We are the good guys!

We don't torture?http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/121705C.shtml

Spirit Post Mortem

What was this unarticulated joy
that beat inside my chest?
That was both expected and is past,
reflected numens chanting
to my spirit, as if subdivided
in my superconsciousness--I may not
have borne them as a whole
though holy they may be...one mystery
selects a lifetime as its drum
and makes the years crescendo
poco a poco from its infancy
unto the crashing storm of age
when breath itself implodes.

I think it is too much--
a joy the mind at quest must know
and not to be endured.
I think a man must shake his fist
in protest as Beethoven did,
unable to sustain it to the end.
It is the depth and height of ecstasy
of which its single aim
is to expire.
~

This too, shall pass

There is an unseen magnet in the lure
of solitude. I seek it hungrily.
In it, I draw down silence as
a cover, insulating truth, but I
deny the need for joy. For as a boy

I sought too often, all the places that
my friends avoided, sanctuaries that
would give the groping spirit in the heart
of me some rest. Of all my friends it was
and still remains, the best. Yet finally

as age invades this shell, the mind has learned
to swim in consciousness, to question and
to laugh, to know that truth alone,
while still supreme, will also reach about
in love, and also with the cosmos that
it rules, may celebrate its restless peace.

I chase down thoughts, and wrestle with them now.
I make them work; they may not get away
with merely tantalizing fantasy.
They are the mortar of a spirit house
I'm building from a curious design
some spirit architect passed on, but it
is mine, and will bring smiles, I think, at its
grand opening.

The years are good, the friends as well, for as
they came along I saw at once that they
were not a mirror for my greed nor just
a sounding board for some vain homily
my ego had prepared--no they were sons
of God! I laughed again, but now the joy
is sung in concert in a universe
without an end.
~

To December

Racing in to us, dull season
short on daylight, long on endurance,
that for once I do not dread,
although I do not know
just what severity may come--
I laugh at old presumptions,
tattered hopes,
sophisticated fears
that seized their own close skies
and pulled them down like shrouds
around me...not this year.

A wiser soul may welcome cautiously,
arriving wnter,
tolerated for its piquancy,
its stinging air,
enough to foil the colorful bravado
of the schoolgirls' scarves,
uncompromising skirts
and blushing, sensuous knees.
And should that soul retreat to kneel
before some stodgy saint in penitence,
the stuttering shame it bears for looking
may become salvation
if indeed its god still smiles.

Mine does.
He understands old men like me
who suddenly, like frosting on the years,
will notice pleasure seeping in
between the breath of one more tomb
or its cessation in the death of gloom
that mortal skill alone creates...
Audacious men, indeed,
who sit at wizard keyboards
punching out the will of God

...and graciously forgiven.
~