Category: Existential Poetry

The great joy of life
is knowing
that at the end of it all
you will have felt the warmth of the Sun
with a body and mind made of Sun.

The lotus that sits within the pond that is itself.

I am a man that often gives himself
to illusion.

At times, it is easier to ignore
the tree,
and focus on the plastic artifices.

The truth of the tree,
its aging breaking bark,
can be too much for this heart.

However, the true poison
is fear.

One is meant to feel,
with every stretch and compression.

Blood must flow
to carry the minerals, twigs, and ashes of life.

If the blood runs cold, then it runs cold,
and one must shiver.

And if the blood burns hot, then it burns hot,
and one must sweat.

To be real
is to be body, mind, and spirit.

The whole of my being
cascades like leaves declaring
the wind’s undeniable existence.

I.

Inside me
there is a wild and rolling forest
with trees of all kinds braiding together their roots
and intertwining their branches.

Happiness abounds within my breast,
scurrying across countless moss bathed stones
and filling the leafy base of my being
with sounds of life unfolding, of life unwinding
petal by petal, exposing
all that is sweet nectar
for all to drink and be nourished by.

Outside of me,
there is also a wild and rolling forest—
it is called Humanity.

I am a stranger in this land,
though my face appears
so clear
on the dark surfaces of its rivers and lakes.

But this Humanity,
despite its familiarity,
is cold and foreign.

The easy mist of my lungs
within moments
freezes to ice and plummets
with the sharp icicles dangling
on the sapless branches
of Humanity’s trees.

Leafless, skeletal,
the gnarled fingers
are pierced through by the rays
of a spiteful Sun.

What has happened to Humanity,
I wonder to myself
each moon’s turn.

My mind cycles—
first a saintly compassion,
then a righteous indignation…

Just look at the mountains!

Once proud and noble aspirations
lying buried, obscured by frost,
inspiring no one and nothing
to challenge their lofty heights.

Indeed, in this winter wilderness
my eyes are needled by countless icy spears
that conspire a netted haze,
blinding I and countless others,

and perpetually dispelling the fires of ascent,
and keeping our soles from reaching the peaks
where our former trials would stretch beneath us
as ant trails in a bush.

II.

Blinded,
and oppressed with a faceless horizon,
I struggle
to move
a single foot.

Humanity
is a white wolf
ravishing itself.

Steam from smoking blood
is ever pouring from pores
formed along the ground, Humanity’s
raw red heart
which thunders like tectonic plates—
clashing,
thrashing,
and breaking apart
as the pillars of Man
in a continuous and vein attempt
usurp one another.

Such a futile fight,
to feel the blessing of a Sun
which continuously glares hatefully
at such a confused planet.

The animals have gone with the flowers,
and the insects with the natural rhythms
of life and death.

Now we die discordantly,
as slitted notes on sheets
burned by fires stoked by hands
that have traded instruments of song
for instruments of death.

Ours is a tragic melody!

Ours is a tragic melody!

Ours is a— melody, no less.

III.

Though I find this forest’s wild white howling
obtuse,
and struggle
to love it,
I note a soft fluty breeze blowing through
its desolation.

It asks one to close the outward senses,
and to hear it;
it compels one to discard their coverings
and stand bare.

The golden gale
requires trust.

Thus, I stand naked, always waiting
for this tundra’s absolving breezes
to brush my tingling flesh and enter
the slopes of my lungs.

Against my own shadow,
I remain hopeful that these fluty currents
sweep across my inner mountains
and bring a calming coolness
to my spirit.

IV.

Nightly, I dream that within me,
my soft and happy creatures
croak and chirp and sing, and infuse
this outer wild wind
with verdant heat and pulsing feeling.

I am not a continent so far removed
from the world;
thus, I exhale
golden breaths twined with emerald,
offering back
something warm and alive
to ice scorched
Humanity.

V.

In some hidden dens, I hear
the ice walls melting, dripping,
seeping into softer earth.

I envision my face
within those puddles,
my reflection in their depths
clear as moonlight.

Humanity, my kin,
my mirrored happiness and despair,
my vibrant thunder and wrathful hale,
my fire and ash—

How can I hate you?

Indeed, I am lost within your storm,
seeing nothing in your distances—
but, that is only ignorance,
my embittered eyes’ slant.

There is a horizon.

It waits—

It waits beyond the white walls I perceive.

I know this—

I know because there is also a horizon
inside of me.

And somewhere—

Somewhere in those ice pearl plains
stands a godly tree.

Its body a tower
reaching
beyond the heart’s petty wintry whims,

and its branches crossing
the bladed border that divides
one man from another.

Within this shimmering twilit space that splits
apart horizons,
stands

a bridge and revelation:

Winter and Summer,
their branches interlaced
as beginnings
to one another’s
ends.

Humanity,
a limb
of my World Tree.

…and for a better world,
he peered through the window and into the cold,
seeing only the frozen blueness of the sky
and the thin brittle branches
of the barren tree that sits all icy winter
in the lot next door.

Like it, he now sits,
thinking about the spinning globe,
and the threads of fate that pull its inhabitants
this way and that way, to destinies unknown
and only revealed in the individual moment,
like the gold curtain of the sun
as it slowly drapes itself over one hill,
one plain,
at a time.

What is there to do
for the small things that live their lives upon
the warmth of a fleeting thing?

What is there for one to do,
but follow the ageless trumpeting of time
through the cold winters of the hour,
and pray that after the hard spell of frost breaks
one will rise as a full green bloom,

like the tree outside his window
when summer brings its love.