Category: Existential Poetry

I have inherited a worthless gift:
the gift of words,
an impotent wind
that cannot shake the feeblest branches of this world,
cannot support a nest, cannot roll a stone,
cannot even feed the poet who gives his blood, and burns
upon its crucible
his soul.

It is a worthless practice, yet I am committed to it
for reasons hard to distill,
like trying to discern the features of a mountain through a maze of trees.

I am compelled to poetry
like a moth is compelled to confuse
a lantern flame for starlight.

To ash, to salt
to the dust that comprises the firmament of dreams,

a bird given the gift of wings under the sea. 

A litany
like snow falls
upon my heart in place of sleep.

A litany for the lost,
for the fading memories.
A winter’s mist, white descending sky,
how it pools and blinds childhood’s dreaming eyes.

Simple joys
bright along a field, once here,
then lost within a veil.
North winds raging, freezing tears to jaw.
Once a child, now a private weeping
winter.

A litany
like heart reels
from toils, from time’s spinning wheel.

A litany for the lost,
for people known, people unknown,
buried beneath mounds of mounting snow.

A broken home,
a father’s noose, love’s betrayal, a world obtuse.
Stars, perfect in their celestial beds, shine,
unmoved.

A litany
like weather weeping
ash.

A litany for the lost,
the smothered child, the leaves
on graves,
dead.

The flowers lie buried,
the mourners sleep forgotten,
all has sunk
under falling,

falling,

falling, snow.

But I will never sleep,
and I will always sing
for you

a litany,

a litany,

a litany…

I don’t know what is colder,
the winter shards of wind piercing through my window
or the acute awareness of ingratitude within myself.
Bizarre how life daily strips the things one loves,
and yet the lesson is never learned.
The old fisherman that breaks his line and loses his fish
complains about the mango back home.
The sweat of summertime is overwhelming,
yet here I am, lamenting the cold.

You sit in so many different places, in a park, in an office, in a subway, in a car. The scenes around you change, like maelstroms, like rapids, and yet the center remains. The eye is fixed, and it watches, and somehow in that watching, what solidifies the eye and differentiates it from the transience, also begins to change. Mountains once the pinnacle of awe become speedbumps on a road, and what used to stain the heart with disdain earns paternal empathy. The eye that watches becomes the eye of change, and seer and scene move adjacent to one another. It’s a dance, a dance of becoming, where the theme that drives the rounding and bending and turning and leaping does not end, instead ebbs and softens then hardens, quiets then explodes—and there is only beginning. You are a continuum, and when you reach a hand to touch the handrail, you are the cool metal turned heat and the pumping of blood within every artery of animal life. The pigeon that flies overhead is the freedom between your temples that millions around the world cry out for as they are crushed by the immense weight of your boot. How like a stampede you are, through rain slicked neon streets, through dry dead grass patched earth, through glades in the hearts of forests that circulate with red ants carrying the nutrients of a day left hot and shivering after the sex of life and death. The lamb is born, and with it the sin, and on the mountain meditates a Hindu monk that knows the letters that make up your name. It is his name as well, and that of she who lives at the base, the base of your desires and dreams and despair, and in the mirror shares your face. And somehow, with all this change around and within you, you sit, here, there, and everywhere, reading this.