Liability

How long before long will we learn
that love is a cause and not a consequence
how soon, how often will we teach each other
that love is not a defence but an element of the crime.
How many times will you say I need to know
that love is a lie I don't need to believe in:
how love is your excuse, my justification.

How quickly will I come to admit to myself
that love lies not in the heat nor in the moment
nor the hand bringing down the knife
but in my guilty mind that compels the blade
to darken the night with my heart's bleeding
into a pool so dark I see your reflection:
you walking away, saved by your omission.

You had no duty to care: I had done all the assuming.

Looking forward

When the world my heart is rending
With its heaviest storm of care,
My glad thoughts to heaven ascending,
Find a refuge from despair.

Faith's bright vision shall sustain me
Till life's pilgrimage is past;
Fears may vex and troubles pain me,
I shall reach my home at last.

_______________
Charles H. Spurgeon

What you do not know

You are more important to me than you know it.
You are important in the way I know the morning will be clear, and it will be quiet;
in the way my feet find the ground.
You are important in the way my voice comes to me when I command it,
and in the way your laughter follows my joy.

You are important to me in the simplest of ways.
I do not find you in the clouds, nor the stars:
you are none of these
but the quiet endless arch
on which these lights and colours hang themselves.
You are the silence and the stillness
on which poetry speaks and music resounds.
You are the page on which no words need be written
for meaning to be spoken.

In this sort of comfort,
there is no meaning to be hidden
no strings still attached
nor feelings left unchecked.
In this sort of silence, and under this sort of sky,
I have no words left unshared.

Freedom

We are pendulums swinging across the arcs of our days; we give each other momentum and let each other fall. Sometimes we swing and we catch each other, and then we intertwine and loop dizzily in space, and we draw the circumference of each other's lives; we chase each other along the same orbit. But we always forget that when we finally find each other across the void of string and space, the momentum stops also; and then we disentangle, we swing away from each other and spin again in equal and opposite directions, no circle too large or too far away from the other, and then we are free agents once again. We are free to love and to hate, but we are free most of all. At the top of every arc we are free most of all.

My mistake

I could not bring myself to say it; I would not allow myself the possibility of failure, nor introduce the moment when I would no longer be master of myself. I could not say it; I could not ask the question gilded with hope and with doom, and in failing to ask it I had failed. For nothing else but your affirmation is failure, and failure is everything but the shape of those words forming, with precious slowness, like silver in the air, like the peal of a bell.

Heart's fire

There're certain things you can't bring to admit to yourself, certain memories that are ageless and changeless, locked away like a prisoner within a circle of heart's fire. These are the things that have sculpted you, formed you into the person you are; you see it in your hands, your eyes, the shape of the words that come from your lips. These are the things that dance like fingertips across your visions of the present: the twitch of recognition, of recognizance, of recollection that flickers across your face like the shadow of an osprey, like the shiver of water as memory blossoms slowly upon the pool of your consciousness.

The answer of the hills

Laugh, and the world laughs with you;
Weep, and you weep alone.
For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth,
But has trouble enough of its own.
Sing, and the hills will answer;
Sigh, it is lost on the air.
The echoes bound to a joyful sound,
But shrink from voicing care.

Rejoice, and men will seek you;
Grieve, and they turn and go.
They want full measure of all your pleasure,
But they do not need your woe.
Be glad, and your friends are many;
Be sad, and you lose them all.
There are none to decline your nectared wine,
But alone you must drink life's gall.

Feast, and your halls are crowded;
Fast, and the world goes by.
Succeed and give, and it helps you live,
But no man can help you die.
There is room in the halls of pleasure
For a long and lordly train,
But one by one we must all file on
Through the narrow aisles of pain.
_________________
Ella Wheeler Wilcox

But somehow I think all that doesn't quite hold true these days; one man's pain is all too often another man's pleasure, and this is the schadenfreude that is woven into the texture of all relationships. It is the double entendre that echoes behind all men's laughter, like a silent chuckle hidden into the darkness behind one's palm.