Dilemma

That my life begets success,
Is yet a distant query
First, I must this snag address,
Of which I'm all too weary

What, pray tell, shall I equip,
From these pestif'rous two?
Seems as if each one may snip,
One here, one there, its due

ONE: To strive towards success,
With all-consuming hunger
And to seize ideals, no less,
As if the heart keeps younger

Younger both in age and thought,
For who can dare so claim:
One will gain what one has sought
On erring, all the same?

TWO: To simply go about,
On one's own merry way
Thoughts within, nor strain without,
On how might end, the day

What becomes of waiting, then,
For some reward, for rest at last?
Be success as sacch'rine when
For naught, the net, one will have cast?

Grumblings of a Loner

It is indeed past me - the genuine, expecting
Gaze wherewith you asked me then,
Wherewith you ask me now and again.
As if I would endeavour each time to perfecting

A different yet semantically similar reply:
"Must we not put on our best and go,
To idle away time with so and so?"
As well, I could just skyward stare whereby

I might achieve the same, if not more.
No, I would above all not relent
To frivolousness, to words misspent.
Hereof you mustn't impel nor implore.

For why would I choose the company of such
As those who would but to silence speak,
Or to paraphrase the prevalent mind,
Those who indulgence, not insp'ration, seek,
In what men play and in what men find?

Your leave I must ask, forthcoming or not,
As already a lapse this matter has brought

And soonest return to my parchment and pen,
Too, that cupboard full of wise, old men.

Grumblings of a Jaded Will

What blasted thing did I erringly unloose?
What bane, what blight afflicts my will,
That now I come across so - beastly, broken
A wingless bird of night, perched still?

A wingless bird of night, perched still,
Or the similitude of such a one, no less
Defaced by dint of its own doing,
Left earth-bound, its deformity to address

For it deigns to call my predicament but so
Make no mistake - deformity not so as to imply
To nature's hand, rather to my own volition
Or lack thereof - In the many times I did comply
To the wayward, wailing, wonderful winds

Make no mistake - 'tis not but my transgressive flight
That is my bane, that is my blight

Yet, such a discovery with every Sun I make-
- What say you?
Is that their cosmetic console? Their somnolent monotone?
That 'To err is human, to forgive divine'?
Blasphemy against the function of man, no more
For from many a cup I've sipped holy wine
When in the best of body and mind
And on many a flesh I've engorged myself
All in the best of body and mind

Peace

Gripping my window frame,
I gaze beyond the storm,
Keeping life at bay

Nightscape 05: Wind

To a space pregnant with the seed of tomorrow,
Shepherded I was by its myriad, brushing hands
Some pairing with my robes in a phantasmal dance,
Some repairing to their quotidian share of lands

All partaking of my clinging, vestig'al wit,
Leaving me voided as the premonitory sky -
- 'Fore a cumulative, vapoury mass of grey,
As a secretion of time itself, appeared nigh

And nigher, treading limbless in grace unworldly,
Till the night's cavity was flooded in its hue
And my perceptive language bound in its image,
Granting a pilgrimatic reform to my view:

Was it not but the molder of mass unyeilding,
The striving, professing one,
Its voice a silken hint?

Was it not but the wisened, bearded countenance,
Of the ancient, wondrous one,
Whom they adjudged 'the Wind'?

For the Autumn

And as the leaves in perpetuity, fell,
From widowing trees under Autumn's siege
We heightened in affinity unfound,
Singly adhering to the winter's liege

For the rest dispersed in gloom, of habit,
And despair resumed its opportune knell
Resounding across the purling vista
Just as the leaves in perpetuity, fell

                   ---

Would that they knew the essence of Autumn:
That by self-emulation it does not teach
As might the simplistic summer and spring
But by embodiment, the hearts it dares reach

The embodiment of our own
Fateful, eventual silence

A Leave

Would that a leave my prudence could grant
For me to bare all restraints to this wind
That it may whisk them as 'twould lint
For me to recline face-up in this rain
That it may remove my privation
For me to disown all sound save its own
That heralds a congress of ancients
For me to forego all hold on my limbs
That it may level me with the land

If only to spare my kith and kin
From an eventual burial
Would that a leave my prudence could grant