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The Comfortable Paths Of Postponed Reckonings
(2020)​
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What boundless darknesses
Await a sleepless man
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The stray and reckless tappings
Within him and without
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An attaché or a rope​
~
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In blindness he encounters
His twisted pains and tryings
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Curled squirms and stirs
He soon unclamps the worries
Of petrified remorse
Wrists tucked in pillows
Hiding spent contritions​​
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His frail and frenzied lungs
~​
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His fingers rove to find
The sunken slumps and valleys
Around his ribs and elbows
The incremental settlement
Of cartilage and accounts ​​​
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~
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In secrecy he thanks
The foils that awoke him
The bountifuls of solitude
Cannot be understood
By wife or child or colleague
Or comrades in the sand
~
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He regulates his breathing
To pair with her affliction
For mercy or economy
Or personal asylum
~
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The upward widths of night
That swarm throughout the ceiling
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The joy of needing nothing
And sensing nothing at all
No voices or defenses
~
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In his wakefulness he reckons
That he can grasp at wisdom​​
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But the windswept dust that neighbors us
The murmurings of danger
Behind abandoned sheds
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Remind him of his failings
~
One day the winds will fall
Into the hands of stillness
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And none of us will stand
In memoriam to fraud
Or the cylindrical aspect
Of smokestacks and cigarettes
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Or these readings
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~​
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Yet planets, suns, and ​pathogens
Will continue to align
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Approach to form the circles
Of temporary harmonies ​
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Lights condensed to crescents
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At a distance from each other
And unknown to each other​
~
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In learning to create
You must write or paint or forge
The universal secrets
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He often imparted to others
The schooling sessions
The searching sessions
The years-long sessions
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Of refuge from the stars
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~
The comfortable paths
Of postponed reckonings
The self-sensing seas
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The vast cosmos lost
He lies there looking up
Together and alone
Waiting to hear from God
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Waiting for the shapes
Swarming in the ceiling
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To tremble and collide​​​​​​
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