I fell, but then I was standing. How many falls have you taken? Really, how many? And you’re still here? Upright and alive? Notice that when a tree collapses it actually rises, it becomes a towering castle for chipmunks, a mountain peak for fungi, a floating planet for ants, and a universe for poets searching to transcend the gravity of their lives. Falling is a change of form, but not substance.
Author: Michael Angelo
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A Bad Day
It can be a bad day,
a really terrible nasty day,
the kind of day where the sky is a blue bruise
and the air is a raking of nails…It can be a bad day,
a truly unbearable day,
where gravity bulges into obesity
and shoulders slump and drag against ground…It can be a bad day, but
all it takes is a single moment:a word of buoyant gratitude,
a glacier smooth smile.A bad day can remain a bad day—but
the shroud of clotted clouds
can been sundered by a blade of beaming luminance.It can be a bad day,
but the eyes can still shine. -
Moth
This is okay,
lying here,
being the night,
being the breath
and the rumbling wind
outside the window,
outside the body—
I have no body.
I am nobody,
only fantasies fluttering
and dusting
milky blackness
in a bedroom.
I cannot be shattered,
or have thoughts pruned;
no voice or word can touch
me, the stillness
of mind and life.
I am the womb
of night,
mother and babe,
father and son,
dreamer and dream
with knees pressed to chest,
and arms folded tight—
Truly, I have no limbs
only light
wings
that cut no air in their flight. -
Wish Upon a Star
The stars in space are twinkling
my name across pearl petaled sky.
Something within eases, a child’s sigh
escapes my lips and into the wide vision
of a godly dream.Bronx streets are crackling with concrete
grief. Feet draggers and dazed loiterers,
brittle toilers, come apart regularly—One wonders if underneath
such sky
a gun or knife can take away
such silverly light—Can a stranger’s deranged might
truly cut down infinity
smiling, perpetually mute?It soothes my heart, it does,
how still
things can seem to be.Although, I know
heaven’s bodies
and city’s bodies
spin and cycle
black depths and black speeds
so fast that to the eyes they seem
to be resting in peace.Can such illusionary serenity
free the mind from debts,
from the pains of making ends meet,
from the strains of maintaining the lightbulb
of the soul alight—can the reality of inner poverty
cease to be?I wonder how many others
look up at the night sky
and wish.Does the bruised branded,
gun-toting and scowling jacket,
youth?How about the quiet nurse
who over long seasons sheds
her spring bright eyelashes
over sanitation sinks—does she
peer through the ceilings of hospital wings?Do we all feel childhood’s pang
reaching
from an infinity inside?Can we hear the muffled prayer,
its delicate wish to come alive?Do our hearts somehow still retain
a vision for haven,
a yearning for home’s continuity,
even long after we’ve been casted out
onto the wet stoops
and into the glare of unblinking streetlamps?