Once, in a life long past, I encountered death and spirituality on more occasions than I care to remember. Each experience was unique, disturbing, morbid, thought-provoking, emotionally fulfilling and hopelessly depressing as well often-times spiritually enlightening. Still, each experience gave me much time to reflect and be inspired to put into verse a conscious and sometimes subconscious response to what my mind had experienced and my heart had indelibly undergone.

This is a volume of poems hauntingly inspired and emotionally drawn from that long ago year, encapsulating not only a subjective perception and philosophical (and sometimes religious) perspective, but also an objective view of those friends and relatives whom death had visited inconveniently and without warning, and whose many ghosts continue to haunt and perplex me to this day.

HOPE, ESOTERIC

The darkness and light in one lifetime still ring true
In all the dreams I never dreamt and never knew:
In all the love I lived to seek but never sought,
In all the dreams of love and life that came to naught.

I stand against the barren landscape, weak but strong,
And whisper the name of love--though the night dies long:
To hear a voice--one solemn voice--return to me
All the desperate hopes of truth that burn in me
Something of my spirit mysterious and strange,
Something in my soul worthy of challenge and change.

Ah, there beyond the ordinary heights of light,
Beyond the strength-filled night, of lives and deaths contrite,
Beyond silence and all the heroic pretense,
Of scorned self-importance and righteous self-defense,
Inside the dreams of stolen summers and slain springs,
In the hearts of dreamers and other dying things;

Among the words of strangers and lovers and dreams,
Among hopeless skies and every grim star that gleams,
Amidst the great heaven of endless pain and strife,
Where tragedy and grief are unified in life;

--I long to live to hope to triumph and survive
The sorrow of life and the desolation of death,
And be one of the grave--but breathing and alive!
Though I am dead and hope was my last dying breath.

ANGEL OF DEATH

I am myself a stranger to whimsy and sophistry,
Though a student of love and a sage of loving beauty,
Who has lived lifetimes divorced of truth and philosophy,
Like the soldier of fortune who always does his duty.

So, yes, the Angel of Death becomes my life’s destruction!
Who knows the curse and ruin of an unrequited soul!
Until ignorance reveals its powers of deduction,
I will have deduced that death is no longer in control!

Hence, sunlight maintains the comforting desires of despair.
As moonlight remains the slayer of passion and romance.
For years immortals have strolled on water and traversed air
To have murdered death at the drop of a murderer’s glance!

Still, my spirit is heavy and my heart is old and tired,
And I have grown so weary from the conflict and the war.
As all my heroes perceived all their deeds and codes expired,
They are gone to the tombs of mortals--gone forevermore!

But I am not yet gone! And I have not yet lost control!
Though we drink of doom and are connoisseurs of its wine;
The Angel of Death does not live in every stranger’s soul.
And I am still not willing to see Her live inside mine.

DEATH AND LIFE

Life knows the visionless happiness I have felt
For the dark of the sea, for the salt of the earth,
For all the dreams that fade, for all the fires that melt,
For every lifetime squandered and wasted from birth!

And it knows the hopeless pain my lonely life lives
And the abject misery that won’t let me die!
(For such are the dreams of life which death never gives
To a lonely, desperate dreamer such as I!)

So I came from the earth and I lived for the sun.
And spent my time from birth expecting from the tomb
The beauty of love that is meant for everyone...
Everyone who was born from the same dreamer’s womb!

Now am I old and cold with dreary, fading truth...
The truth of all that visionless love I had felt.
(And endured and suffered since the death of my youth
In all the dreams that fade, for all the fires that melt!)

So I long the dark of the sea and the salt of the earth,
And every dream of love which neither death nor life can give!
(While in this passive lifetime squandered and wasted from birth
I seek the god who is dead from the god who doesn’t live!)