wayne (photo)

Little Room

"Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them."

---Henry David Thoreau

I will endure this now because my dread looms large, the cost is too dear.
I will pour this bright nectar, ounce after golden ounce, down a grimy drain until it's gone.
Until then, I will turn around in this little room of my days and nights,
and just wait, wait and just wait and wait. Because maybe someone will lose a key:
I will pick it up on the street one morning and find that it fits exactly
into the lock of the door of the little room where I have made my peace that is
not exactly peace and certainly not the dance I would dance if I could dance.

I notice there is a key in the pocket of my heart. All along, it has been there.
This key has a voice I do not want to hear. It speaks to me of a pain that has become familiar, a hurt that I know
I can endure, if I must. It does not
cease speaking, this key. The other pain is sharp, and quick, it says, it is sharp and terrible and it lays waste to all that has held you in this half light.

It is too hard. I will drop it down the drain along with the nectar
that damned nectar that warms like soft sunshine on a baby's face. And that will be that.
And that will be that.

Raining in Nantahala

It is raining tonight in the woods of Nantahala.
Water from the black sky is rinsing the woods clean.
The rain sounds like some tomorrow wishing to be
born differently: a day unlike all the others.

White moths flicker in this deluge, oblivious to the wet,
their small minds intent on the light only, that light
that whispers to them, that draws them to my cabin:
a whiteness that lures them from the pitch dark forest.

I am listening from the cabin, dry and hoping that the rain will go on
all night. There is so much to be undone that a brief and feeble storm
will not get the sweeping done. There is so much darkness ---
I fear that there will not be enough rain to cleanse it all.