An Evening

Loneliness, sometimes, allows us to connect with ourselves in ways we often avoid before the onslaught of fears which riddle the armor of our lives:



An Evening


Alone with music of silence

I gather from the darkness

from the stinted limbs

of hope's shortened corpse

instruments in lonely symphony

plying their melodies

to connect each to a chord

of memory that spans the

sheets between here and

morning's birth but the

key of life is elusive, and

in the cools arms of night

I assemble the notes,

orchestrating final movements

before quiet settles over

my brow and I am

again holding myself

to ward off despair

Fighting Life: A Poem

As a child when I or my siblings would rail against naptime, my mother and grandmother would say that we were fighting sleep. As adults ironically we frequently take refuge in sleep, seeking escape from the peaks and troughs of our lives; nothing is more telling than the struggle which ensues in our waking moments:

I fold back the mesh
raising up out of
Sleep's warm netting;
I press my back down
listless against softness
desperate to recall dreams;
a blink, a nod, a yawn
acknowledging the inevitable
but defiant in the face;
I grasp firmly my pillow,
thrusting my legs forward
in pointless mimicry
yet all argument is moot,
squelched before absoluteness:
Morning has come, and the day begun

Haiku Couplets - Answers Between

Our most conventional stories portray the journey of our lives as a struggle between light and darkness. Rarely do these tales realize that the truths we seek do not lie at either end of the polarities but somewhere between all the layers of fleshy occultation. Here I employ the haiku in a less customary format to make such a case.

Shadow clips edges
promising coolly, bluntly
Desire's veiling

Glaring brightness hides
Love's unyielding penumbra
shining concealment

From the womb of both
past, present, future echoes
invites the birth - Choice