Tuesday, March 19, 2019

Tales of Humanity in a Box

The “Do Not Enter” sign when I try to step
Outside my self
And I’m staring at the suitcases and bags –
There’s nothing I can say to this silent room,
Who will only repeat
What I want them to.

I wish I could heal them,
But the shadow of my own wound
Drops down like a strap of a backpack.
Still I try, to bless them and their guides
For as far as eyes and mind
Can conceive …

But it’s only a bonfire
On a vast and lonely beach
– Perhaps it is seen, from the air, from a distance,
It’s impossible to know –
Do the logs go on to warm my bones
Or fill one crease with light?

So much would be known
If I could only overcome
The ghosts in the air – tragic, ironic,
Helplessly unable to help themselves, and taking
What doesn’t protest as their unconscious right –
How to give anything of the perfect to the nadir?

To take care of myself, the prayer responds,
The thing that I do last, the hardest part,
That’s what joins universes in sound
– For the chaos from which I sprung
Will not be made whole
Except as the eccentric harmonizes.

– The container of hearts
Now triumphantly faces away –
Pathos is all that’s returned –
That mirror I don’t wish to see –
For I don’t wish to be,
Except as a wind through some trees …

Ah but there’s a vagabond
In the wasteland
Rubbing sticks and catching grubs –
There’s nothing, it seems, I can give him –
There has to be something here –
What can be called love.