Late afternoon.

Here is calm, yet not peace.

We gape at heavy clouds dimming our bright world:
those solemn, silent gods have freed us from Sol.

Nature stirs the forest with unseen hands,
the wood and wind contesting for Her pleasure.
Feathers sing battle lore.

How each note echoes!--then dense, rushing quiet
hangs from solid air. Earth herself has paused; we
taste the silence like wine.




may '07 - june '09

what have I become? --my dearest friend

The answer to Johnny Cash and Nine Inch Nails' mournful question--echoed by so many other mediocre modern artists in the throes of self-pity, and myself upon occasion--is that the question itself is misplaced. Ask not what you have become, what have I become. Ask what you have not become, what have I neglected to become. This is necessary. Then ask not what you have already become, but what you can become: what can I become, my dearest friend?

The answer, of course, is that at every moment, the board has been set and you are the white pieces and it is your move. You have become a chess piece; you have not become a checkmate, but you can become, and will become, exactly that: for, or against.

Ask not what has already happened, but what has yet to occur. The only thing that's real might truly be pain, as they wrote, but only insofar as pain has yet to occur. Reality is forward-moving. Disillusionment is proper for the backward-sighted; reality, my dearest friend--lies ahead of you, in pain or pleasure.

Everything goes away in the end, but only if the end has already has come: and it has not, and so that statement, too, flatly fails. What End? The future of possibility, the End in that future, is yet still only forward-sighted; while the mourned departure is backward. One way only exists. Everyone goes away--but at the beginning, because it has already occurred.

The past is false. Only the future is real; the End is real; but it is not yet chosen. Do not mourn while the bridegroom is still with you! And since he--He--shall outlive, outlast you: Never mourn.

And yet--of course--and yet. It is everything, and it gets everywhere. Grief too gets everywhere. To this perhaps there is no answer; or this, the answer is a blank future, and does not well satisfy.
But yet, again. If we still have presence--existence, Breath--enough to mourn, the End has not yet come and mourning is yet beyond us. Mourn the night we must, but morning--splendid Dawn!--shall make fools of us all.




June '09

waste

shame is a velvet robe
gone rough, you know
with overuse and sweat from sleeping in
worn always with a blush.
no one knows my name here
nor cares, nor should.
ah, i am so very well forgotten:
the dim spare twenty crumpled so in old jeans.
but feel not self-pity; rather
disappointment, confusion, distaste--
i am a morbid curiosity.




june '09 - july '09