To a ‘goodnight’ gone, and those still to come…

I am only a part-time poet. I love to be lost in lyricism, awash in the wide stretching words of sonnets and verse, but my thoughts tumble out best, and most often, in prose and in essay. Perhaps it’s because my mind is always wildly musing and meandering; fueled by the epistemologist’s urgent need ‘to know’ and the philosopher’s desirous love of wisdom, I write for the want of understanding.

But, poetry; poetry is something that comes to me in intervals indifferent to the varying searches of my intellect. Instead, it often arrives as an unbidden and unexpected guest, whose aid is twice blessed because it is unlooked for, as Tolkien might say.

Poetry comes to me in the midst of rapture, ecstasy, agony, and anguish. In all the immoderation of an instant that evades easy expression, it emerges from the excesses of a moment in time.

Between memory and anticipation, between where I have been, where I am now, and where I am going, something nameless and unfathomable, something unexpected and ineffable spills out and spills over in abundance. The moments when we indiscreetly and indiscriminately sense an overwhelming shift in the shape of the world, a change in the amassed arrangement and organization of ourselves; when all we are rupturously collides with all we have ever been, and all we are about to become.

Poetry is simply one of the ways in which I try to grasp at something vaporous; an attempt to capture the spillage in space. It is an effort to create a time capsule; a place where the past is made prescient, where the future becomes present, where now becomes perpetual.

When the losses of all the days gone mix and mingle with the longing for all that is still to arrive, in the fullness of being here, we write. When the magnanimity of the infinite merges into a single moment, we write secret messages. We write these messages, if to no one else than to ourselves, if for no other reason than to remember…

Your voice
Still redolent in my head
Still running wildly through my chest
Still wafting through the four corners of all I am,
And, perhaps, all I’ve ever wanted

Goodnight
Goodnight, you say
Again and Again, goodnight
Over and over, goodnight
I listen until I’ve lost hope of ever tracking the count

I have known so many nights
Many have bidden a darkness beyond words
Some have shown stars brighter than I remember
But none now seem “good” until this one was named as such by you

How strange it is to miss the figment of a face I have never met
To be nostalgic for a life that I have not lived yet

Until then..
Goodnight

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