The unexamined life is not worth living. ~ Socrates
So, I’m waiting for this horseman,
Windows barred, doors flung shut
In a vast pretense
Of indifference.
Only, I see roaches,
Resigned, driven by doom
Under cracks, seared by dim
Flashes of light, some blue,
Some red, not just unaware,
But irrelevant
Like distant quaking nuclei
Star struck long, long ago.
This means little,
For now not only exists,
But does not exist.
A parable
A man, blind from birth,
Is given the gift of sight.
The bandages come off.
He hears the voice of his beloved wife,
And sees…
An incomprehensible blather of light,
A tide of something he has never experienced,
Like water poured on the back
Of a desert beetle,
Or love in the heart
Of a man who has known only
Survival.
A week later,
He is blind again,
Rejecting the meaningless confusion
He has lived without his whole life.
His wife, devastated,
Leaves him,
Thinking she has seen him as he really is,
Ungrateful, mean.
He thinks he knows her at last
For the first time,
A creature wholly devoid of empathy.
Meanwhile, the sun rises over the desert,
And light falls on a beetle,
Scuttling under gathering clouds.
I.
In the garden
An old man rakes gravel
Leaves oblivious
II.
Time is not a river
It is an ocean of many currents
Give me a raft to sail on
III.
We are sparrows, you and I,
And all the rest of them, too,
Picking at life’s slab of suet
Did they sing to us, too,
These poets of the young and wistful,
Of the just discovered?
Were we, too, so fast conjoined
In giddy possibility?
Are we now consigned to a coarser reality?
Because a thing becomes familiar
Must it become less beautiful?
Time is a joke poorly told.
An old color photograph,
Its blazing reds and excruciating blues
Reduced to jaundiced dim browns,
Still cuts deep
Through all fog and wishing,
Blinding in its fierceness.
After nearly seven decades
I still own nothing
Am sure of nothing.
Some god has granted me
The grace of ignorance
To go with my compulsive curiosity.
That’s the hell of it, isn’t it?
An irony so relentless
As to be hilarious,
And we, laughing to split our sides,
Tumbling headlong into sweet oblivion,
Or not; no one living will ever know.
exiles child 