sometimes
it’s like standing in a shower of diamonds
with one hand tied behind the back
while the other is black with grease
so that,
to catch one,
is a lucky beautiful moment
hidden in an endless stream
of loss and lost

i
i need to write
i need to write about the dark
i need to write about the light
but i find the middle grey
its gets so frustratingly in the way
with cloudy currents that neither sing
of love or hate or pleasure or pain
but an entangled knot that weaves them all together
in some horrible, wonderful knot i cannot split in twain

and i am caught in a spin in the places i would go straight
caught in a complete and utter lack of any blessed fate
as if life were but a slow and colorful drowning
to the bottom of a realization far too late

“Happiness can be found even in the darkest of times, when one only remembers to turn on the light.” – Albus Dumbledore

A great wizard said the above in a series of books I have come to admire and I must admit that I need to hear these words more often than naught.

Hope.

What an elusive, slippery and intangible word (like the great golden snitch of the above mentioned books). So hard to grasp what it is and harder still to understand its value.

It is the past that has taught me the value of hope despite its bleariness and darkness. When I look back into the darkness I can see the candle flicker of many small and sometimes bright lights that burst to life unexpectedly amidst the more all-too-expected blackness like stars going nova…going bright for a moment and then dark wherein the remnants weave themselves together again unseen into new light. It is these moments that give me hope.

I have come to expect darkness. I am never surprised by it. I understand this is a somewhat despairing way to look at things and if I could change out my eyes for new ones I would but I don’t know how.

What I do not expect is light. I never expect it or prepare for it but I have learned from the past to at least hope for it and embrace its possibility amidst the certainty of all other things.

Only the past can teach hope. Not the present and not the future…it arises only as a seed planted in the past. This is ironic since hope is rooted in the present and leans toward the potential light of the future like a sunflower before dawn that already looks toward where the sun will be, ready to make the most of it – as if it knows something we are not yet convinced of until it happens.

As the great writer Ernest Hemingway once wrote in a way that only a man who spends a great deal of time in the dark can write – “the sun also rises”.

Hope…hope is the sun that has not yet risen, it is the destination that one has not yet arrived at, it is the peace that sits far off on the horizon in the midst of the death of war.

Hope.

It is there because it has been realized before in those past moments of light. Those past moments of good that even one as misanthropic as myself must grudgingly accept as having once existed and therefore may one day exist again.

It is what I strive for even if I do not fully believe it will ever come.

what do we want in the end
but a flesh we are afraid of
and a life that burns as phosphor
blinding the ones who dare
to look us in our seraphim eyes

is it too great… to destructive
to take this sort of killing beauty
into the public spaces?
maybe… but fire is a cleansing
and we are in dire need

I want to sink into the eternal sunshine
where the birds fall like bullets
till they spread their wings and fly
like darts toward unknown places
and the wind is warmer than it should be

what a place is this deprived mind
that makes a heaven of a dozen hells
a love of a falling sky of hate