Eventually

Eventually, the undeparted dead,

Alive without, long since gone within,

Shall arise to feel both love and pain.

There are no dead that cannot live again.

Even those long buried shall begin
Rising up towards tears and rage and need.

Emptiness

Emptiness costs a bit extra:
In distant horizons there is peace.
Given two windows on a whitewashed world,
How could one not long for the sea?
The soul wings it out to the horizon,
Yet stays contented in a well-ordered room.

Sing to the gauze-covered shallows,
Inlets and coves and the open sea!
Xylophones tingle on porches unseen.

Inclined

Eighty-three is happy to be here.

Inclination makes her so inclined.

Gifts of temperament, like gifts of grace,

Hang the veil of choice across her face,

Thus making will the uncaused cause of kind.

Yet one wears clothes that one was born to wear.



There is much, of course, that she must bear,

Having lost a portion of her mind.

Recent trains are difficult to trace,

Ending up in alleys dark and blind.

Even so, there’s much she still holds dear.

Early

Early on, there's a point to regret:
In creative pain, one can make changes.
Grief is a wild, foolish, helpless rebellion,
Heart against stone, desire smashing against
The locked fact, the impenetrable event,
Yielding nothing but the wash back into life.

For one who grieves, there's no point to regret:
One lives through pain, it's not a time for changes,
Undoing in one's heart what one must accept in life,
Repositioning the precise stones one smashes and smashes against.

Challenging

Challenging the veil does not come cheap.
One gets to know the provenance of hunger,
Living off the energy of wonder,
Unwilling to trade ecstasy for sleep.
More than life, one must want to be
Bestride the instant of the revelation,
Uniting image and imagination,
Seeing first what now the world might see.
Dread and longing dance across one's dreams,
Alive with hope for charismatic schemes.
Years wearied, wasted, wait impatiently.

Alexandra

Alexandra is not one, but many.
Life flows through her boundaries like a river,
Entering her while exiting another.
X-rays show one, but we know of plenty:
Ancestors mingling with descendents;
Near relatives pouring through the sluices;
Death, the loyal angel of her graces,
Resting momently in recent remnants,
Alive again in her awakened senses.

Knows

Adrian knows well the unsaid rules
Demanding that one be what one is not.
Restraining the fierce appetites within,
Interning the insurgents bent on sin,
As he matures, he learns to love his lot,
No longer heeding the laments of fools.