In times as these

I feel ripe for a line

Ripe for death

The fruit has matured

To perfect consistency

Perfect roundness

and plumpness

With heart so heavy

I fall from the tree

On my own two hands

I fall from the tree

In times as these

It is hard not to feel ripe

Perhaps too ripe

For death

Surely my heart is sullen tonight

And weariness breaks upon me

with deadening glow

My musculature heaves to its own rhythm

Like a fantastical dirge framed by the night

With the very same weariness

My mind pens a line

Half-believing in its frail gifts

And on the broken back of this chunk of verse

I feel again the tenderness

That I thought had escaped

Senile destitution,

the currency of the market,

personal trade of ages,

capitulates to the force of dull time

and placates its own release.

Death: which is as much its release

as its preserver; its tattered,

unromantic Shepard

the old man does not even know;

his youth as age eternal, hoary birth,

the opening of a code:

Time compressed

Into the screen

Today is rough

Another day unseen

What can speak the words of the

spirit, in a time without none?

When the only listening proceeds

from the dear and fragile –

The presence of others, which only

lives for a small moment,

For its being is finite. 

Poetry is not language but it is life

In it, I know that the manifest and

variegated appearance of things

Is a gift, and only that.

No one can speak the language

of the spirit without knowing this:

That it is not words but music,

That signals, cries, and loves

What is in truth nothing.