Child

This child standing so hazily in front of me
Defeats my heinous attempts at sanctity.

His gaze is empty:
Silent as the stars,
Drinking in the world,
Seeing each crisp occurrence
In the space around him
From the distance of his solitude—

He:
Vapor angel,
Fading
Into
Air.

And I cannot compete.
My gaze breaks with each expectant object;
I cannot converse with any one in particular.
The grown-ups approach,
With chatter and noise,
And I am ashamed to know their lingo.
He lingers on,
Dreaming in the green currents
Of his secret revelations.

Yes, they seem secret even to himself…
And that is his beauty--

Beauty that deprives me of my gravity addiction,
And slowly I float into the marginal realms
Of this noisy room, never
To be heard from
Again.

Elegy

We
Screamers,
We lovers of laughter,
We children dancing
In the warm wavelengths
Of life as it spins us,
Smiling, proud—

At the end and in-between
The hushed holinesses and
The jittering inconsistencies,
The dolorous dark daisies of doubt
In the blind night
And
The redemptive chill
Of the morning’s red caresses,
Underneath the hills
Of our meager thoughts
And howling out of the mountains
Of our emotions,
At the deaths of pets
And in old people’s eyes—

Yes, we know, but not soon enough,
That kisses are from lips
That wrinkle and sigh,
That years are emptied of their months,
Which sob out their weeks,
Which blink through their days,
Which are made of mere hours,
Which are made of mere minutes,
Which pass by in a mere sixty seconds
(Seconds that drip quietly from a faucet
As we sleep through a third of our lives)--
While all the books
Bleed out of print,
While the Word
Drowns in the darkness,
And the world sleeps softly on…

So we fade:
Our dying exhale
Follows fast
On our new-born gasp.
Choose your words wisely.

Existentialism

How the hell do you presume to form a unified philosophy around a fundamental devotion to individualism? The myriad divergences are dizzying. The paradox is apparent. The devotees are self-baptised saints. The dogmatic god is dead and from the soil over his rotting body grow flowering acts of ownership.

On Seeing (or, I'm Sorry, You Hyperactive Sentence Snatchers)

Occasionally, in some un-searched corner of my day, as life swirls about me repeating its sardonic maxim that I am not in control—mocking me, pinching and poking, and then, like a playful father suddenly addressed by a business associate, straightening up with impenetrable features and a stone-like jaw—yes, as life spins about me like a myriad of streaming faces circling a dizzy carousel, and I am running and flailing about in joy or despair (it doesn’t matter which—only the movement brings the paralyzing realization)—occasionally, my chaotic, desperate spasms coincide with life’s undulating waves of faceless motion…and I catch a still-framed glimpse of the force that is so absentmindedly tossing me about. An he, in shock, in indignation that such a singularly muddled creature as myself—a creature born into emptiness and doomed to either a bitter, dark honesty (graying with age to a nasty pessimism) or a self-deceit so strong it must continually change faces to avoid falling apart—he, almost embarrassed that such a naked, tear-streaked child should happen upon him as he tinkered with the next trap to hurl at my feet, his face involuntarily contorts in unveiled conceit and he slaps the spinning globe into an even more fearful whirl, casting me once again into the pressing darkness of my centripetal void….

And eventually I forget the time-tucked pause. But sometime later, when the winds have whistled countless tunes to my dancing toes, when my dialogues with eternal days and hours have slowly and profoundly twisted and kissed my deepest being into new shapes and rhythms, after my path has diverged at such subtle points of sin and redemption from its previous direction—in short, when I have so consistently lived in the moment so as to be completely transformed in my power of forgetting—then, unexpectedly, the textures once again catch, the revolutions of an overpowering Life and my tiny, virginal one coincide and entwine for a silent eternity. And when again life has outsmarted me, and world which encompasses my narrow fantasies has proven too proud for me to discover to any extent but that which both teases in its gasping brevity yet quenches some unknown area of my soul—when this happens, it seems undeniable that there is a progression slowly forming, that these seductive and elusive slaps of reality are forming some mysterious and inimitable story, some dialectic among the gods concerning my fate, spoken in a language I cannot comprehend, but which, at such hopeless points of resignation that I am turning to give up, I catch a familiar turn of phrase. And the universe is a twinkling puzzle expanding around me, and I am its center, and God’s glory is blinding me from every direction. And I never forget.