Don’t try to rush me.
No, not floating, not aimlessly hoping to scrape the shore
of comfortable.
Trapped between two towering vacancies
and I prefer to remain between.
No, not fickle, but not naive:
See the gates of Gilead gathering dust!
But see, beyond, a myriad of calcified trusts!
So doubt requests a new dimension;
Not mind, not soul, not mine, certainly
It’s grown too old.
Moss, on a stone, at some point knows
The stone to be a mountain, and then a hillock
And then but a stone.
And the vacancies grow more vacant—
Filling up with ephemeral volumes of all human knowledge
Which then turn to dust like Gilead.
No, not cynicism!
No, not obstinance!
The dimension is hope:
A mathematical coping mechanism for when you read “truth”
Scrawled upon opposing doorframes.
But doors are dead, and winds whistle through their cracks.
The words you read are friends whispering at your back,
Increasingly infantile, petty, and washed out
By an incandescent wasteland
Into which the towers collapse—
And you are left with God.
I am drawn, I am drawn
To speak with God—
A pilgrim,
He walks with me through the wreckage, amused at the wreckage
In tune with the shattering pains
No! Not callous,
Though these carpenter’s hands draw blood.
O thoughtless self, be not afeared of the wasteland.
Glittering shards from my crumbling towers,
Tinted with blood and rippling adumbrations:
Safely we watch,
Having scraped upon the sureness of
Time, plodding time.
No one was hurt; they were vacant.