Dragonfly Debts

After the battle, of many lonely years
The solitary times no longer worry,
It’s only grief and a slow dying
Facing snow, I know the color is white

A dirty walking road of dusk and clouds
There is too little light this far north
But I am old, I am finally old –
Too many places, communications are broken
*
Family is scattered, but I cannot read
My books of grief, there are too many poems
That sound the same, too many days
Each piece of spring it will return

I cannot grieve forever, my moving eyes
Return to important things, the beauty
Lost in my studies of the world, one must
Still seek joy, the greater good, across
*
The passing honors, I will reveal flying blossoms
Pollen in the wind, lost faith returns
I am drunk in the debts I have made
Nature’s drops of water, dragonflies

So little time to know each other
We should not part, happiness and I
Bliss with unusual you, I watch butterflies
Go deeper and deeper into a field of flowers.

Photography Credit: http://browse.deviantart.com/art/Dragonfly-187356316

Plato Does not Speak of This

I have learned to despise in myself
What those I loved left me for –
They are not here with me now, I must deal
With the sun and moon for my pillows

The grief of lonely years, the dust of doorways
And years of half-grain and empty homes
Cold rooms, half chaff, no jewels
I have learned to accept in myself

What those I once sought, did not value
For only I must truly, live with myself
The others, they do not sweeten this bitter sea
They give and retreat, without loyalty

As a thorn opens into a rose, my throat and lungs
Beg the light for an execution place
Where I will wail and be thirsty for my own blood
Purified, as the Nile once flowed beside my limbs

I was never a warrior, but a humble worshiper
My dead eyes did look into your living eyes
and I cried, for love’s work looks absurd at times.

Only a Passing Shrine

I live with Him – I see his face
Death, the sundown visitor
The look that claims us from the invisible
I’ve seen people die of grief
I’ve felt the enormous conviction
Of hopelessness, going unloved

The Stillness of the Room
When the brain stops being creative
I’ve looked in the eyes of the elderly
Tried to find the light in their eyes
There is an uncertain stumbling buzz
In the way I feel incomplete, in

The notices of feeling alive, intense
Is the lack of beloved visitors
The absence of true friends
Proof that physicians are wrong
About the human spirit, do I have
Permission to recant, permission to forget

That this life is a series of goals
That I learn and am growing
From traveling proceeding?
To Ache is human, it’s not polite
It’s just mortality’s oldest custom
The little toil of Love, on the edges
Of all that I hold dear….

Battered by Words of Sad Gold

Often, as I awake in my room
I am the first person holding a candle
To myself, the one that murmurs
In his dreams, weeping

These are the days, I wake up to
Empty fountains, ringing bells
For a world that falters
Nearly as much as I do

My lips taste timid metals
My mouth raw with hunger
To enter the capital of the opposite of indifference
I am sick with solitude

My eyes are lost to the nights
I end up staying home, too late alone
I see another solemn evening pass
There goes my life, it weighs upon me

I am the first and last person, I talk to
Each day, the mouth that cries
No water from these eyes at noon
When the world expects my strength

Summer sheds her petals in soft agonies
It’s only in Spring, I stare and stand before
The large white house, and ponder
The clarity of extinguished things

Like memory, like the angels of the soul
Beneath the slow martyrdom of strain
I spread my heart thin in massive words
Letters, poems, that don’t amount to much.

Uninterrupted Poetry

These poems are lost to me
Like the dead, there is no returning again
To what was, old loves

My mind feels them shouting there
Those who have died to us
Once here, now gone

It is the same with the music of the night
Grief dies to my renewal
I regenerate my lips, my ears, my thirst

Like a mausoleum of longing
I am, without ever being satisfied
I wake up to radiant mornings

Each and every day, jasmine at my feet
And I write poems, like lost waterfalls
Missed sunrises, broken comets

Stars on the tips of forgotten inheritance
These poems are lost to me
Like the emptying fulfillment of breath

Like a kind of solution to what I am
I create a rhetoric of distinguished ambiguity
Legislating my soul to be free

An embroidery without worldly cares
These poems are lost to me
I am not a thief of possession

But rather, a common beggar
With the guarantee of unearthly words.