I am not a poet of the mind

I am not a poet of the mind

To pulverize and peel away

The masks and classify and calcify

And cry hollow words into the infinite abyss

I prefer to feel and intuit and look closely

Then turn away to understand

To speak

Once the things I've sought

Have gone the way of dust and sand

When I was a young man I sought love and found ecstasy

As I grew older I sought love and found work

Now I run away from love and it finds me

I am not a poet of the mind

Love is war

A war I cannot win

Love will kill me in the end

Please treat my bones kindly when you find them

Step lightly around my grave and pray for me

Whosoever has said this war can be won

Has lied

Sisyphus has rolled the stone upwards

And there is no end in sight for him

His task and mine are the same

The difference is

I have learned to kiss the stone as it rolls over me

A smile of pleasure might cross my face

Before the tears trace lachrymal lines

And I rise to climb the path again

I am not a poet of the mind

I wish to speak of parallax and

Comet tails and solar flares and

Cosmic trails and multiverses and

Birth of stars and system disks congealing into

Planetary spheres and all my fears

Reach a fever pitch and I shake from

Hand and neck and breast

To feel alone is worse than to be alone

We are all alone here

From the start

Don’t imagine it can change

It will not

Life’s condition is to be

Always in a lesser state of being

Wishing for a finer state

To taste, to be lost,

And once again to wake

I rage against the dying of the day

Said the poet of the mind

The day is dead

Her words are empty

My heart devoid of love or care

I am the unmarked obelisk

The smooth stone

My prayer is the cosmos turning

Like the monk’s wheel

Or the pilgrims flag

My Self is a memory

A sadness with no bottom

A mummified happiness

A crucified emptiness

The oceans lap against the shore

Night falls and breathes its first and last

I turn to run away from

This prison that has killed me

It is not love or beauty

But necessity

Necessity is the death

Of what is real

I am not a poet of the mind

I grow in spaces weeds were meant to grow

I need no fertile hand to shape me

I seek no dream to wake from

I sing my words to plain blue skies

And weep while heaven holds back its rain

There is a pungent fragrance to this dry garden

Snails, and caterpillars trace and writhe through me

I dream of sweet cataracts

I dream of crushing volumes of rushing rapids

Thundering towards me

Washing me free of my mind

Purifying my loneliness

Erasing my memory

Be gone ignorance

Be gone intolerance

Be gone injustice

Be gone violence

Be gone

I am not a poet of the mind