I look at the wrong things and cry But tears are taboo, aren’t they? Like used razors or sandpaper towel Or the last page of a living novel And yet I do, not because I cannot avert my eyes From the still beauty Subdued by time But that I would witness In those aching final ages Filled with long and random sunlight My disappearance Into wet satin And gossamer ash Of original nothingness
If fire could speak of pain And water too of how it feels to suffocate Beneath the weight Of drowning men They would But flesh cannot heal the sky Nor blood fill a river dry For all thoughtful fantasies are unwritten tragedies Beginning at birth And only deepening when you die
So I weep for the ocean of sadness Clenched inside my throat I pray for the lambs sheltered In the veins of my battered boat And I yearn to leave the answers With my back against the dying day To rest amidst the sleeping shepherds For I have nothing more to say…
Death, do not cry I know; you are no one’s friend But that does not make you; a foe Like all who have been and are being swept away Like a clove leaf upon a current You too are destined by design To sow and grow; sorrow That abandoned thistle tree Which all passes and pretends not to see
Death, do not cry When your choices go wrong There are so many voices asking To add another verse to their swan song But you know as do I That music is sweet only for so long And it starts with no cymbals and shall end with no gong
Death, do not cry People do care about you a lot You may not always be the fountainhead But you are almost always an afterthought And we may not think of you as we breathe Or when we play the games of Holy Land But we do rehearse our union every night Though not all of us understand
Death, do not cry We shall meet for once and forever But before that I must ask an honest, humble favor: Of all the places for us to meet And greet, if you could visit me when I am fast asleep Then there shall be nothing for me to weep As I skip; the curtain call of my every emotion And be like a nameless raindrop falling into an aimless ocean
My life A candle Waning slowly Knows not For whom it’s burning Or why Just that it is And soon shall Dissolve Out of existence And there is nothing it can do now Except burn, burn and burn With a hope That when the wick goes out Atleast the wax will survive
There were cypress beyond the city wall With cones like eyes upon them And I tended each for long until I felt They saw far too much of me And showed far too little of themself (Those leaves with their whispers and those roots with their secrets) So I did not water come the summer, I did not water come the winter; And the leaves, they yellowed and fell, And frost took the roots Slipping needles of ice into their breaths Till decades were laid silent Like sand beneath the ocean. I walk beyond the wall now and then Dressed in nothing but the evening And stand under the cypress And watch the antler twigs sway Hiding nothing now but melancholy motion The sense of sleep And I wonder at the difference, if any, between our shared nakedness
Do not let me die
In a hall with white walls
Near windows overlooking
The world’s asylum
Filled with paper praying people
Watering themselves
Towards an early spring