I seldom get prepared,
I've been impaired by doubt,
My ego I've seen scared,
Cowering, undevout. 
But I've been forced by chance;
Death with its passing glance
Denied delusion's spout.
When faced with nothing, stared;
What could one care about
A lout who never dared?

And death won't come with haste;
First you must waste away.
Everything gets debased, 
More falls into decay
Than just ideas of self:
Family flags in health
And dissolves in dark play
Between the wilting taste
Laced with their care's dismay
And frustrations they've faced.

As such I find the choice
I thought foisted on we
Unhappy-lifers moist
With tears is trickery.
Questioning if to die
Like nature would comply;
That's not what nature sees.
It could never give voice
To the dead, poised to be
Without meaning to hoist.

Somehow cause and effect
Randomly trekked, evolved 
A thing that could detect
Through narratives revolved
Around themselves, which pit
Their souls against split
Realities–one solved
Death with life unchecked,
Irrespective of all
Values our walls reflect.

The other state is void,
Paranoid and alone,
And since alone employed
In rough attempts to own
An answer, an escape
From our foresight which gapes
On futures of cold bone
And uncertainty. Toyed
With, annoyed, spurred to hone
In on zones death avoids.

Ever an opposite,
The gnarly bit that leads
Hungry jaws thought unfit,
Separate, alien, seeds
Ostracism in souls
Haunted by lack of roles;
It breaks them to concede
Their selves they can't transmit.
A chasm's pit impedes.
They plead disconsolate. 

Constantly feeling trapped,
Handicapped by some lack
Of congruence, a gap;
As though the line went slack
And let one slip apart
From creation, to start
Upon a separate track
Than all else that seem rapt
In naturalborn tact,
Fractionless and unsnapped.

"I'm different, I'm 'not this,'"
Is the distance that daunts
A single soul. A hiss
Of uncertainty taunts;
Instinct and selflessness
Give way to helplessness
When reason becomes bonds. 
That something is amiss
It insists from its font:
Questions' haunting abyss.

The division inside
Is applied to all things, 
And the conscious derides
Itself for its own string 
Of differences between
Man and many a scene;
Something lacked singling 
Out every petrified,
Yet-untried pair of wings 
That thinks in wanting strides.

How is the whole restored?
Toward which star is truth,
And how does one afford
To dive into uncouth
Surroundings teacherless,
Nebulous, featureless,
Which direction holds use
And communion's reward?
Accord springs as proof
With greed refused, ignored.

Once I gave up control
And stole away from dreams;
Then life was rendered cold,
As each fabulous scheme
Crumbled before my eyes.
I thought it my demise.
What I thought was esteemed, 
Needed even, I'd hold
No more. What only seems
Builds its themes from false gold.

Everything I let go,
Every show of desire,
The thirst to possess thrown
Away. As though expired 
I laid, a corpse in bed;
Grandiosity bled
From childhood, and a pyre
Consumed wishes with smoke.
But a glow from the fire
Inspired peace to bestow.

With semantics removed
Two visions would remain:
There was death to reprove
Me; but who've been insane
And stood upon the brink,
Yet had the chance to think
Come to a new life's plane.
When "dead" and seeing through
Who you knew's eyes in pain,
All else feels vain and crude.

Slowly dying for years,
Disappearing from hopes 
By degrees showed the fears
Of peers and loved ones' scope.
I may not be who I'd 
Wanted, but if I died
They'd hit the instant slope
Of grief, now domineered
By sheer void. Left remote,
To cope when I'm not here.

All that we could have shared
Unfairly unfulfilled
Forever. Where once prayers
Of life dared on its hill,
Could have been anything,
Everything; emptying,
The chances of life spilled,
What time could have repaired.
Loved ones must bear that nil,
But the world will not care.

The people who are dear
To us hear, see, and strive
Alongside us through drear 
And joy, cheered to survive
Together. Though success
I may never be blessed
With, they're still gratified
To have me in their sphere.
I'm steering. I'm alive.
Our revival is clear.

So long as breath is drawn,
From conqueror or child,
Human's human; beyond 
That inconstantly styled
Egos who could lose touch
Bent on titles and such.
It made me feel more mild,
As one of many pawns
Of fate's ponderous guile
Smiled on as eons yawn.

The treasure is to try,
To ply my unique hand
In endeavors that I
May find or understand
A secret or a dream
Within this world that seems
At once overly-grand
And too small to describe;
Surprises and demands,
But also plans and smiles.

Writing this poem's all
I want. Should I fall down
There are some I can call
While I'm sprawled on the ground.
With these ones I adore
I don't feel less or more;
I'm assured that I've found,
After a life that stalled,
My small niche in the sound
Where I'll renounce my walls.

It really is like an arrow's piercing.
All suddenness, the sheer sting
Of a changed instant's immanence;
A fact unchanged by my technique.

The fiercest singing instruments
With their clear strings stop at their peak.

Deliverance's shock in ears rings
So uniquely; all that's near shrinks
When his cheer flings the dart where the tears spring.

All my unintentional misdoings
Are so eminently preventable
If each action perfectly, intently
Eschewed things that I reduce to fractions. 

Urgently manhandling reviewings
Mentally; they remain untenable.
Ever these distractions keep renewing
By tracts incensed and undependable.

They're queueing up, ready to force entry.
The ensuing chaos of reactions
And their extendable propensity
Is spent in full by folly's protractions.

Why do I hesitate;
Slabs of lead and slate.
No one buries curses
With my name inscribed.

The hand that waits rehearses 
The clock's gait; who's bribed?

And who will hear them crepitate,
These pages, my poor verses;
All that I cry imbibed
Like all that time disperses.

Nobody really knows who is wearing their face;
And mostly a face is an incognito space,
A nexus between two semipermeable
Worlds. The secret corridor of intimacy
Seems somewhat open, though never traversible
Wholly, and some steps taken unreturnable
Which I-feeling egos snatch impetuously.

Even in memory we toil to retrace
Infatuation, which leads along impishly
Via the blown kisses that we wish to see.

We can but trust the data our instruments seize,
Though we know people's facets interminable
With fluid, perhaps capricious, intricacy.

Magéia revolves
Around the doors' recalled
Dimensions of debauched
Assumptions, souls enthralled.

The demon's advice–
Primordial, divined
In secret rites alike,
Syncretically combined.

The cultic belief
From which the art proceeds
Today we still perceive,
And wonder yet reseeds.

And Terror's domain
That menaces: opaque,
Unknown frontier, estate
Of Knowledge's mistakes;

The violent ravine
Of Ignorance, unseized
And unbesieged, ungleaned,
The magus must trapeze.

A path that preserves
The mage seeks to procure,
Protection to perturb
The forces he abjures.

Recite this to invoke the animated Word,
And from the manifested silence draw forth sound;
The sound whose sight is only in the mind–wake up!
You master of the hypnagogic mansion's rooms,
Fair Hypnos, help me bring these dreams into this world
Of slumbering ideas inchoate. Melody
Of Eros ferry me from worldliness's needs.
Replenish me sublime physicians with your word;
By the clandestine name of Imhotep, relieve
And heal me from the imprecations of the real.
Release the mind and let it not be fettered by
The body which is slave to appetite and death.
Unbind me by the holy name of Mithras, he
Who gives to poets visions of surpassing awe.
Osiris by your Bacchic name of Zagreus,
Unlock my tongue, give it rebirth and liberate
With tongues of fire my deep unspoken soul within.
Reveal the essence of creation by your names
Of mystery Hermetic Thoth who holds the key.
Allow my passage from mundane to other worlds. 

Another time away, a wilderness
Where you alone are writhing, fiercely touched
In broaching infinite bewilderedness;
And all the parties search, but nothing much
Turns up. We brothers in arms march the road,
I wish it lightened or removed the load.

O pray, I say, when you have disappeared;
It's seldom someone vanishes but once.
I many times went up in smoke and neared 
The ultimate undoing of a dunce;
None other than my shame which shamefully
Appraised me of my friends disdainfully.

Along the promontory where you walk,
How distant do the mighty waves appear?
Its sparkling vastness, does it make you balk
Like me? Does its immediacy hear
Your frantic self-calumniations in
Compulsive condemnation of a sin?

If only it sufficed for one to wear,
Like wretched martyrs to obscure our dreck,
A bramble and a tunic made of hair
To be a martyr with no background check.
Though I should like to have some saintliness,
I'm more than blessed to miss ungainliness.

Alight on water and the ripples pulse.
In certain soils and trails one leaves a trace
To varying degrees; it still results
In leaving an impression on the place,
But since imperfect the residual
It's often wished to be invisible.

Aloneness keeps perfection as its goal,
Its prized possession is a furtive show
Where it can be itself without the role
It self-assigns; it wants someone to know
Its substance, but for fear of what that means
It keeps its sordid details out-of-scene.

The tight-lipped tyrant in the citadel
Of self-abasement locks in bonds and chains,
Pronounces any thought as infidel
Which holds compassion for the human brain.
Those doubts and flaws it hates beyond compare;
All small shortcomings are beyond repair.

Proclaimed a little insect, just a bug
On fragile wings of chance and charity,
And is it instinct or a lucky tug
Outside the many mirrors, clarity
Of insignificance how they avoid
The means through otherwise they'd be destroyed?

Peregrinating bones beneath the domes
Of holy cities who were left unnamed,
The penetrating moans that no one homes
From gutters emamate in curse of fame
Who made them or waylaid them, or the worst,
Left them ignored completely from the first.

A future time with its magnetic eyes
Looks back into our own, and swiftly snaps
Its lids and so have caught the poor, dumb flies. 
It closes on a present tossed like craps.
When real life deviates the mask slips down;
A demon whispers of a fated crown.

The absolutist instinct overcasts
The gentle flaws of gems aflame on night's
Horizon, and the blackened cloud outlasts
Perception as the eminent un-light.
The lust for an elusive fact in mist,
Ideals are petrified and actions list. 

The eye of indecision is afraid.
The ears that fear derision sensitize.
The hand of visions grand is stayed,
And in real life is disincentivized.
Their less-than-perfect is a less-than-whole,
And they beholden to a stillborn goal.

What can I say to praise imperfect things?
I cannot add or take from what they are.
What I could add more value doesn't bring;
If I detract it's not a further scar.
So I shall sing that greatest virtue sees
Their value is that they exist with me.

If Love is that which casts the shroud upon
The mindful eye that sees the Cloud in pain;
If Love or his the name which focusing
On blinds the eye, but then awoke to song
The spirit hears the Word of excellence,
Then praise be heaped upon this gentle sense.

If steadier the loaded pillar's held
When two more hands enclasp, fulfilled or healed
By how the bountiful creation lives;
To see a soul of beauty's face in Love
Allows them the Forgetting benefice,
So may we sanctify those sentences.

This affirmation in that Lordly Word
That turns one to a path affording wide
Acceptance that envalues every sod,
And felt alighting just as He had said,
"If Love is held between thee in my name,
There I reside as well the holy flame."

May we in loving love all things as much,
And see the ways the spirits' springs are matched;
Call it agape, happiness, or what
You may, we feel it when we’re blessed to wait.
A beacon though it's not beatitude,
May we accept it with due gratitude.

Gnarling, fomenting, and terrifying was she;
Screaming the wrath of Poseidon's doom was the sea.
Drowning was Panic's cacophony in the blasts
Down from above and below which shattered the masts.
Crying, just crying and fear. All courage destroyed;
Thought, in its vacuum, disintegrates in the void
Realization has carved out. Only despair,
Only despair and anxiety of the snared.

Iron and liquid, the sky is hard yet it melts;
Torrents from Heaven in syncopation with Hell.
Clutching in darkness below the deck while the bolts
Flash in the chaos without, all struggle to hold.
Crashers rebound on the hull and toss us around,
Piercing a hole in our side like running aground.
Light spills in almost as fast as water, and sight,
Fouler than blindness, itself impresses on night.

People unfathomably bereft in the lands
All of us left, that will never see of those sands
Where we return; it is never now for the forts
Cannot espy us, and nonexistent the port.
Always awaiting, the ones surviving us poor
Souls of the wreck; we were gone the same as before,
Then it was final. The sea in silence responds;
All that she offers are marching waves from beyond.