All These Words I Speak Will Die
All these words I speak will die;
fading into endless night,
winking out, perhaps bursting out,
but inevitably out and gone,
dissipated into space's cold dust.
Every light I light will vanish away,
puffing away like candles over-lasting;
no human word lasts forever.
'Nothing but a puff of breath' --
some said this of the concept,
the universal on which we think;
more than breath, there is light,
but light endlessly fragile,
refracted through delicate crystal,
ephemeral and passing like sparks.
We write only admonitions;
by words we guide, admonish, and gesture.
Gestures by nature pass.
They do not stay and talk,
but, like our sense of time itself, move,
flowing as time itself flows,
being themselves time measured out.
Moon, sun, and stars may remain.
Words fade, to be no more.
The Point
death is a point in the room
nothing more
a point infinitesimal and no greater
yet it is the axis-point of time
around time goes
a wheel of light
around a point dark and still
that moves but never moves itself
changing by merely being
and in a room where death dwells
the room spins around that point
unmoving
it does not fill the room with brooding presence
for death is a point in the room
no more
it has no proesence
but all the room spins around it
the very axis-point of time
death does not brood
time broods on death
brooding is a circle
the sigh of an invisible point
going around
ten thousand times around the point
the only place that does not move
but moves all
the axis-point of time
but once I chanced to turn my head
and saw it from a different angle
the circle did not move but stayed
brooding in light around a point
a single point of darkness moving away
its rest a different moving
not in a cicle but in an implosion
like great stars dying in their age
that pull all things with them
through them
to some unseen and other side
unseen by light of time
which moves away from our seeing eyes
moving away at a singular point
a point collapsing into another place
punching a hole in the light of time
to something drawing it
until one day it passes
to that unseen and other side
