Isn’t solid ground
Or a bar of gold
Or an Oracle
The Song of Songs
Is an empty bell
And a rose is just a rose
Author: Miklos Arany
Fighting for breath
In a house full of open doors
One closing feels like an blindfold
Full of noise and no time for sleep
Sitting alone after midnight
Listening to you breathe careless
Dreamless dark distances fill the room
This part isn’t love it isn’t anything
But disappointment and solitude
In the promised land broken and lost
With nowhere to rest and fighting
Sleep & Dreams
When you return tonight
Slow tired and warm with caresses
And kisses I’ll sleep alone
Apart from your crowded voices
And mad loves’ abandon
This tempest tosses my mind
Like a lost wing and loses my way
In the flittering dark
And the slow black below like
An ocean of still divers
Great Debate
The asymmetry of science and religion
Is so great the two can scarcely share a line.
The truths of the former stand undisturbed
By the latter, no matter what its claim may be,
While religion falls and lies, enraging, daggerfull
At every pinprick science incidentally delivers.
Soup Every Morning
Every green, running water,
And a thousand voices singing
Stars that cross the night.
Tribes come down like shadows
To make castles in the sand.
Here we were, a minute warmth,
An hour’s embrace, quiet days
And nights of eyes brighter
Than bright — fires, dancing,
Sighs, looping paths in the dark.
A long road to the heart for
A happy few, strong as stone,
Strong as love, and mercy
Full of wonder every morning.
Terminal Restlessness
Like the bird fighting a wire,
This flyer cannot run by rail
And falls, fluttering, well down
A tunnel steeper than night.
Lasting peace is always late,
A soft embrace like moonlit
Horses running away, subtle
As a dream at dawn — lost.
Prayer
Let the light die tonight.
Let this ship go sailing high
On still and moonless water.
Be fearless and breathless,
The shore now close at hand.
Gateway to a dreamless land,
This last loving and leaving
Is the worst and best of all.
Ending the body electric
Is beginning nothing new.
Life
This life is not mine, and that is not yours.
We hold only slender shoots, single notes,
Singular bells, green then dark then silent.
Rough, we drink our joys and sorrows
From a well that runs ever deep, ever
Drowning deep, but still and ultimately dry.
Are we each or are we all? Illusory ghosts,
Spirits fleshed and undressed, by turns
Boisterous and quiet, hot and chill, atoms
And ions entangled, untangled, blazing
And broken, too much too fast to stay
A course, always picking ourselves up
From the rocks, undone, released for life.
Agreement
Cold and sleeping trees
Verdant recall and promise
Knowing hope is love
Digging Leviathan
The dream is still there, even if it’s etched in glass
And a sandstorm is bearing down, the hit or miss
Uncertain as a long and sleepless, starless night.
I hate to hope, unreason reasoning that longing
Begets distance, a monster birthed by troubled sleep.
There has to be a low door in the wall, however small.
The dream is an orchard summering on the far side,
Light and ripe and sweetly fragrant yellow fruit
Like murmurous, laughing constellations of sun,
Like love and warm hands, like green memories.
There has to be a way, because hope is all there is.
