All you really have is this moment.
The great and terrible tomorrows
are phantoms.
This here is truth, this poem,
and your eyes scanning.
Behind the mountains, within the clouds,
between the alleys, beneath the clothes,
there is nothing.
Nothing is the only thing promised.
If you love,
love scorchingly.
If you hate,
hate like ice.
It is better to feel
the sting with achingly alive fingers.
The realest thing is this poem
and you,
miracles of the senses.
Before I die, I want
to do this one tiny thing—Before
I never again have the chance
to dream—Before
it’s over. Before this struggle ends—Before
it stops,
the carousel of life
with its horses and noises
and peoples and voices
and dirt deep in pores
and ashes scattered offshore—Before
I know conclusion—before I don’t.
Before blinking into a nothing sky
I’d like
this meager light of mine,
the faintest thing in that sleepless solitary night,
to burn completely and fully.
Maybe like this, the lonely
will have somewhere to rest their eyes,
and the broken
will have somewhere to hang their suffering.
There is a chill in the air
as the unearthed night
rises.
Crickets fill the empty space
within my heart with prayers.
I breath and exhale,
then watch each hope melt
into the unfolding blanket of suns.
A human being’s sorrow is small,
and the Cosmos is so bright.
No man can fill its spaces with his darkness.
The stars shine
undisturbed.
Every day there is the uncertainty
of whether or not one has risen correctly
and has set their mind upon the right thing.
Somehow the birds knowingly go to their flying
and the worms untroubled to their wriggling—
but the person,
what do they do?
There are trains raging certainly through tunnels;
there are cars coughing confidently into dirty air.
Offices are committedly clattering
and classrooms are persistently prattling,
every place pours itself like a monsoon—
but the person,
what do they do?
On a corner with a starving dog is an old man
playing music with his ribs;
today’s meal
comes tomorrow, and tomorrow’s
comes whenever
a cherry blossom’s petal
falls onto a lake.
Tectonic plates
grind their old hard faces together
as nursing patients sneak away
to make love.
Time explodes
like mines, like grenades,
like jets and torching dragons,
like pent up anger and lusty housewives,
like punished children and young men pregnant
with propaganda,
like flowers on the cusp
of summer and particles conspiring
the atom, God’s lonely heart.
Such uncertainty
is swirling,
so many questions of right and wrong.
It’s almost like air and water, this not knowing;
it’s almost natural—almost certain, like the person
living and dying
on a mound of questions.