Wednesday, November 01, 2006

THE LIGHT WITHIN

A blank page,
A full pen
to capture the ephemeral,
the eternal, forever
Marked in time
By puny perception.
Discovered, digested, shat.
Future, present, past.
How many marked the same inspiration
In how many different ways
In how many different times?

Perhaps there’s only one idea
Out beyond the chaotic, congested cloverleaves
Of synaptic traffic on high speed thruways
Of convenient habitual thinking
Where one’s gentler nature radiates
Well being and good wishes,
Enhancing thought, context and comfort,
Evoking remark, journal entry and action.
Others ideas, writings and achievements
Mark such timeless personal experience
Once removed by literature or time.

It is the same experience
In different pastures.
And you get Christians, Muslims and Buddhists.
And you get Democracies, Theocracies and Tribes.
And you get the Kagel toss, the Masters and the Bolshoi,
None necessarily antagonistic or opposed
But all very good reasons to be in different places.
Better to be thinned out in mutual
Appreciative tolerance of differences
Than to suffer suppression of natural variety.
All derivative of the
One idea.

Communication,
Real communication,
Wherein the ear and voice become one,
Makes an event of perception
A shared experience
As unique as the occurrence
Of such identification.
That may not occur even when
Both parties actually share the same experience
If they never acknowledge it somehow.

Strangers speak of the weather
A thing surely common to all
But those you’ll never meet
Outside cells
Or lonely, fetid rooms
Sentences self-imposed.
Prisoners speak freely of their crimes
While words are worldly weapons
The voluntary solitary shuns;
Judgments being many murders
Endured ‘til dying ends it all.

In such rooms ruminate
Warriors of the ultimate battle
Between love and rejection,
Self esteem and conformity
Creativity and business
Self against the World
Sufficient solitude
World goes away
Read of others’
Lives alone.
The light
That lit the pen
May fall upon the page
To illuminate that one idea.
Feelings of failure to fit are finally seen
As evidence of truly independent thought
And the inherent stability of variety
Requires a metamorphosis of perception
From self against theworld
To self as inescapable part,
And painter of our world.

No longer the dog being wagged by the tail
Awake angry and the world frowns.
Awake sad and it looks like rain.
Awake happy and get smiles on the street.
Someone loves us and we’re in love with the world.

Without the eye of an artist
One mistakes one’s picture for the pitcher
And one’s words for the truth.
The artist delights in the myriad versions
In one inspired perception
And the unbearably fine insufficiency of poetry
To nail down truth with words.


Strangers on a cold, drizzly street corner
Venture conversation about the weather while waiting
For a light to tell them where and when and how to go.
Do they go on about their chilly, mundane, sodden way
Obedient to blind blinking convenience,
Or does it burn within them?

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