Cutting like a knife

All the fleshly deceptions

The corpulent lies

The weighty baggage of the 

False

Cutting like a knife

To the skin and bones

Of truth 

Fate is hindsight

But is there proof

The doors were locked

When you simply neglected to open

The right one?

Everything that happens

Seems necessary working backward:

Your lover’s rejection, the career that sputtered,

The dreams scattered, that calamitous fall—

Or was a fall intended as the one we are told

Produced a glorious result?

Happenstance and necessity

Chance and destiny

Regardless, we are moved through this life

Through chaos or meaning—

Acceptance and reflection is all

 The dissolution —

That music hath a dying fall

From the first tremulous note—

It is a grave matter to enter this world

Forcing recognition of the mortal terror

Seizing at the breaking of innocence

A silent shout that persists

But grows tired and almost familiar 

With a crescendo like a dying fall

That passes for acceptance

Falling from the start

Where the mind goes

Memory goes

Down avenues, streets, 

And narrow corridors

Leading to unlocked doors,

Rooms with all the lights left on 

Perchance the birds

Know in their solidarity

When to scatter, when to stay.

A human hand can make them flee

Until the seed offered by that hand

Entices their wary return.

Who is friend, who is foe

Not always simple —

Ask the birds

Perchance they know.

If a meteor should rend our spinning earth 

In twain, there is no ground for belief

That the act was done to stop all human birth

Or if a tornado gathers all its force

To uproot all houses, all children, without relief

No one dare claim a purposeful course.

What then of a contagion spread 

With untold numbers of sick and dead?

Is there a benefit in seeking blame

Unless an act of horrific shame?

A virus, though a deadly thing,

Has no thought of the harm it brings—

A virus knows no one’s name.

Tadzio

Where dreams emerge like ripples

In a lapping lagoon

You are surprised, beguiled

By beauty unexpected

Long locks shining from sunlight

A face turned to the warm sun

A delicate gesture

A laugh with hair tossed

Your aging body drawn to

The shimmering dream