I’ve heard it said reading is like traveling,
But I disagree.
Traveling lightens and enlivens
With immediacy,
While reading, when you lift your head,
Returns you only hollowly
To a life as yet undeveloped,
Pale in contrast.

Pray for the day
you prefer your own life
to the stories that were
everything to you.

A promise made,
Gentle words forgotten,
I remember you as you were:

Silent determination
In a softly reaching hand
That lifts me from loneliness—

Determination to be for me
What none were for you,
To be the strength in my belief
That people can be true.

Even after falling hard
And scarring this pale heart,
I long for you, I bleed for you
To remember who you are

Not the knives that time had wrought
But who you longed to be
In those quiet, lonely nights
When you secretly gazed at me.

I walk in shadows
To find deeper dark
In hopes one might reach out

To shape the arms
that held me before
And let me find the rest

That I once knew
When I was with you
Alone, our own broken peace.

For every year
That leaves me colder,
Though I fight to play my part,

The time I was sure of you
Burns, the only fire in my heart,

A light often trampled,
Dampened by fallen leaves,

But holding its own steady mark:

Warmth remembered more than felt,

Immortal through memory’s glass.

Choosing an author to read
Is choosing whose arms
To rest in—

Whose eyes to define
The rules of the world
You will sleep in,

What shape to expect
From hearts and surroundings
Of new minds encountered.

For each line traces purpose
And purpose a person
To define the framework of reason

requires, a god of ideas—
Setting sense the harsher world
Has not.

And when life is over,
we fall to seed
until the day we can live again.
‘But, when?’ cried the petal, ‘When?
And how can we set aside
the fear until then?’

The illusion of conformity,
the lifestyle wars,
the lie that your lifestyle will last—
even the traditions you cling to are not to you
what they were to those who made them.

We cannot find the lock
on the door of the history house
and cannot claim to know
what passions and pains our own forerunners felt,
having left those emotions at the roadside
and chosen to chronicle the pulses of power
and nationhood over those of personal strife.

Like dust in the wind,
like the clock unwound,
your sense of time
has no bearing on the passage of it.

Change is the texture
of the morning sun on your face,
so why not open your hand
and appreciate the sensation—

absorb from it the value of the feelings we share,
the humanity that sends us all running
in search of a reason, in search of a prayer,
in search of each other, just not knowing where
the feelings connect us beyond our trivial affairs.