Are You an Artist?

Are you an artist with an artist’s broken soul?

Letting love and pain pour out in poem or paint

Beginning a piece by throwing all into the wind

Completing it with raw, reserved restraint

Know all mankind is burdened just the same

Loaded at birth with an intense need to create

Those unable or prevented will choose destruction

Hoping agony will thus be rendered satiate

Those with talent are beings set apart

Loved and lauded by most; hated by some

Burdened by both expectations and critique

They still burn brighter and rise into the sun

Tempests and Vagaries

The tempest of time and the vagaries of fortune

Have assembled this scene

Where I am no longer myself

But a fraction, or a splinter of what I might have been

Now I wander like a ghost along gleaming corridors

Of a vast and lonely fortress

Helplessly searching for Health

In body, bones, heart and head, pain has not visited yet

In sleep visions, I reach your hand and lace our fingers

Into a lattice of love

When awakened you are gone

Into the mists of a past that now I only dream of

The only way forward is to walk into the face of fear

And then right on through it

To the vast, blue yawning

Beyond the pale unknown where my future is lit

Into Mystery

Desire flowing like wine

He carries me to the top of the parapet

Awash in sunburst glory

Piercing me with joy

Together we leap from that great height

Into an unknown sky

All tethers to the mortal world sliced

So we fly freely, together, into the air, into mystery

Then fall warmly; slowly drifting

Until our toes touch solid earth again