China, your skies are bloody red!
What do the astrologers and soothers say?

I say, it happened once before, the year of Boston's bloody massacre.
And from that massacre, America was freed from the yoke of tyranny.

Thunder, hail, storm,
You shall be pestle
And turned to the sea.
Your odor shall waft abroad.

The child's heart within all
Feels so much larger than it actually is.
It feels like all laws bend to its will,
That it is of a greater importance
Than the Great Pyramids,
Than the Mythic Stonehenge,
Than the Swirling Milky Way,
Than the Eifel Tower,
Than Democracy,
Than Free Speech,
Than Patriotism,
Than History.
The child within all feels like the creator of all worlds.

It feels so important,
Like a king,
Like it were great at every which thing.
A great skier,
A great chess player,
A great teacher,
A great writer,
A great builder,
A great artist,
A great singer,
A great champion and hero.

The child in all believes itself to be great...
It feels entitled to all good treatment.

It feels as if the world revolves around them.

I don't know how we ever grow up...
I look at people, in their self importance,
And I find each one a world swirls around their minds,
I can tap into it by listening to their words.
I can feel their feelings, know their thoughts
By the words they speak, and the mien they imbue.
I can know them, and so can you.
Yet, not many care to know them.
Not many care to look at the dramatic obelisk of Other
As a friend once wrote in a poem about a man named David.
That there are obstacles hindering us,
People, places and things.

I look at myself, and my wisest thoughts
Came from other minds much wiser than mine.
It came from listening, from tasting,
From touching, from smelling,
Through the descriptive tense
Of another's words.
Not my taste, not my touch,
Not my smell, but my ear.

The greatest pieces of wisdom
Came from the greatest adversaries.
For, I could poke holes right through them
When I became undaunted by their words.
When it became interesting.

In practical matters I still feel there are foolish men---
Yet, they find a more practical lifestyle than I do.
And I feel their swirling world as they speak---
It is offensive. It soon becomes my world
A swirling kaleidoscope of thoughts and inventions.
I've learned to embrace it, for such is their freedom
And such is mine.

Yet, my brother told me today,
"Do not seek to persuade me."
Can democracy flourish without persuasion?
My inner child likes to reach out and touch other worlds
But it often gets burnt. Thus, it still reaches,
It still touches, it pries into the deepest held beliefs.
Politely, I can have a conversation with a woman
On Dharma, and she enjoy it.
Yet, her husband---for he ought to be by now---
Scolds her, offends her, doesn't listen.

"Buddhism is more optimistic."
I agree, it's not the torments of Caste systems.
But, really, there must be something better after this life,
Than having to live it all over again.
What cruel deity swirls us in this cosmos for eternity?
Hell is a comfort to me, for there is no wisdom there.
No activity. No planning.
Meaning, no thought. For, with thought
There is wisdom. Hell seems less cruel
Than tormenting someone on Earth
Over and over again,
With a reincarnation of past lives
Rejuvenating and swirling like the Milky Way.
That is immoral.
And at last, it is simply to die?
I cannot  believe death is the sum of life's choices.
I believe there must be more.
I'd lose hope, if all I had to look for
Was another life like this.
Yet, her thoughts are interesting,
And he---very sure of himself---
Tells me I upset her.
Something tells me she was telling the truth
That it was not me.

Rather, I live to listen...
Do not be offended if I cannot agree,
But that is core to our freedom
Even to have heated arguments.
If I could not persuade,
If I could not gain access to the worlds which swirl around me,
I would be despaired, and lonely.
I would be, as the Woke Mob wishes me to be,
A solipsist, constantly reassuring himself with his own thoughts.
And there I would be, no one to challenge me
Suffering in the hell I created for myself
By telling someone I thought was wrong to, "Shut up."

Offense is necessary in a free society.
For, in a free society, we are free to share our worlds
With one another, and burdened though we be,
The child within us touches the scalding, red-hot
Iron of another's world---if we cannot sway them to ours
Or be swayed to theirs, then there is no freedom.

I know it burns. But, there is no better joy any other way.

While reading a poem, if you ask a question, assume the poet has it answered and your job is to find it

Talk to people in England, if I were right.

Or anywhere, really.

Just not in America, where you are, like 4. No, 4 1/2.

The primary thing to understand
About poets, is that "Love is not All"
By Edna St. Vincent, I understand
That when she wrote, "I do not
"Think I would", it meant she wouldn't.
There is no might about it.

Also see it hopefully,
That though love is not everything,
It is still as necessary as all the rest.

You are my poetry.
I listen... what do those thoughts inspire?
I know not anymore what they mean---
Only what you say about them.

Do not come to me, and ask,
"Does your poem mean, thus..."
I do not know.
I want to hear your words
And interpret them like I do Eliot or Wordsworth.

I want to listen.
Do you not understand?
I wrote so much to listen to you
Tell me what they mean.
I know what I meant by them...
What do you see by them?

I can listen, and understand you.
You listen, and understand me.
I wish to listen to you...
Just tell me your honest thoughts.

Know only one thing about me.
I believe in Christ.
But, tell me what you see in my poems
And reveal to me mysteries I had not even fathomed.
Reveal to me the hidden parcels of wisdom
I did not see, nor conceive.
Show me what they mean---
For do you not understand,
Words have meaning?
I say this over and over again---
Thoughts have meaning.
Precise meanings.
Do not shy away from telling me your thoughts.
I will think over them,
Mull over them...
For that is what I want.
I want you to think
And speak important words.
Not sit idly and talk about nonsense.
Talk about something deep,
And if poetry draws that out of you,
I wish to listen and see the chrysalis of your thoughts.

See, those reading my poems,
You are my poetry.
To have never had an audience
To listen to,
To never hear you tell me what they mean---
I am tired of my own thoughts...
Do not make me blue.

I wish to place wisdom
Onto your lips, and make it rain forth.

My love, I had forgotten Smerdis was that Death, 
And Death my Doppelganger throughout my odes.

My poem decries the cycle of civilization. 
How there is always a vacuum left where power begins to fail.

In the Histories, Cambyses campaigned in Egypt, 
After his sire Cyrus had freed all his subjects;
Cambyses sought to reconquer them. 
Thus, Smerdis arose to usurp power from his brother Cambyses---
Yet Smerdis was killed by Darius,
So was justified because Smerdis was a changeling
As the story goes---drawing a comparison with Smerdis 
To the Androgynous mobs of Death.

Yet, I felt the presence of the poem,
That its meaning defied even me...
It was born from this author
But---as the Archer told me in his village---
It had a sense of strange otherness.
What I had made was beyond even my own interpretation.
How I could forget something so key,
There it was, beyond me, something I made and could now rediscover---
A poem I wrote had intrinsic meaning... 
Even its author need rediscover it.

It was, then, its own being,
Like I had given birth
And the child grew.
There the child was,
Born of my seed, 
But something else.

The painful stroke of marginalized
Artists, making 50,000 florins,
Taking up the apprenticeship of sire;
Walking the path his father gave...

When the two great masters met
They hated one another, competing
To best an adversary. Bitter and spiteful,
Like Southey and Byron,
Wordsworth and Shelley,
Leonardo and Michelangelo...

I watch like Raphael,
Wondering at their chafe.
Their unbridled hate.

For all genius is welcome to me...
I will applaud it.

Yet, the modern sage says Michelangelo's unfinished
Pieta is better than the one set in St. Peter's Basilica;
Better than Moses and David
For that, there can be no Raphael now...
For the sophist says
That exegesis is deferred to the reader
And their capricious whims.

I told him, I'd "burn my entire library
"And everything I'd ever wrote
"If you are right."

Yet, his musings were divine...
It was not jealousy, just the disrespect
To communicated thought.

Were Leonardo and Michelangelo
Different? Were they not the same,
Dissecting corpses, and both experts?
Yet, Leonardo was jealous of the craft
Of Sculpture, and Michelangelo 
Defiant in his defense.

Why do I write?
I tenderly ask this question when I see the sophist
Has reign over the modern age.
While I do not wish a scientist to determine the language---
While I do not want an algorithm to determine my meaning---
He says, "Language is not an algorithm, it expands, contracts..."
I say to him, there is one thing I disagree with.
One thing. I said that words can be understood.
And for that, he ignored me.

Like Leonardo's disrespect for Michelangelo's
Sculpture, the terrific thing is that I am not
Simply caked with dust like a baker.
I form with words the sculpture of my architecture...
And I wish them to mean something.
Not just be a kaleidoscope of feeling. 

Weak faith had I, when every truth
Brought the blush of cherry tomatoes
To my peachskin face. I looked
And every good fact doubted.

I held to faith...
Would cut truth,
And in faithless backbiting
Tear down every bastion of knowledge.

A fire, burning the chaff
Of miracles, truth and beautiful exegesis.