Isn’t it pathetic that
in my moment of weakness,
of doubt,
when I am brought to question
the fundamentals of my own identity,
I seek the one I hurt,
who rejected and left me,
and find solace in the beauty
that she creates,
that she embodies,
that she exudes,
and it is through my ability
to recognize that beauty,
to love her still,
that I am brought back
to myself,
to calm,
to peace,
to grace.
The first thing I noticed was the hair,
then the jacket, the gait, the confident stare.
The piercing paragon of perfection impaled
by a single solitary blemish unveiled.
Not divinity, no, but a regular woman.
Perhaps that’s the most we get as humans.
If not worship, maybe we get to love,
to have and hold and be happy thereof.
Living every day, one day at a time,
we rarely see the curve, the shape, the line
that life tends to make, veering this way and that,
sometimes two steps forward, sometimes three steps back.
How deep are the grooves that guide our wheels
in ways we never notice, forces we never feel,
locking us in its grip of subtle predestination,
subject to health, wealth, chance, and situation?
An intervention is needed to break the chains that bind,
to heal the body, raise the spirit, comfort the heart, and free the mind.
Let’s not make the same mistakes over and over again.
Go someplace new, try something different, see what happens then.
Not the center, but a little to the left,
live those with promise, and those bereft.
First the learned, then the free,
then those without leaf or tree,
when you travel west are the ones you’ll meet,
going from City Hall to 69th Street.
The universities and co-ops cannot hide
the shuttered schools and bombing sites.
The progressives who want to change the nation
start by displacing the local population.
Home to both the generous and the very unkind,
contradictory is the natural West Philly state of mind.
If I could have any ability,
it wouldn’t be speed or flying.
What I wish I was able to do
is ably comfort the dying.
To soothe their pain
and remedy their guilt.
To remind them of
the lives they built.
To help reflect on what was,
and ponder what lies ahead:
for those who go on living,
and those who will be dead.
To witness life about them,
in its glorious impermanence,
vibrant diversity, grave sincerity,
and steady, graceful cadence.
It is an honor to have lived
with such feeling and integrity.
The body may be frail,
but not without its dignity.
Of all the people you have met,
I will be the last.
The pain is coming to an end,
soon it’ll all be past.
You’ve conquered the mysteries of life,
but mysteries of death await.
Go in peace, go with love, go with courage
onwards through Heaven’s gate.