Poetry Notes and Letters

Unsleeping, Unchanged

thegnosticpoet — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 00:22:14 +0000

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.

Sheltered from the Sun

thegnosticpoet — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 03:21:57 +0000

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.

Morning Birds

thegnosticpoet — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 04:20:20 +0000

Morning birds,
desultory song.
Summer heat.

On Thinking Other Thoughts

thegnosticpoet — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 04:36:25 +0000

Snow, sleet,
Roads of ice.
My veins.

Frozen Heart

thegnosticpoet — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 06:16:21 +0000

Freezing
Rain Falling
My heart.

Fading Summer

thegnosticpoet — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 02:19:57 +0000

The nights are chill with clear and star-filled skies,
While days of fading summer burn with haze.
The ladies wear the latest fashion craze
To capture wandering eyes and hold their prize,
For soon enough this warmest season dies,
To leave the women robed in autumn’s maze
Of sweaters, wraps, and shawls as all the praise
Is captured by the leaves bedecked for eyes.
But even as sweet summer fades to fall
I think of you and smell the flowers bloom.
The rains of springtime freshen up my mind.
I see your shining smile and I recall
The times I’ve seen it shine within our room.
In you I’ve spring in fading summer’s rind.

Just in Passing

thegnosticpoet — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 03:25:05 +0000

Today I heard about your father, Jim.
I sat to write a note that might convey
My solidarity in recent pain.

I couldn’t bring myself to send those words
Like drops of blood escaped my heart and veins.
Instead, I wrote expected words of balm.

But now I sit reflecting on my day,
With nothing but the air to break the calm,
And see those formal words in twilight truth.

We fall upon the formal ways we’re taught,
Mortar between the bricks to set and smooth
And hold society together well.

For sharing pain can open unhealed wounds
And chasten out mortality to tell
Us that our time is fleet and passing soon.

Two men who lived to be near eighty years,
Two men who passed within a hand of moons,
Two men who shaped and molded who we are.
Two men are left to mourn, you and I, Jim.

I Moved the Stars

thegnosticpoet — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 02:44:25 +0000

I thought, and then I moved the stars.
They clinked and tinkled as I stretched
To shuffle them about, and Mars,
With baleful glare, the hostile wretch,

He marshaled planets for a war.
But Sol commanded them, “No more!”
And back they went to placid sleep
To graze their orbits, bashful sheep.

Wholly, Unscarred

thegnosticpoet — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 02:21:26 +0000

Cascading midnight curls, your hair, her hair.
A frame so slight and light, your frame, her frame.
But there the likeness stopped, and so the game,
The game my mind will play but cannot bear,
In every crowd, my eyes pull out your face,
And frame and features, yes, your every trace.

But eyes can’t build a treasure from the parts
That, taken like some ghoulish graveyard theft,
Are joined together ‘til not one is left
And sewn each piece by necromantic arts.
These parts, they do not mesh into the whole
And leave the scars of joining on my soul.

It’s you my eyes will ever long to see.
The imitations cannot quake my earth
Nor move my heart to discover their worth.
It’s you and always you, as it must be,
Who haunts my dreams asleep and dreams awake,
And who, as a whole, I’d forever take.

Initiation

thegnosticpoet — Sun, 08 Jul 2007 18:07:07 +0000

I don’t know yet what this blog will become, or if it will dry up and die. I may use it for a number of purposes, or several purposes. One thought that comes to mind is that it might make a capital way of posting poems that are examples of form or techniques. But time will tell what really comes of it.

The Gnostic Poet