Tag: Poetry

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.

Ex Nihilo

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I was certain it was all or nothing.
Could ignorance gamble a different solution?
But in the end, it was all for nothing.

Desperately through ashes I was sifting.
Had I recourse but to hold fast the illusion
of one solution – of all or nothing?

Beneath the foundation I was digging.
Perhaps not all was lost and the real delusion
was scribed on the wall as: all for nothing.

Only ashes and dust am I reaping
– gripping, ripping from the earth in my vexation
as each angel that swore “All or nothing.”

Now not even remorse counts for something
– yes, it might outweigh every other emotion,
but it can’t pay this debt of all for nothing.

What is left but hope- oh that cruelest thing,
for “ex nihilo” is ever the conclusion.
Are you certain it is all or nothing?
Can you pay the price of all for nothing?

Concerning a Dead Bee On the Sill of a Stained Glass Window

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How auspicious this apparent florescence
must have seemed at first:
an irresistible panoply of all you were ativistically designed to seek.
But it was an unintentional deception
– the stars reflected in the water.
In your desperate search through each and every hue,
your strength was bartered for regret.
Exhaustion weighed down your wings
as you crawled, still driven by duty,
toward this insufficient facsimile.
Now the sun sets.
Now the sun sets upon your fatal mistake,
filters through the opaque glass
and casts upon your lifeless body
a death shroud of many colors.

Chasm

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Will you fill the void?
Will you bridge this divide?
Or will you watch me slip
into the space between
and tell me
“I don’t owe you anything.”

I let her fall
into the chasm of my indifference,
only to turn and find myself
still on the other side of yours.
Yet how can I cross that
which you insist does not even exist?
Oh but it does and I persist,
and with unfailingly devotion,
carry out your every request.
For you say that you do love me,
that you do want me.
So I believe
that if I fulfill your every need,
you will want
to satisfy just this one of mine.
But I am exhausted
by this process of elimination.
Time, money and emotion
all fall short,
and I scramble back
to the martyr’s edge,
– hear the jaws snap
as resentment lowers
its haggard head.

The Beginning

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This bond will break, it cannot bend.
Hold fast- I could not stop
the beginning of our end.

Who is to blame? We both had doubt.
But voiceless fear is an open wound
and silent answers sold us out.

You are not dead to me my dear
– yet if I feel no life with you,
then you’re the death of me I fear.

But I became your every breath!
So could I truly call it living
if I left you to certain death?

Blood is pouring from the suture.
These broken hearts we stitched together
bleed and stain our every future.

Who is to blame? We both knew change.
The children we were died in our arms
– the face in the mirror was strange.

This bond will break, so leave it be.
It was made for a different life,
and from that life we now are free.