Graceful as dancer’s arabesque and bow,Our lives appear serene and without stress,A gentle dance around pure nothingnessTo which we sacrifice the here and now.Our dreams are lovely and our game is bright,So finely tuned, with many artful turns,But deep beneath the tranquil surface burnsLonging for blood, barbarity, and night.Freely our life revolves, and every breathIs free as air; we live so playfully,But secretly we crave reality:Begetting, birth, and suffering, and death.<p>Alphabets</p>From time to time we take our pen in handAnd scribble symbols on a blank white sheet.Their meaning is at everyone’s command;It is a game whose rules are nice and neat.But if a savage or a moon-man cameAnd found a page, a furrowed runic field,And curiously studied lines and frame:How strange would be the world that they revealed.A magic gallery of oddities.He would see A and B as man and beast,As moving tongues or arms or legs or eyes,Now slow, now rushing, all constraint released,Like prints of ravens’ feet upon the snow.He’d hop about with them, fly to and fro,And see a thousand worlds of might-have-beenHidden within the black and frozen symbols,Beneath the ornate strokes, the thick and thin.He’d see the way love burns and anguish trembles,He’d wonder, laugh, shake with fear and weepBecause beyond this cipher’s cross-barred keepHe’d see the world in all its aimless passion,Diminished, dwarfed, and spellbound in the symbols,And rigorously marching prisoner-fashion.He’d think: each sign all others so resemblesThat love of life and death, or lust and anguish,Are simply twins whom no one can distinguish…Until at last the savage with a soundOf mortal terror lights and stirs a fire,Chants and beats his brow against the groundAnd consecrates the writing to his pyre.Perhaps before his consciousness is drownedIn slumber there will come to him some senseOf how this world of magic fraudulence,This horror utterly behind endurance,Has vanished as if it had never been.He’ll sigh, and smile, and feel all right again.<p>On Reading an Old Philosopher</p>
