What will be your master,
and what will be your slave?
Will you court disaster
to be perceived as brave?
Will you call your pastor
to hide that which you crave,
or be your own ringmaster
and own how you behave?
And will you choose virtue,
or live in fear of vice?
Will you choose to be true,
or default to being nice?
And when there's much ado
will you jet their paradise?
Or just defer your view,
as act some men and mice?
I pause in woods one winter day when leaves stick to the ground, and twigs and trunks stand stiff & straight - a breeze the only sound. It's a world without walls or bounds, but one can't see a mile. One's sightline is obscured by trees -- their trunks not single file. A world, at once, open & shut to eyes and ears and mind. But I've never felt so at home, for i'm no lonesome pine.
Around the corner, down the street who knows just what you'll find. I often head on down that way when I wish to unwind. A vendor might set up a cart, selling divine munchies, or philosophers might hold court: wannabe Socrates. Or there are those days of muggers, or when painted girls flirt, or when the somnambulist roams in sleep, sans a nightshirt. The city never lacks chaos: always something to see. Sometimes it pulls one forward; sometimes it makes one flee.
Seeking perfect moments: in times of bliss, in times of pain, in times of sanity, and when insane a divine meal, a fine strong gin, the kindest virtue, a dark age sin falling into never, coming out the other side, landing on one's skates in the smoothest glide falling but not crashing, running but not gasping, finding but not keeping, fingers interclasping, and wishing for nothing more.
Plunging into darkness, there is no other way. In the tomb-like silence, the mind begins to stray. To roam, to roam, to roam, or does it simply sink; with neither light nor eyes, one might just be hoodwinked.
It doesn't need wide open spaces. It doesn't need direct sunlight. No bark-wide chasm through the tombstone -- Gardner, leave that tree alone. Hey, Gardner, leave that tree alone! All in all, it's just another fig in the wall. All in all, we're just a bunch of figs in the wall.
My war days are long past. I'm not quick to beat drums. I've neither king nor caste. I've seen the winter come. Fearful norms have no hold. The law has lost its sway. I've broken from the mold, and turned a roving stray. Crazy sages / role models: those freed from conventions, who can't stand for twaddle, and shun all pretensions.
The forest looks painted with dabs of bright color, a pointillist mural of the leaves' last hurrah. Soon, it'll turn twiggy, and sing desolation, and invite the fog in to soften sharp lines. Then one day you'll notice leaves glowing in sunlight. Their green will be golden from warm yellow rays. The maturing forest will darken its greenness, turning to sober tones that blot out the light.
Vines crawl along the wall -- an organism in sprawl. Their leaves turn red, arterial at the ends, venous in late Fall.
How much grander must the world seem
closer to the ground,
a grass forest within the forest
with layered forest sounds?
Or would one be cut off from
the vaulted dome of sky,
and have one’s world shrink to
the limits of one’s eye?
If an ant thought it saw everything,
but only viewed a slice,
would its tiny ant mind have contracted a basic human vice?
Tiger Riding for Beginners 