If you listen carefully until the silence tugs
At heartstrings,
Or just whispers to the sky in confidence,
With patience, you may hear the sorrow,
Feel exhilaration
As it trickles through the veins of all posterity.

A certain segment of the circus we call
History
Has been assigned the task of keeping track
Of all those things that haven’t easy passage
To the concrete and sequential.

Love, and hurt, and loss, and endless worry.
Heartbreak, death, abandonment, betrayal;
These are life’s immutables,
Though they lend weight and mass to every
Cleansing breath.
No measurement exists to tally up
Collective sum of all the mortal coils.

So all this serves as an apology,
An affirmation for the poet’s craft.
His calling to give voice and record to
The essence of humanity’s parade.

Read any poem and feel the chill of death,
The hollow song of absolute regret.
Or turn the volume up and hear the bass -
Anticipation warming up the blood.
The heat of all the treble and the strings
May overwhelm the brass or tame the drums.

Something divine runs through the length of verse.
So that all poetry is just the same,
As any other while it stays distinct
And offers testimony to but one
While paying homage to the core of all
The family of man and woman too.

Let everyone experience, in awe
The subtle genius punching at these chords
Whose brevity is only overwhelmed
By overwhelming unintelligence.
To wit is fine, to wither, yours, more apt,
As fleeting as it is, its stain persists
And fogs the broken mirrors of my day.

What point did poetry become the medium
Of blighted conciousness with which the dumb
Lead blindness like a bellows to the hearth
With flippant, trash bin, faux-intelligence.
Has mediocrity a gravity?
Something pulls the loathesome to your voice,
And concentrates stupidity by gallon.

You’ve got them by the ears, now loose your chirp!
You’ve got them by the eyes, so add some flash?
You’ve got them coming back and digging in
Like dogs atop a concrete block for bones.
So piss your nothings, scream your blackened tones
In time there will be no more collars here.

You’ve gotten here, a flea, on shoulders less.
Illiterate corpses call your verse “a mess.”

If matter lasts forever and its energy endures,
A piece of Caesar, one of them,
May march right through your pores.
If not an Emperor of Rome,
Then one a bit obscure.
The largest point – is anything
Quite ever truly yours?

I think this covers why it is that simple folk prevail.
Within the scope of character
A hero wags his tail.
Or maybe its resistance swells
When bravery goes pale.
Regardless, in our marrow
Flows the willingness to fail.

Let’s face it: some things precious override the risk of death.
Those things you cannot live without
If nothing else is left,
Are worth the time and effort;
Every single, painful breath
Is justified by righteous pride.
Rewards come after Death.

I feel in my bones that music lives,
That melody is timeless – old and new.
But what if consciousness is one
And being One – the same?

Suppose all song is nothing more than breath
That animates. The finger touching finger
From the power to the fore!

Think hard of it! If notes and chords
The artist thinks he makes,
Are nothing more than every bit
Of happiness and grief
Committed to the measures
In the everlasting Scales
That serve as mordant score
For all the interludes we live.

This truth would then explain the riddle.
How is it that the face of tragedy
Always stops the tune?
Whence comes the silence
When we undergo the heat of Hurt?

What if? What if? What if?

What if the ringing anthem never stops –
It’s just that hearing faints away
When moments of adversity storm in.
What if? What if? What if?

What if the music lingers long
And plays as loud and strong?
But we in helpless haplessness
Can feel only what’s wrong?

Then music then is life,
And life rings on and touches hearts,
With strings and keys and melodies
And never stops nor starts.

We sometimes seem to stay in stasis
- Where
Our advance or retreat is naked to the well-dressed eye.
Today’s ennui is indistinguishable from
Yesterday’s fog.

This trench warfare of the spirit
- Like
The real deal – puts us face-to-face with the already dead.
Our war of attrition malingers here
In empty pockets.

The mercy of inertia isn’t lost
- On
Fretful fingers worrying the beads of those most devout
And closely linked in faith with physics –
For the path to Valhalla is overgrown
With ground cover.