was only the specter
of one I held so much dearer,
and left, many years ago.
Pareidolia? Perhaps.
And I suspect you would laugh
at this pathetic confession
from a sentimental man
that just left you breathless and satisfied.
For what was sentimentality
to an emotional artist?
An artist so disconnected from her creations:
dissonant machinations
of commodified emotions.
You could paint a smile for any occasion.
You would be nostalgic for each lover.
Ah! And you never missed a chance to check your reflection.
– how I watched you practice in the glass.
So mesmerizing, so detached.
God, now I wonder,
for a girl that spent so much time
in front of the mirror,
did you find yourself so familiar?

Troubleshooting

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My days are spent fixing broken machines.
Sometimes the owners misuse them,
sometimes a part simply wore out.
Poor engineering is possible too.
The problem isn’t always obvious
and some machines are quite complicated.
But if I know its designated purpose,
then give me enough time to observe it
attempting to fulfill this function
and I might have a diagnosis.
Give me time to peruse the manual.
Are there idiosyncracies
and proprietary parts?
Are they generic and universal,
is it analog or smart?
Give me enough time to open panels,
watch the brake in operation,
trace a wire, or listen to the gear box.
Just give me enough time.
Just give me enough time.
Just give me enough time,
this one is particularly difficult.
See, I still don’t understand its purpose
and I cannot find a manual.
Certainly I am intimately acquainted
with its idiosyncratic patterns
as it attempts to fulfill some function,
but all too often, falls short.
What that function is,
I do not know,
for it has never completed anything,
– no products to show –
and I have begun to suspect poor engineering.
Still! Is it not JUST a machine like all the others?
Given enough time
and careful observation,
surely I can determine
the cause of this malfunction.
Surely I can fix it
and see what it was meant to do.
But God, I’ve been troubleshooting
this machine
for almost fifteen years now…

Dying in the Present Moment

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We were dying in the present moment.
I was running from my memories,
you were trying to chase your dreams.
We thought we were the solution,
but didn’t know we were so broken,
we were running in circles,
colliding at the antipodes.
I gave up on the future 
when it became a rear view mirror. 
These problems were cyclical,
we were so predictable, 
but too addicted to each other 
to see what went wrong.
We sped towards our self destruction:
a collision course bound for
each other.
Indifferent to the collateral,
we were dying in the present moment.

The Least of These

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He said, “Deny yourself and follow me.”
but we fell so short in that instruction,
one might conclude we did the opposite.
The renunciation of pleasure
became
the pleasure of renunciation.
Self-denial became the virtue
and ceased being the means to attain them.
Cradling this deformed
and stunted soteriology,
our gaze only ever turned outwards
to accuse one another
of the sins we had invented.
Still, He was calling, “Follow me!”
Yes, there He stood: the least of these,
on San Pablo and Divisadero.
Did we see his divinity- his humanity?
No, we could not even see his privation,
it lay just outside our myopic casuistry.
We could only see the sin:
the indulgence and the addiction.
“Depart in peace.” We said to him.
“Be filled with the evidence of things unseen.”
Then we took up yet another offering
for those impoverished, yet believers,
in faraway countries.

The Valiant Never Taste of Death But Once

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Staggering on an atrophied reason
through a miasma of resignation,
I find and light the torch of conviction.

And run.

Emptiness revels behind every door,
gorging herself on the countless corpses
of every instance of my cowardice.
‘Neath each door, a dim glow promises more
when my conviction’s guiding light falters.
I hear her laugh, an echoing whisper,
“How many times have you been here before?”

Exhausted I sought rest in compromise.
I knew it could only metastasize,
but I dissociated my demise.

And now

I fear this is no longer a labyrinth,
for casuistry had become cyclic.
Ignorance is no longer complicit
in the fraudulence of expedience.
Yet this tragic familiarity
was the thread leading back to honesty:
the travailing threshold to congruence.

She whispers sweetly now, drawing nearer
as my only escape becomes clearer:
I rush to the door that frames a mirror

and push.

Insignificant

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In silence It sat between us,
damning me for my ambivalence.
I kept a knife against Its throat
though I exalted Its existence.

What will was left began to wane
as hours poured from an artery.
Eclipsed in her indifference,
insignificance would swallow me.

Your implicit ultimatum
left me desperate for an absolute
that she would never offer me.
My hope only served to convolute

the tangled strands of lies and truth,
when twisted with my misconception,
slipped the noose around my frail reason
and filled my lungs with resignation.

Another dawn could never break
to grace her smile to my memory.
Acceptance like a tempest cast
me on the shores of reality.

I surrendered my last recourse
to the cold grip of the second hand.
In silence It read the verdict
that fell with the final grain of sand.

The pain of one last goodbye still
pales to one more indifferent embrace:
so as I twisted my blade in Its
throat, I memorized her darling face.

Blind to the blood that marked my hands,
unaware of Its lifeless body,
she bid farewell as we embraced:
the sole fruition of my folly.

In silence It rested with us
staining the sheets with pools of crimson.
Putrescence pervaded our dreams
and immortalized my transgression.

Passing Glances

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A slender form slips through the crowd,
careless of the curious eyes,
like the pale moon slips past the clouds,
she beckons my gaze to the skies.

Her elegant scarlet tresses
frame an ivory decollete,
and conceal her furtive glances
as she slowly dances my way.

For a moment we turn away
– she lets her verdant, velvet dress
brush past my hands as if to say,
“All that’s left is for us to guess.”