From where
does peace arise?
Does it ascend from victory drums,
like conquest smoke
of wars won
by fractions of mankind?
Or is peace
like the moon,
ready to lift itself onto the summit
of man’s imagination and hope
once the fire of the sky has waned
and youth has run its course?
Is peace the percussion of the heart
or the stillness of the night?
If so—why, then, does it seem to find me
between beat and silence?
This is the ambition.
It is this thing on this page.
I sketch its features with these words, awkwardly
scratching lines with a childhood’s fantasy
now recreated, now resurrected;
this is its face.
This is its eye outlined, but where
lies the essence?
Words are not images. They are suggestions.
In writing,
I am trusting mankind.
Is there a common humanity? Do you—reader—
cup your hand in the same spring
and draw from its miracle formlessness
the shapes and colors of my mind?
I write how we dream,
sharing imagery and metaphor,
notes of a heart beating
as one.
This is a shared life.
The ambition again is this,
the desperate reach through the dark,
the splatter of acrylic onto lips,
the stirrings of your tongue, and
the whisper—
you, mouthing these words that you read.
Spirals
all about.
Spirals
of all types.
Some turning this way,
others that way.
Left right,
up down,
each a distinct rhythm,
and beautiful.
We fall in love
with one another,
spinning and weaving together
life.
Spirals
on end.
Spirals
sparkling night.
Spirals,
I am one,
as are these words
that eventually unwind
through time
and reveal the page
marked by the print of an unknown finger.
The world seemed so jovial at that moment:
when every tangle
of gold grass was a joke dangling
from flapping tips.
Every tree jiggled
fat belly secrets
of beautiful things hiding
in the high fever heat.
I laughed so verdantly,
bemused as to why the world
had ever seemed so dull and dark.
Before I knew it though,
the stars had risen,
and in their frozen light
loomed that familiar
sterile cold.