Category: Existential Poetry

I fell, but then I was standing. How many falls have you taken? Really, how many? And you’re still here? Upright and alive? Notice that when a tree collapses it actually rises, it becomes a towering castle for chipmunks, a mountain peak for fungi, a floating planet for ants, and a universe for poets searching to transcend the gravity of their lives. Falling is a change of form, but not substance.

It can be a bad day,
a really terrible nasty day,
the kind of day where the sky is a blue bruise
and the air is a raking of nails…

It can be a bad day,
a truly unbearable day,
where gravity bulges into obesity
and shoulders slump and drag against ground…

It can be a bad day, but
all it takes is a single moment:

a word of buoyant gratitude,
a glacier smooth smile.

A bad day can remain a bad day—but
the shroud of clotted clouds
can been sundered by a blade of beaming luminance.

It can be a bad day,
but the eyes can still shine.

This is okay,
lying here,
being the night,
being the breath
and the rumbling wind
outside the window,
outside the body—
I have no body.
I am nobody,
only fantasies fluttering
and dusting
milky blackness
in a bedroom.
I cannot be shattered,
or have thoughts pruned;
no voice or word can touch
me, the stillness
of mind and life.
I am the womb
of night,
mother and babe,
father and son,
dreamer and dream
with knees pressed to chest,
and arms folded tight—
Truly, I have no limbs
only light
wings
that cut no air in their flight.

We are all dying
and because of this I want to hold your hand.

Each day,
we are dying.

Each
day
I want to hold your hand.

Can’t you see,
the shining towers of gold
are illusions in the sand.

The stones are melting
and the heat fades with the land.

We are dying, my friend.
Hold my hand.