On a Birthday

Older than my earliest memories;

Younger than my last night's dream;

You come.

Eternal, yet recurrent, you come

Indifferent to one.

Pregnant with possibilities,

Loaded with promises

You are welcome to all.

You add to my age 

What you take from my life away:

One plus one plus one each year,

Gifting debris from the past in your wake

Promises revoked, possibilities dispersed

I celebrate you nevertheless,

And wait for you nevertheless.

Looking backward and forward

Straight and across my life,

Dreading the day I'll not

Be waiting for you to come,

Will not be waking for you at all,

Early or late, then or ever.

You My Poem

Come to me

When light is low, not quite out,

Silently;

And be with me

When darkness thickens

And night descends overwhelmingly.

Sing to me 

In floral tones;

In simple rhymes

of light and life and love;

of whatever is in short supply on earth. 

You owe it to me.

You are my poem

In gossamer veil

A piece of my being on wings:

An indigent prayer,

A meagre offering; a cri de coeur; unheard 

Heavenwards winging.

you are innocent, humility and inexorable solitude.

You are my poem.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - 

Lonely by nature,

Lonelier in a crowd,

Indifferent to sacred shrines

I meet you at the crossroads of culture

Always.

Prone to pray at penumbral places,

Scared by the glare of marketplaces,

At dead of night I worship

At bare open spaces,

Darkness and light commingling,

At the crossroads of culture.

Coda: A Meta-poem

A poem lives briefly,

As a sequence of phones

But dies, quite quickly, on the wind.

Survives as a system of sense,

proposing a personal range of pleasure and pain:

Purely personal, scaringly intense,

Sometimes the one, sometimes the other,

Sometimes blending the two in equal measure,

Fugitive feelings animating the whole

Waking a swell of wild desires,

Licking the heart with tongues of five,

Articulating structures of impersonal passions.

A poem is a funny thing,

If you feel into it, you are changed by it,

But if you don't, you are not,

A funny thing when you come to think. 

An Air of Aboutness

There is an air of aboutness
Around my world now;
The sun is about to set,
The night is about to fall,
The sky is about to drown in darkness.

My journey is about to begin;
A long and a lonely one.
My ultimate soliloquy is about to start;
The audience, hushed or absent,
The lights dimmed,
I am about to move to the edge of the stage ;
Savouring every moment of being,
Alert, tip-toe, waiting for the cue.
Then plunge headlong,
Hitting the Void, head first.