Category: Thoughts

A freckled face was her distress,
You’d think her own, but you’d be wrong.
She’d swear up and down she’d ate enough,
That all was well, but don’t they all?

Beneath the surface she hides the truth
Of years of pain and loss.
She wore her smile like a shield,
A shield that shine in the sun’s warmth.

Then, alone, the smile would fade.
Sometimes tears, and other times,
Silence.

Years had passed, and still
Time did little to ease her suffering.
A hidden hurt that no one could know.
The mirror was her enemy then,

Unable to look at the her looking back.
But from that, those knowing eyes
Piercing inward, her stomach could not take it.
She swore she ate enough.

And looking up, she’d wash her face.
Her freckles would spark those moments.
Alone, she smiles. A sad smile.

It doesn’t take long for it to fade.
Tears. Or silence.
She hates the silence.
And she misses that face.

The energy of the Universe,
The speed of particles hurling through space –
Through our planet, our trees, our bodies:
Fire within and without.

One spark ignites, blazing hot,
Turning all form to ash.
That which fire does not burn:
time tends to that destruction.

If fire is the giver and taker of life,
Time is the doler of justice,
for time of life or fire.
And what is left cannot burn.

Heat is the awaiting combustion,
A creative and elemental force,
Unbridled in its curiosity and fervor –
Ever wandering in and among our spirit.

We feel the temperature of the sun;
the burns of flame and fire.
We know the warmth of summer’s day
and the safe enclosures in winter’s heart.

But so few have accessed the heat of creation,
The first flames licking life into mud and stone.
Those with such knowledge are genius,
or madmen, for it is blessing or curse.

Many more seek it, not knowing.
Asking question after question,
Hoping to receive an answer.
Not knowing they ask the question to the answer.

Seek, and ye shall find.
Knock and it shall be opened.
Who knows the way to Cold Mountain?
What do you carry with you, other than yourself?

Heat burns – can give or take.
But it is only the essence.
It is only everything, as it is nothing.
Those who speak know not; who know, speak not.

Have we moved past the age of poetry?
The verse that speaks most to us
is from an age gone by,
and as our language escapes us,
it seems less likely for us
to make use of the words
in the ways that the poets had.

We speak now in limited vocabularies,
forever adding words
To our dictionaries
but removing so many others
from our usage.
We stagger through life hindered
By our shrinking lexicons,
so suddenly incapable of
conveyance and appreciation
of language.

That it would be Gutenberg’s folly
To propel us in the ages of technology
While the actual inventions of his genius
Wither and rot to our consciousness.

Books no longer bound by conventions,
Electronic, delivered to illumined screens
and forgotten.
Words, too, sit unused, unheard,
Save for ramblings of intellectuals and
Essays, long-formed and mostly unread.

Where do unspoken words go?
What graves guard the deceased syllables
of prose and poetry?
When the world reduces its collective rhetoric
to mere utterances, what remains?