Unavoidable

Or unenviable

One must always gravitate

Toward the perfect cause

Christendom

Or callousness,

Sanctity

Or hell

Inevitable

Invariable

We all must choose a side.

What happens when one listens to the silence too long?

Does he go insane?

No;

He looks forward to brighter days

When the silence will not pervade.

If I were never cool enough

Young enough

Smart enough

Slick enough

Smooth enough

Then forgive my disdain

Dissatisfaction

Disregard

Disappointment

And dismay

In having to be

Only the person I could manage to be

And look back at he

And all that was meant to be

Yet choose to see

The goodness that comes forth from me.

There is nothing quite as primal

As being barefoot in the park

As the primordial rocks warm on your soles,

The water dripping down your ankles,

The sound of the stream splattering regularly

Down the cliff face.

One has to laugh

Either that, or cry

I choose to laugh.

A favorite poem of mine, by Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935):

Whenever Richard Cory went downtown,
    We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
    Clean favored, and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed,
    And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
    “Good morning,” and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich — yes, richer than a king,
    And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
    To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked, and waited for the light,
    And went without the meat, and cursed the bread,
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
    Went home and put a bullet through his head.

“Richard Cory” by Edwin Arlington Robinson from The Second Book of Modern Verse, Jessie B. Rittenhouse, ed.  ©Houghton Mifflin, 1920.

Simplicity

I do not think

Can come

Unless you are willing

To accept its complexities.

 Excerpt of a poem by Carl Sandburg:

Do you know how the dream looms?  how if summer

       Misses one of  us  the  two of us miss summer—

So I shall look for you…

In the listening  tops  of  the  hickories,  in  the  wind

       Motions of the hickory shingle leaves, in the imi-

       tations of the slow sea water on the shingle silver

       in the wind—

                  I shall look for you.

“Silver Wind” by Carl Sandburg from Smoke and Steel.  ©Harcourt, Brace, and Howe, Inc., 1920.  This excerpt as seen on a portrait of Sandburg in Hendersonville, NC, with lines arranged here as originally published.  MBH 

I like summer.  It makes me happy.  It makes me feel alive and optimistic for the future.  I don’t get sad in the summer.  I don’t get lonely.  I am not, usually, depressed by the warm air, the gorgeous breezes, the sun-dappled water, or the grand mountains.  Summer here is an amalgam of childhood’s memories and later-life remembrances.  I am all at once ten and then thirty-something.  My soul lives here; it haunts the side streets and corner benches of small towns along the line.  It grows old at the soda fountain.  It rests by the stream.  I need not grandeur nor renown; I have the summer.

Apparently,

It is impossible to predict

With acuity

The consequence

Of our own inaction,

Just as it cannot be done,

To know what others may think,

Or the opinions they form

Based on the who and what of when you were.