Category: Existential Poetry

I am a man that often gives himself
to illusion.

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

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

However, what is 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 a body
that cascades like leaves

declaring
wind’s undeniable existence.

I.

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

Happiness abounds
in my breast, scurrying
across countless moss bathed stones
and filling leafy basins within my being;
joy is the sound of life
unfolding, unwinding
petal by petal, exposing
the sweet nectar
abundant for all to drink and be nourished by.

Outside of me, though,
there is another wild and rolling forest.
It is called Humanity.

I am a stranger here,
despite my face appearing clear
on the dark mirror surfaces
of its rivers and lakes.

But this Humanity, familiar,
is cold and foreign.

My easy mist
freezes and plummets
like sharp icicles
when met
by the sapless branches
of this strange forest.

They loom
leafless and skeletal,
gnarled fingers
pierced through by rays
of a spiteful Sun.

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

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

Just look at the mountains!
I scream.

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

Indeed, in this alien winter wilderness
even my eyes are blinded,
countless icy needles
conspiring a netted haze,
and perpetually dispelling
the fires of ascent.

Our soles, here, forever kept
from touching those peaks
where past trials would lie beneath us
as ant trails in a bush.

II.

Blinded and oppressed,
faced by an artic horizon,
I struggle
to move
a single foot.

Humanity
is a wolf
devouring itself.

Steam from smoking blood
coloring air and drowning the ground,
Humanity’s raw red heart
which has thundered perpetually
like tectonic plates across time–
forever clashing,
forever thrashing,
forever breaking apart.

The pillars of Man
crumbling in continuous
vein attempts
to usurp one another.

Such a futile fight
to sit under the light
of a Sun who continuously glares
at our confused planet.

Here, the animals fade with the flowers,
and the insects with the natural rhythms
of life and death.

In this forest,
we die discordantly,
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—a melody, no less,
we sing.

III.

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

It suggests by its tenderness,
its stonelike earnestness,
that we hear it,
that we heed its call
to discard our coverings
and stand bare.

The golden gale that carries seeds
to new promises and potentialities
requires trust.

Thus, I choose
to stand naked, baring
my leafy hermitage,
waiting
for this tundra’s absolving breezes
to brush my tingling flesh
and roll down the slopes of my lungs.

Nightly, I dream
that the soft and happy creatures
croaking, chirping, singing, within my being
disperse into this outer wind
and offer something warm and alive
to ice-scorched Humanity.

I am not a continent so far removed,
and against my own shadow
I remain hopeful.

IV.

I can hear.
I can hear!
From within the walls, I hear
the dripping!

Ice softening and seeping
into soothing earth.

I see my face.
I see it!
Within those puddles, my reflection
sits in their depths,
clear as moonlight.

Humanity, my kin,
my mirrored joy and despair,
my thunder and hale,

how can I ever truly hate you?

It is only ignorance
that embitters my eyes
and slants their sight.

There is a horizon.
There is.

It waits beyond the white hills.
I know this.

I know because there is a horizon
inside of me.

Beyond its edge, somewhere over land and sea
stands a godly tree.

It reaches like a tower,
ascending beyond the petty wintry whims,
and its branches cross bladed border
weaving a bridge and a revelation:

Winter and Summer standing united,
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.

I thought I was cured—
that the squirming feeling in my stomach had stopped—

that it went to sleep along with the anxious
breath my lungs hide when I hear about a new house
bought, this marriage sealed, this baby
born—I wish
my years

would feel less like dreamed decades and more real—
that somehow my shredded apartment would be

a home,
but I’m still ill,

and get cold chills
when I see those tall sharp buildings and endless roads—
when I hear the clattering teeth of the talking human being

on stage, their words wet and thick with
the smothering future and
the market value of things
and the career trajectories of
people and the hard work involved…the vacation
plans and
retirement plans and
insurance plans and
health plans and
plans of plans and
plans and—I’m sick,

and my stomach is churning again,
but the schematics of my life refuse
to burn in the incinerator

no matter how high I turn up the flames.