THESE BLESSED RAINS (Originally published in Nomad's Choir)

Sky is crying
its raindrop tears
reflect my solemn eyes
upon the pond
of all selflessness.

These blessed rains,
surge through my veins,
my earth-sunken toes
retap their roots again,
in the absence of Disunity,
my fathomable finite essence
nourished, rehydrated & found,
at once unbound
of the encumbering gauze
of worldly inflictions,
now standing,
a human tree,
awaiting to be sunken
back beneath yet above it all,
nestled within the womb
of the Omniscient Benevolence,
to sprout up in due time,
a new creation,
wielding fruits
to overflowing.

SECTOR (Penned in twenties)

Beaches and once barren, desolate Earth
dessicate and desolate
but if in the womb of God,
surrogate Father of a Humankind
plagued by bias and the insidious Bigotry
of Subjectivity, Relativity-
all so transparently veiled in corrosive cynicism.

Yes, don't get me wrong,
there are just as many occassions for song,
as there are for weeping,
but if we never dream while awake,
we are always,
sleeping.

FAMOUS LAST WORDS (Penned in twenties)

Voltaire once said,
Thereupon his death bed,
"I would renounce the devil,"
"And eagerly bring level,"
"The wayward heart of every rebel,"
"But I ponder I must refrain,"
"In blissful disdain,"
"For though I am a man weak in Death,"
"In Life I was quite keen to see,"
"Inborn as is the breath,"
"That now, especially,"
"' Tis not the time for making a new enemy."

-inspired by a quote that was credited to the French Renaissance writer, historian & philosopher Francois-Marie Arouet (known by his pen-name Voltaire) upon his death bed, when a priest asked him if he would like to confess of his earthly sins and renounce the devil

LOOK BEYOND THE DESPAIR, FOR HOPE DOES LIE THERE (Penned as a teen-I began as a poet/writer composing devoutly Christian verse)

In this troubled world in which we live today,
There seems to be for much to pray,
And oftentimes one is forced to deal,
With daily horrors that prove all too real,
Yet in the midst of one's struggle to cope,
Beyond all despair does lie hope,
For Hope & Despair are both derived from a similar intensity of emotion,
Only differing when being put into motion,
So, before the darkness of Despair casts its self-defeating shadows upon you,
Just remember the Lord's promise and how it still reigns true,
For when you begin, in Despair to cry,
All you must do is look up to the sky,
And reach out and receive the Lord's gracious & healing Light,
For only then can the mortal human Spirit truly take flight,
And although at this moment the tears may continue to fall,
These are made of Joy & Salvation, so stand tall,
Do not allow the weighty mass of Sorrow weigh down your heart's wings, nor the chaotic rumble of inner turmoil drown out your true voice,
Instead look for comfort, hope & security as the angels of God's mercy & amazing grace sing & then rejoice,
For even though this world seems ready to fall apart,
This does not apply to what lies within your heart,
For God made each and every one of His children strong,
And to His Light & Love only do we rightfully belong,
So whenever you begin to feel as if this life is simply too much to bear,

Look to the Heavens and beyond the Despair, for Hope does lie there.

LEGACY (Penned in 20's)

Before I became human,
I was a Poet.
I would swim the streets at Night,
scavenging for Treasure
in those places Most Low which most often called Home,
reaching Fullness Of Enrichment only after I had exchanged all that I had to give.
But, however Noble it may sound, there were no true Vows of Poverty or Chastity taken-
but only the feigned Destitution of a Creature for whom everything was always rich & fully satiating.
For I was a Poet, one of an elite classification of species,
whose sole utility was to speak for for those whom couldn't adequately speak for and by themselves,
Yet in order that we could truly become enabled & ennobled for this Metaphysical feat,
we had to sacrifice ourselves willingly and oft willfully before the Shrine of The Flood-
the Flood of all human highs & lows-The Experience, raw & uncensored, unashamed & unafraid.
In essence, we poets were interpretors of The Wind & The Rain,
keepers of the elusive yet essential,
the soothsayers of oral mediums through which the cryptic codes of the Intangible
could be evenly & justly deciphered.
Although, I, as a Poet was more often than not misunderstood, and even feared & loathed-
cursed in a word-by words-and the Truths which my Works revealed to the Human Heart.
For despite all of our attempts to declare our Citizenship with the World,
we knew we would never fit & would always be few & far between.
Yet, by our nature we were Solitary animals & this alienation did not hinder us in our quest, nonetheless.
We were native & adaptable to Any & All an Inner Landscape or Climate,
however Alone we were in our expansiveness of Mind & Heart.
The Poet is oft romanticized & exalted, yet is also equally Demonized, Pathologized & shunned.

The Poet is all, must become all-thus is the Poet perceived often as a kind of High Priest,
or even a God or a demi-god, crowned in the glory & subtly forging
Omnipotence & Omniscience of The Idea, The Platonian Utopia of Mindstuff as Matter.
As Poet I was:
Muse
Mother
Father
Sister
Brother
Healer
Devil
Demon
God
Archangel
Priest
Priestess
Warrior
Temptress
Martyr
and even Castaway.

And the words which often came to me in the Night,
would greet their beatification
upon entrance into the Temples of both Spirit and Flesh,
all Angels & Demons roused into Dynamism each according to their Intent & my delivery of them,
into countless swooning & hungry human hearts-
hearts hungry for that certain special kind of Hunger, enflamed only by a certain kind of Catalyst.
And often, for those much more renowned of my fellow wordsmiths,
their zealous idolators, teeming with such staunch Idealistic Rage & Fervour,
would often shout these Poet's legacies from dormitory rooftops
or any and all Institutions of Enlightenment & Bohemia everywhere.
And for this purpose only was and is the Poet willing to undergo
all forms of extremity-even depravity-to attain their ends.
For through our words, life can be brought to either epiphanous revivification
or morbid diathesis each and every time one of our works was, or is heard or even silently read.
And perhaps it is also for this reason that we, the Poets,
must spend only the first quarter of our lives as Poets.
For we cannot be both human and a Poet-this goes against our good conscience.
For all throughout history, so many great Poets met their early demise trying to accomplish this.
For though the Poet is hired to best speak for Humanity, we can never fully be, only Human.

Thus, it came to be that eventually, my words, upon their dispersing out into the Atmosphere,
would merely evanesce, and so one cool night, I took my last verbose breath.
I knew that it was time.
It was time to save myself from the eventual Damnation of Exaltation,
from the continual cycle of Extremes which only the somewhat still young of mind can survive.
Yes, it was time to pass on my Legacy to someone else-
someone preferably, I thought to myself, whom perhaps has discovered the Gift for that Ultimate Art-
even exalted above wordsmithing itself-
and even exalted above the art of learning how to not only die as a Poet, but how to live as one.
But perhaps even more importantly, the next in line of poetic licensure and legacy
could finally hone that much coveted yet elusive of all refineries:
The Art Of Being Human.

THE LEPER'S LEDGE ( Penned in my twenties)

The sky lets out a warning
and the ground shivers
in apocalyptic suspense.

The faint form of a man appears
just beyond the vertical horizon
of mountain splitting sea.

Rock and Rain,
the things of which Man
is so fearfully and wonderfully made,
a constant duelling of infinite Dualities,
kept stoked by the incendiary
two-fold doctrinal commands
of Existential Liberation & Blissful Veneration
vs. that of all forms of micromacrocosmic management.

Like water to stone,
the things of which Man is made,
psyche to soma,
soma to psyche,
Spirit to Flesh,
Flesh to Spirit,
like baptism to impurification,
a cycle dynamically and concentrically
charged and dynamic,
the endless barrage of stones skipped
over the surface tensions
of an infinite continuum of perfectly still waters.

The diaphanous image
of the man
on the vertical horizon
of mountain splitting sea
upon which we glanced but a moment ago
has dispersed, and left in its place
is the air up there.

We watch all of this from the leper's ledge,
quite homey for supposedly being
the loneliest place on Earth.

For the leper sees reflected here in his surroundings
only his true image,
beatific, majestic & noble,
and so we let him be,
and do not burden him,
with our presence.

BORNE (Penned in twenties)

And He formed You from the dust
of my Earth
where you roamed
my fecund loam for days
searching for Sky where solid ground lay
reticent & rumbling
hot & quick
beneath Your feet.

Yet Your nubile, nescient mind
had grown a thickened membrane
where the shock
of something you named 'longing'
in some quixotic tongue
whetted the parched matter of Your Flesh
at the sight of me
drinking you in,
split-shifting Your sense into the Belief
that truly, nothing did fill the space between Sky & Substrata,
breaking you thus,
into One.

PARAPHRASE

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of Doubt,
I shall fear only this-Faithlessness.
For the rod and the staff of any God cannot comfort Thee in the face of this-
Doubt, the Dracul of all Hope and Mortal Transcendence,
always in search of the blood of saints,
that rich liquid gold of the reverent and the noble,
whom hath erected of their Souls,
impenetrable temples of diamond, onyx, lapis lazuli and mother of pearl.

Might I become one of these, Oh, my God,
for only then do Thy rod and Thy staff comfort me,
guiding me to those still waters and greenest pastures,
no matter what very well might lie on the other side,
for they, despite their perilous proximity to the fiercest opposition and open fire,
remain still, the safest dwellings,
where the encompassing skies whisper a Joyous Lament.
For my strength is only my weakness,
but Thine strength restoreth the fatally aggrieved human psyche
with the priceless balms and ointments of the High Noon of Day,
where Reason and devout Circumspection are exalted to their peaks of dynamism,
and the Mind's Eye may gaze upon The Son,
wincing only when those clouds of impending plunder and metaphysical pillage,
wrought by a devastating precipitation,
blind one with the scathing reproach of our archaic cardinal heritage,
which is overcast over the Temple of the Soul's Mind,
to herald the season of that old familiar uninvited dark Guest,
as we struggle to comprehend the Meaning,
in order that we may mean the Struggle,
which so often is what leads to the Struggle's end.

Thus, once more I can see both Cause & Remedy to any ill or anomaly,
each within the things themselves,
and hear sweetly and so clearly resonating throughout
the newfound hospice of Reunification,
the song of True Freedom,
the song of I and Thou, Oh, my God.