Permission

When the old blind man comes
knocking on your spiked gate,
do you merely loosen the lock
for him?

Or do you, like a mother
having disciplined her child
clean his hands with stinging medicines
and bandadge them in
your own former nightgown?

Then, when he comes again
Ready to die
He need only cry out
and the gate will fall down before him.

[Who chose you]

Who chose you
O Dweller-in-hell,
Who chose you
as eternal symbol
of Face-turned-from-God?

Who chose you,
and if heaven began again
would you choose again the same?

How might heaven
Live eternally altered
In the light of your eyes

How might hell
Burn with different cruelty
under the will of another

Could mercy be gentler
or deceit more acidic
Love a greater burden
and lust like flaming oil

Or is the quality of human frailty,
the Echo-in-us-all,
Vastly the misunderstanding
of the immensity of our own choosing?

June 10

So what
of our being called to love
will move us from our
deceptively dependable
train car cabins
of living for tomorrow?

Tomorrow will not come; only today.

That is why duty never rests.
But emanates ever from the willing heartbeat of its owner.

Trust

All I have ever wanted was to give myself away as a gift of love, and to bear the consequences. Perhaps I shall be led to new strength.

Hold my love tenderly, but be not afraid lest it die. For only neglect, out of apathy or fear, will give it place to asphixiate.

Take it up, examine it in the light, in the dark and in the twilight. See how it resonates with joy in the embrace of the earth. Touch with your hand, or cradle it in your arms, and it will show you what it means when the leaves burn and die.

Pressed close to your heart, it will gaze at the pulsing wonder of your very life. Challenge it, and it will grow in strength. Speak, and ice will fall from the stars.

Ways of knowing shall tumble open, the floodgates will burst, and we shall be drenched.

Give your love in return, and we shall burn forever.

Oh this will consume me. But I would rather my Life consumed by Love than wasted at the cool altar of pleasure and memory.

Few love affairs ever truly end; the infinities of each person make them fatefully eternal.

The Propensity for Reading Thoughts

The trouble with my literary nature is that in reading, the language of the book becomes so much the language of my own mind that it definitively alters the manner in which I think, write and speak while reading and for an indeterminate amount of time afterward.

Having in the last few minutes just finished Love in the Time of Cholera, I feel myself well-equipped to write to anyone and everyone a love letter. But who would want such a thing from me? The timing of this reading/linguistic acquisition could not have been more horridly fortuitous, as I will now undoubtedly say the wrong thing to everyone in the course of my farewells.

For those who truly listen

Messiaen paints in the air,
Flashing brilliant colors like the
lightning of your hands on the keys:
Parting the reddened form of my mouth in a love song
to the birds
and
Pushing the deeping clouds
with feathered chords across the indigo sky.

Realizing a trinity of hued love:
You, the piano and a divinely ordained synesthesia -
While the night and I race our ears to listen.
Oh how the clouds do gallop!
Propelled by some unseen force beyond my senses,
or Perhaps just as my pounding heart,
trying to keep pace with the flight of your lightening hands.

Beginning: swept up by the pulsing course
of your creation,
ever-new,
Where colors, sounds and hands
birth one holy spirit.

Faster and faster
we all dive into the sky,
until - playing and listening are so much the same -
I am the piano
on which your fingers ecstatically sparkle
beating my heart,
pressing my lips,
voicing my cries.