From where
does peace arise?
Does it ascend from victory,
drums of conquest, black smoke
of wars won
by fractions of mankind?
Or is peace like the moon,
itself a summit
of imagination and hope?
Is peace the percussion of the heart,
or the stillness of the night?
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.
–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.