Black Hole

It does not always look like this.

Sometimes it’s a pulsing glow,
illuminating the night like Aurora,
blue and green quilted tentacles
reaching across the sky,
hoping in vain to grasp
the milky pathway of the heavens.

Once it was the Louvre,
a gallery of memories:
tragedy, gallantry, and delight,
looked upon by empty gazes
and brush-stroked eyes
cracking with age.

Yesterday it was sunset:
a subconscious meadow
of dubious flora
and swimming vistas,
where the green of the fields made
daylight stark and gray.

Tonight it is a hole of black water,
and I know not where it leads;
a cosmic doorway to another world,
but I know that I shall wake
on the other side,
wherever that may be.

I stretch and dive.  Perfect 10?

Waking Up

Fresh-brewed black coffee at eight,
dark, fathomless, encircled by richest brown.
How welcome! filling rooms
with fragrant warmth. Magical elixirs
that imbue the one who drinks
with alertness of all the senses.

Flavor of a modestly nutty complexion,
spiked lightly with humor, infused
with the liqueur of profound thought.
Holding them with mine, weighing—
watching to catch some glimpse
of beauty veiled in loveliness.

In the sifting light, expanding, contracting,
speaking in shapeless foreign tongues,
as much telling as taking in.

To Call It Morning

What were you before you were named,
and who have you become?
An infant, a book of empty pages;
what was the story’s title?
Once, I sensed you for what you were.
You held a small space in my world,
anomen in my consciousness.

I saw you come and go,
a being of pure nature—like the breeze
on a summer day.  Your voice
like the cooing of a dove at evening—
wordless.  If you bottle the wind,
what use is it then?  It stops;
movement dies, and wind is no more.

When I heard your name you took form.
Your yesterdays, your tomorrows,
converged in today; spoke meaning
into wind and gave word to thought.  I began
to look truly, listen truly, feel wholly,
and so to know.  Suddenly, you are
no longer what.

Your self came blazing in my eyes;
I beheld the sun for the first time,
knowing, for the first time,
to call it morning.
Stunning radiant realization.
And here, I have only begun
to discover who you are.

Reading the Heart

The pen of the poet channels energies
he cannot hold in himself.
Bubbling up, spilling out
through the scurry of a quill across paper.
Like a cup running over,
he tries in vain to contain it.
Couplets, twins of like voice,
the patter of feet and meter.
Subterfuge.  Forms to say what cannot be
expressed in word or song.
Lines that bid you look beyond,
to read past the hurried scribbles
of a troubled hand
and grasp tactile, throbbing potency:
the heart that drives the pen.