Innocence

your apologies fall
like alphabets from the sky—
light, loquacious, and
ridiculous.
and I'm sorry
that you're not more apologetic;
the auguries of your
innocence have a way
of making me feel
ashamed.

so I pick up
your guiltless excuses, and
patch in the holes with them,
paint the walls of my world with
your faultless smiles, and
gird my doorways with the
strength of your convictions.

for it is
the license of naivete
to love,
and the naivete of love
to lie.

_____________

Sometimes I think our values are products of our experiences, so perhaps we should be more receptive to the idea that as our lives change, our values can develop as well. When life gives you lemons, make lemonade, even if you don't like the drink. It may well turn out to be an acquired taste.

She Walks In Beauty

by Lord Byron
_____________

She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that's best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
Thus mellow'd to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.
One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impair'd the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress,
Or softly lightens o'er her face;
Where thoughts serenely sweet express
How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.

And on that cheek, and o'er that brow,
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent!

Things fall away

Sometimes, in life, you stagger on with your arms full of the things you want to hold on to, when it is obvious that the extent of your embrace only encompasses that much, and the clasp of your arms reaches only so far.

But your dull recognition of this sad fact only begins when things start to slip and tumble from over, under, and between your arms, and the rest of the items still wrought in your grasp reorientate themselves to fill in the gaps left by what fell away. And then you are aware of nothing but the burgeoning, unbearable lightness that is left in your clutches, and you heave and ache with the grievous weight of a vacuum in your arms, while the entire world is running out to sea around you.

And still you stagger on like a dismantling doll, bleeding from the holes left behind when parts of you came off together with the pieces of your world that fell away, disintegrating into the backwash with a final whispering hiss, that is the last breath of loss.

The poem that took the place of a mountain

by Wallace Stevens
__________________

There it was, word for word,
The poem that took the place of a mountain.

He breathed its oxygen,
Even when the book lay turned in the dust of his table.

It reminded him how he had needed
A place to go to in his own direction,

How he had recomposed the pines,
Shifted the rocks and picked his way among clouds,

For the outlook that would be right,
Where he would be complete in an unexplained completion:

The exact rock where his inexactness
Would discover, at last, the view toward which they had edged,

Where he could lie and, gazing down at the sea,
Recognize his unique and solitary home.

Wasteland

And it woke in me again, like a pathogen that was insidious and insistent and invincible, a chimera reawakened; and all I could sense was the roar that plumbed the unknown depths of an abyss that quaked and shuddered from somewhere within me, and that slammed the blood in my ears with a tidal force threatening to obliterate every barrier and boundary.

But in the wasteland that I inhabit, there is only a silence that the swirling and the sound fail to conceal, and amidst the detritus of my world are the wide and winding inroads you have haunted for so long. You may not know it, but it is blood that wells up, like the inheritance of the dusk, from within the cracks in my heart that meander after your every footfall.