Diastrophism

Diastrophism

Mistress Pain weighs heavy on me,

Stern and frowning, refuses to be taken for granted.

Mother Comfort nestling the child... her nemesis.

Divide that embrace! All reassurance recanted.

 

I am a cup for sorrow

Catching every bitter drop,

Sticky as rain, gathers to overflow;

Pleading for the deluge to stop.

 

She trickles down through my life and settling,

Layer by layer, the fertile soil of my soul.

Down to the bedrock that is my core;

Seems so solid yet feels a gaping hole.

 

She lies dark and brooding there

Until I sow seeds in her soil,

Some sprout tangled weeds, others sweet fruit;

Conditional upon the virtue of my toil.

 

Yet at my very center,

Where my soul touches my heart,

Life’s passionate engine heats petrified feelings

To soupy, molten madness and art.

 

My blood boils and my consciousness condenses,

But I am just a sieve to pleasure,

As steam escapes between grasping fingers.

Look but don’t touch; coal burned to treasure.

 

Lithic joy, light as laughter,

Bubbles from the living furnace.

Craving to catch, relish, possess... must be denied

Lest the untamable spirit burn us.

 

Perhaps mis-nomered "Intellectual"?

Consider it as blessed as cursed.

Catch fleeting experience in a neuron net

Word seedlings on paper dispersed.

 

And as doubly loud as each emotion beats

I take also the sensitivity as toll.

The pain will fill me but pleasure frees

And flame-purged emptiness makes me whole.                                                  © 6/22/98