Power is not a crown,
Nor trophy, nor gavel,
But activity allowed,
Restraint unraveled.
Power is function,
Respect, and validity;
Lifted injunctions,
Softened rigidity.
And it’s not innate, but granted.
We give and take it every day;
Some installed, some supplanted,
Some caught halfway…
Some defray.
Silk water, black by the dim moon,
Tinkling between our eager fingers,
Like crystals singing in the wind,
Chiming giggles and splashes of youth.
Phosphorescence shimmered on contact,
Illuminating our gentle lapping,
Like stars descended, stealing in secret,
To swim in our innocence.
And all we were was always all;
All we are, all we will be.
Every breath stretching back to birth,
And on into eternity, and our breath
All mingled together.
We don’t talk about the waterfalls,
The jagged cliffs or canyons.
We are dusty road companions
Who wait out the squalls
On either side of the lane.
Perhaps too much the same,
Too different, to be conquerors.
We are friendly wanderers
And there is no shame
In quiet existence.
We waited out the resistance.
We learned the property lines,
Stayed in proper confines,
With dogged persistence,
And trust.
It took time to adjust.
Trading common intensity
At the cost of intimacy,
But we didn’t combust
And that’s good.
Farther than we could
Without one another.
In time, we’ll discover
All we withstood,
All we let thrall.
Ideas alive, but only to me,
I know I fight what none else see,
But in the depths, inwardly,
I must face the fears that first faced me.
I long for those who forget my ways,
Forget my face, forget the day
I stepped out from the decay
And fell in love with their ways.
Melodramatic, but life can be too.
I wished so hard for you,
But wishes are things we won’t do,
Failures in our follow-through.
Only I may still be haunted
By all these thoughts I’ve flaunted
In the silence of open space, undaunted,
Even while they are so unwanted.
I have these things to say.
Some don’t hear, don’t care
To let me explain. Waiting there,
Abandoned in the rain,
I began my exodus and exile.
I never expected to stay away,
But the stay was different for me.
Transformation, some new way to be,
And I would fly the migration
Back home again.
Always a new me to betray,
I drifted with the tide
In anonymity, I applied
Distance as remedy,
But it cannot heal, just delay.
I see now, there will be a day
I return home
To cease the ache or roam.
Will you forsake
The same old me?
I venture again
Into the forgotten wilderness.
I walk through my years
Every step, every leaf,
Every new breath
Pushes in what I can’t expunge.
I wish you’d given me a token,
A reason to hope.
I sneak through this jungle of ghosts
And I’ve become one too.
I miss you. Have you moved on
From sticks and stones?
I tried to hide away during early growth
Under your top leaves, unbeknownst,
But I knew, I always knew,
Your roots spread farther underneath.
I was passing through, but you would stand
A mighty oak.
Here, in strange and familiar trees,
Green-filtered golden beams
Illuminate the lost, the found.
I thank my God.
I mourn my past.
I think to you.
A piece of you, how could I know?
When planted secret, planted deep,
Even broken offshoots regrow
In the right soil, in the right keep.
I thought I took a piece of you, but
Maybe I left a piece of me.
Striated clay half emerges;
Earth’s fractured rib cage.
Roots, like talons, exhume the sepulcher.
Streams dredge where they converge.
Nature airs her secrets on the finest stage.
I wish I’d told the truth.
A sudden inhale of untended earth,
Bolt of electricity to the clay in my chest.
I breathe what I bottled long ago.
I glimpse the hill I do not crest.
The loner lives, deprived but well.
Silence feeds the timid beast.
Stranded in unending green
Yields forth an ample feast.
A moment known, a moment hidden,
And really, what’s the difference?
Once remembered, forgotten again-
I was born in past and present tense.
Words, words,
I keep you close, fling you away
When I get old, get scared
Of what you will say,
Of what he heard.
Don’t lean on what bends,
What needs to bend before it breaks,
We’re too cool to admit
Pressure we can’t take, can’t shake,
Can’t confess as sin.
Ample warnings.
I am what I assumed,
What I admitted, what I anticipated,
I tremble as I consume,
Fire in the storming.
Falling
Only one safety net, but He
Spreads through tragedy and joy
Before the dawn of history,
All God, All King.
Funny, you never end up,
Where you expect to begin.
What you loved at the goodbye
You awake loving again.
I have lived sequential lives,
Overwhelmed a steady mind
With words of no consequence,
Words too true and too unkind.
Blooms passed through my fingertips;
I refused to grasp their stems.
Now I’ve crushed tender petals,
Both clasp and cast become sin.
Born from the coffin, my eyes
Are still blinking at new light.
Fresh beginnings are not fresh,
But they can bring fresh insight.
I can’t see that far just yet.
My friends are foreign lands,
The song repeats, the new hello,
The call to bloom where planted.
A good day with sun baked skin,
Laughter, merriment, the past
Lies dead in The Graveyard-
The ultimate outcast.
Still, I hear a distant tune,
Sounds of surf, and midnight communion.
I have no concept of home
Outside of that reunion.
Words, heaps of labels,
Only He
Knows what lies beneath
Truth and fables.
Never wine and roses,
But I remember
The sweet taste of September,
The salt fish in our noses.
I find I’m still scared
I’ll never be
Easy to love, easy to see
So undone, so unprepared.
I waste words like this,
Trying in vain,
To diagnose the rain
That falls because it is.
viewingcamelot 