I fall…..

 

It is not a desire for something higher

that drives me into new found depths,

I still rise from under the ruins

Climb my pride
and reach to the surface . . .

To the zenith of my pain
from my memories I build up a fortress.

Evenings, when the light dims
and I lie hidden in bed,
I gather outlines of ideas
that flow over the silence of my limbs.
It is here that I must weave my
thought's tapestry,
arrange my own strands
use myself to draw my own being
to evoke my deepest thought's form,

I’m rather unprolific, the poems

I have wandering in my mind would reach

from here to earths end

So moving, so filled with

and sometimes emptied of all suffering,

so steeped in the softness of a faraway voice

yet speechless before the truth,

The poems I have not written,

the life I have not lived, the life
I’ve failed even to imagine, and still

I so perfectly describe.

 

 

I wrap myself in all expectations

Before I resume . . .

My falling.

 

Yes, I do feel like a visitor,
a tourist in this world
that I once made.
I rarely talk,
except to ask the way,
distrusting my interpreters,
tired out by the babble
of what they do not say.
I walk around through battered streets,
distinctly lost,
looking for landmarks
from another, promised past.

Here, in this strange place,
in a disjointed time,
I am nothing but a space
that sometimes has to fill.
Images invade me.
Picture postcards overlap my empty face
demanding to be stamped and sent.

‘Dear . . . ’
Who am I speaking to?
I think I may have misplaced the address,
but still, I feel the need
to write to you;
not so much or your sake
as for mine,

To raise these barricades
against my fear:
Proof that I was here.