The sun descends before his head designs
To let its weariness allow decline
Into a pillow or a blanket's touch,
With hours of work at his bench left behind.

Despite exhaustion plying overmuch
Upon his downslumped shoulders, tired as such
Would make his sleep necessitated, though
No rest he finds, no flight from tiring's clutch.

Insomniatic paramores bestow
Their anti-inspiration from below
The liminal request, but wakefulness
Prevents the blossom: rest, its growing show.

No dreaming glow within the tired's duress,
No nightlong calmness that the beasts possess,
Gestaltly seething in nocturnal sounds
Insensible, unlike his waitfulness;

Though sunlight tenderly extends around
The back of earth, caressing with the down
Of nightshine from its lunar elbow strewn
Upon the moths that seek its midnight crown;

And frogs in hidden choirs intone the tune
Of nightling drones. Their covert throats balloon
In waves of sonic darkness. They reply
To one another and beyond the Moon.

The song they sing for just themselves is wise,
Far wiser than what can be known: their I
Is not the same as mine. And from the marsh
Their din might indicate the Way's device.

The Way in its inexorable march,
Unseen, unheard, mistaken to be harsh
In its obscurity, we seek in vain
For traces of it in the chthonic karst.

In "where it must have been" a thought explains
Itself and reconciles with one domain
Near truth, but only so far, lost in mist;
This senses must be fluid to attain.

A million forms of matter does it twist,
A million pores in states and senses list
A million paths, yet most escape us still;
Divergent millions toward a single tryst.

To one eternal colloquy they will
Return, and even now might oneness fill
The chambers of a soul ecology
One sometimes grasps before it overspills.

A glimpse affords a little peace to me,
If only it could be to him some key
To access feeling whole, my friend who said,
I feel no god within when there I seek.

I take him at his word, though I'm not led
By any means to think him lost or dead
Completely. Oh, but how he feels alone
Among it all, the hermit of his head.

The water tracks the way throughout the zones
Terrestrial, and spiritual's own
Domain alike is replicated deep
Within the journey of a droplet's koan.

An ancient riddle? That's what he's to keep
At dawn when he's exhausted in a heap?
We transient things need despite ourselves,
For wisdom makes poor substitute for sleep.

I hear at leisure all the host that delves
In midnight's niches, yet that same dispels
The hope of sleep for my poor friend who's still
Unrested in so many hours past twelves.

Hiding on the topmost of paramnesia's bunkbed,
All around the rivers of seeming metamorphose,
Roiling and effusive, rebounding on the portholes
Of perception; what are these waves of oft defunct dread?

Infinitely glints the kaleidoscope perspective;
Universal tears in the ever changing floodplain
Once distilled by focus on one's particular pain,
All of living's sorrow becomes a sad invective. 

Mystifying waves of empathic agonizing
Pulverize my vessel, the tiny heart that sings out
There across impenetrable deracinating
Bouts of torture, someone can hear you harmonizing;

Someone hears you crying with notes to match your sorrow,
Giving chords to death and to loss. Are you aware that
Even I, another small ship, am taking care at
Night when you are grieving and when you wake tomorrow?

Always feeling touched, but not once while on the breakers
Can I find a path to the deepest wave your spirit
Rides on; in the tempest of suffering I hear it.
Singing back, I try to get through, but no such takers.

Who can ride the storm of another, what discerning
Sense can find the entrance where neither space nor time nor
Thought can claim a trace of it truly? No diviner
Sees it, though I feel its divine attempt and yearning.

Every soul desires to be known, and every one in
Turn has doubts. Appearing alone, unreachably so,
Never grasped within as was hoped but meekly–echoes,
Semblances connecting two souls that fate has summoned.

Do they ever join? Can their lamps send out a gleaming
Hail across the waves of the infinitely lengthy
Distances from person to person? Could a strength be 
Powerful enough to connect, or is it dreaming?

Something reaches me, for I hurt alike when you do.
In our isolation is there a way to breach through
Via song or tears to another, somehow reach to
The most sacred self that is not my own to soothe you?

Where inside myself is the song, and where the aching
Friend I long to touch? Is the transience of singing
Like the transience of the human spirit's stinging?
Something says inside that a song's the same in making.

Dark your night, in line with the rest of them, compounding,
Wearing down on you in your lonely home of stressing
Sirens and distractions. The slowly sung, caressing
Lay will be your refuge to weather woe surrounding. 

So presumptuous to believe a poem's power;
Yet my needing soul has but art and tears to cover
The expanse between a repression, that which hovers
All around the self in its loneliest of hours.

Singing, yes and crying, to you in hopes that maybe
I could be let in, and the gulf of separation
Shrink to one embrace in a union of elation;
Just to share a moment I’ll ever weep for daily.

All these substances of elusive nature, such as
Love, depression, fear, and aloneness which are dwelling 
Deeply and inchoate themselves, there's something telling
Me the song of souls is the missing strength a touch has.

Verse will be a promise from me, for never could I
Face the gripping notions of misery unless a
Song could there be sown for a little shade and rest; a
Solace that I'm hoping you too are done some good by.

How that touch–communion!–eludes a solitary
Drifter in the cold of a beating storm beneath the
Eyes, unreachable and afraid to bring to grief a
Guide, but one should know that the song is voluntary.

Pouring out of dreams to be felt in waking sureness,
Heady like a sorrow and piercing just like longing,
Every tendency of my mind becomes a thronging
Want to carry into your deepest heart assurance.

Now my days are constant reflections on emotions
And the ghosts of dreams that are breaking on the surface,
Shadows of the feelings I long to give some purchase
In our real world. Do they exist outside our notions?

Can the love inside of my mind advance beyond and
Occupy not only your heart but somehow link two 
Souls that hide in ether, the am upon the brink who
Only knows itself, can I know we both are bonded?

Something senses it in my deepest unknown seeing.
Thriving, with a hand on my chin so gently turning
Upwards my whole soul from the darkness of a spurning
World, and smiling into my eyes for love of being.