July 13, 2008 by thegnosticpoet.

I thought to read a bit before sleeping,
But then I read too much, and here I sit
Aroused from bed by an unquiet mind’s
Chirping like a chipmunk in the dark room.
I have long played the jester and the fool,
And each pointed barb I’ve forged has cut me.
No rest for the wicked, and none for me.
For I have lived the greatest sin of all:
I have taken myself seriously.
I was the joke who did not laugh along.

So, sleep has sloughed off into the silence
As remembered sins, real and imagined,
Occupy my mind, an army entrenched.
I stare into the stillness of my soul.
It’s not a placid lake or peaceful vale.
It’s a junkyard, piled high with refuse,
but with unrecycled treasures unfound
and ready for some careless foot to kick,
revealing gold among the bric-a-brac.

O, Restless Truth! How did I get this way?
I feel the silence still, immutable.
It speaks within, still, as when I was eight,
It claims, “I am the same. I am unchanged.
The years may make no claim on spirit’s stuff.
Events in time are weights attached to fire;
They cannot hold the flame nor bind the air.
Either they know my heat, or are consumed.”

And now the eyes that would not close have drooped.
The mind that would not rest is stilled of thought.
The head has bowed and jerked and bowed again.
I lay this fey-made shell upon the bed,
the I within has dumped the garbage scow.
So now I stride across the moonlit shore,
Once more the fire that lives ‘twixt sand and sea.

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July 7, 2008 by thegnosticpoet.

If you saw my love, she is not the sun.
Her hair and eyes are dark as outer space,
although there is a twinkling bit of fun
that shows like stars within her eyes’ embrace.
And yet, she is not glory that hurts the eyes,
nor is she heat to dry the skin and parch
the tongue. She shall not coax a plant to rise
and grow into a wizened tree, a larch?
An oak? A yew, perhaps? But, no, not she
to be the center of a solar system,
giving life to all and boiling the sea
in time. She is a gentler light that limns
the edges of my clouds and shows the way
in life’s darkest nights and stormiest days.

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