Category: Existential Poetry

  • Artistic Ambition

    Artistic Ambition

    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 The Way Down

    Spirals All The Way Down

    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.

  • Brief Intoxication

    Brief Intoxication

    –that moment, the world was a snort,
    a tangle gold grass of a joke
    dangling
    from flapping wings.

    Every tree was a jiggling
    fat belly secret,
    beautiful things
    hidden
    in a giddy fever heat.

    I laughed so openly,
    a horizon bemused
    as to why the world had ever
    seemed so limited and dark.

    Though, before I knew,
    the stars had crystalized.
    In their frozen light
    was that sterile
    familiar
    cold.

  • Joy of Joy

    Joy of Joy

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

    The lotus that sits within the pond of itself.