Category: Existential Poetry

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.

There is snow in my lungs
and though I try to warm my breath
by inhaling the sunbeams of the day
I seem to only speak an icy bitterness.

I used to dream
of singing, of adding to the world notes of amber gold,
but after seasons of unchanging season,
winter has set itself within my bones.

My vocal cords are frozen,
dead shores along white coasts,
waves encased like barreling wails,
burning to break forth.

They rage in me like blizzards,
covering wood and stone in crystal,
coated tears shed by shaded people crumbled
in unlit hearths,
and whose pains crackle in my ears.

To hear! Oh, to hear, loneliness so pure
that on its edge I see my image clear,
and to know! Oh, to know, that even those I hate
carry the same faceless frigid fears.

Is this humanity’s condition?
Doomed to days and deaths,
to wander in the storm,
white-eyed and blind—

Am I,
with small body and fragile mind,
to inhale every sour flake that curdles sky?

If so, I am a miserable host
because my words seem not to melt
or shatter ice,
and there is an iceberg enormous
lodged deep within mankind.

But the sea is wide,
and if I can continue—

continue sailing by star instead of sight,
then along the strips of sun I’ll cast my faith
and set to life
an ember in my chest—

in whose smallness rests the end
of permafrost.

And should it grow—

grow to rage like bead of flaming blood in cold,
then with frostbit hands I’ll grasp

my voice,
thaw the chords,
draw its breath—

and with full stretch
of lungs and heart

I’ll break apart the walls
with a song of avalanche.

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.