They tore down the trees today. I stood in the muddy street and stared in horror at the carnage before me. The pine trees lay in a disgraced heap, stripped of their bark and their dignity. Young saplings had been uprooted and tossed aside casually. The ground now held nothing more than a sea of torn clay.

Don’t say it was for the best
Don’t tell me it was time.
I’ve heard it all before
Don’t be like all the rest

I’ve been trying not to cry
Every time I think of her
Don’t tell me it’s OK
Don’t say that I know why

You say she’s just a dog
I say she was much more
Eleven years of friendship
Now I’m in a fog

Whenever I was sad
She was by my side

No, I must disagree
Death is not a thing of beauty
Of joy in afterlife
Death is not a thing of poetry
Of romantic notions of love
Left behind

For those who are yet alive
Death hits you like a betraying punch
Like a slip on the stairs
At the bottom of which
You look up unpleasantly surprised
And hurt
You shake yourself off
And tell yourself it’s nothing

O solitude of emptiness
of grief
a hole through your heart
that love makes
when it is betrayed by the loss of Eden
the sudden absence of what should be
as familiar as life
and the glare against your eyes
against your heart
of what should not
and what is making you
cracking
breaking you

o solitude of emptiness
of loss
an ache made from the wound
that catches you off-guard

I think life is a new, strange, different, deeper thing...since the last time I wrote anything for you. I've lived a lot, these last few months; in some ways, it feels like I've lived more since the end of last year than since the beginning of my life.

“Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.” (Robert Frost, Nothing Gold Can Stay)

Today,
the tree watches sadly,
a hundred years
of what we might have become.
Every day he sighs,
while roots struggle
through cracks in the pavement.
Each day is a torment
that nobody hears,
lost in sirens and
unearthly noise.
Each day they all smile,
trapped behind bars
in a fortress of stone
and of fear.
The city teems every night
in unholy light
and traffic throbs

November 20, 2004

Look to the west,
And hear my voice
Upon the crashing waves.
I promise you
I have found peace.
By your grace I have been saved.
Please understand
How hard it was
To leave you on the shore,
And for letting me
Set sail that day
I love you all the more.

No mortal fear
Can harm me here,
No darkness lives behind my eyes.
Free at last
From injury past,