A Week Offline

Mother, with what tenderness we part:
Those loves are too true that quit us too soon.
But I will always be within you,
Just as your life throbs in my veins --
Your existence prophesied my own,
And mine will be a token and a witness
To this, your having lived, when you are gone.
Only the lie of a physical absence
Keeps us apart, but how can we be separate
Who live with one heart?

Rancune, rancoeur,
The vile thoughts of a heart
Bitter, fetid, rank. Who are we when the loves
Get sucked away?
Hollow tubes pipping jealously despair into the night
We would shatter and stab, and everything in it.
Morality for the miserable is nothing –
The man who wants, wants all.

I have failed, knowledge eludes me. All I have is stilted prose.
I might as well take to myself the convenients of song,
All habitudes of art, for fear that only, if I don't move,
I will die. Will it be roses or lilacs, then, the sun or austere moon?
Keep me in the twilight of my reason, muse, so I may dream of stars.

My heart, are you lonely?
He will come, perhaps he is already here --
Green eyes like the sea, a breath of the wind
On a day with sun and clouds.

These clouds are your inheritance, and the sun
That mingles with them, spending its light
On a vain sky; learn the weather and its seasons,
For these will be company all your days.