Responsibility

If blank verse well-travelled, then the puritans’ words would

be holding us today instead of the modernists’ cry,

the bards would be vacant and the streets held untoward,

yet I do not believe it even if the news knows why:

it is clear that prose is forbidden from passage through the Eye.

I’d rather here scrawl the vestiges of thought never quite uttered,

never utterly quit and yet quickly forgotten.

I’d rather fear nothing but the pressing of time not fully grasped,

by the fleeting mortality of a mentality limed

with the rifeness of life, the pains of fertility,

the buoyancy of fate, and the levity of nobility.

Do the clouds abide by the gravity of their bondage?

Will not the mountains becry the whimsy of their rivers?

The moon complains not of enslavement to the Sun,

but admires her sheen in the transfiguration of the One.

Neither the heavens moan nor the earth heaves

since it is the life of each that makes the life in thee.

Sooner I’d be the opposite of me,

to generate externally that enshadowed need,

and later we’ll come in reunion, three:

the lightness of you, the darkness in me,

joined by the heavenly burden– Responsibility.