My father’s house is a place of chill,
where moments become eternity,
and when I read for a moment or two
suddenly my world opens,
my life’s turning stops,
and I freely fall through the center
of my being here, here where nothing
is that cannot be, where everything
is at once all that I should be, here,
and I suddenly for the first time see
that all I needed was nothing,
nothing at all.
Until I came to face myself
and saw nothing, nothing at all,
then everything was there, everything,
everything.
It was my old, bitter, and always cold
reasoning , those thoughts of mine so perfect
as long as they never entered the world
of my private arena, where I faced my public lions.
Well, we learn, ever so slowly,
and hope that our time left
is enough that we avoid self-destruction,
which is always our worst public failure,
and fatal admission of weakness
in the world we insisted on making ours,
so perfectly ours, that our lambs
finally and fatally lay down with our lions.
09 January 2015
Esquimalt, BC