"The nocturnal procession of children, of more children, and more child, so frightened, so quiet, so beautiful" - Elie Wiesel

I was never there to witness,
The outer limits of humanity's sickness,
Capacity to brutalize,
A machine to systematically dehumanize...

I cannot claim to understand
The essence of identity in man,
But for that delicate trail
Fragile, but not frail,
to a culture defined by oppression and genocide,
to a people with personhood denied,
to a time and a place
we were taken, no trace.
And I know the numbers, the lives claimed,
I know of the suffering, the bodies and psyches maimed,
But for all the tally-keeping,
It is the faces of the innocent that sets my heart a-weeping...

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A mere picture of the faces of the Holocaust has the capacity to bring me to uncontrollable tears. It does not matter where I am, or with who... For all the illusory and diaphanous nature of cultural identity, I cannot deny that I am connected at a deeper level than I can comprehend, to my ancestry. I wish I understood these things... I can only feel them, trickling down my face, leaving a saltine trace.

Petitioning The Muse for the Devil's Sigh

How do I act upon the intent
To allow myself to slip,
Into the space where the lights relent?
Fed, the darkness grows
I follow, where the shadows go,
I trail them, by scent and intuition,
Tracking, to the source of religion
The refuge, of the forgotten, of the forbidden,
Of the internally hidden.
Cast from consciousness,
and buried deep within
Implied behind every grin,
Or in the glimmer of the eye,
Betrays the devil's sigh.

This is human.

Man: The Global Taint

We take for granted that which we did not make,
Blind to the source from which we take
Are you afraid to recognize
Through consumption you die,
Because you fail to create,
Entropy is the fate
Of the species without restraint
Man becomes... the Global Taint

You: Antithesis to Inspiration

When the going gets smooth,
Suddenly I think of you
Of what evaluation you may surmise,
Suddenly my inspiration dies...
Should I look to you to justify,
The movement of my soul,
Whether wordly, kinetic, or musical?

Left-Handed Empiricism

Light as feather
A few simple words, strung together,
Thicker than night, coursing in my veins,
Where the shadows reign,
Here the true terrors lie,
Near the muse, her sigh
Whispering through my mind,
Clearing the muddied air,
Here I search and find,
Words that are neither yours nor mine,
But taken and woven,
Borrowed or stolen,

These streets are my own,
Not paved, but grown.
Like a vagabond, I roam.

In this place, this city, this forest of lies,
Myth and tales come alive,
From which certainty could never be derived.

Thieves on rooftops,
Couples working coffee shops,
Flutes singing,
Bodies swinging,
And truth is being excavated,
But mystery elevated always above, always
with a shrug, of doubt and skepticism,
Left-handed empiricism.

In The Falling of a Grain of Sand

Ponds are stirred
Truths and lies unfurled,
Questioning constraint and capacity
Balancing victory and tragedy

Thrown about, but it's by my own hand
Opening my mouth to shout, but drowning in sand
The sands of time, pouring with such pressure
I submit, suddenly what such pleasure!
To see death unfold in every instant,
Opposing the persistent nature of creation,
and entropy... a mathematical derivation.

This world, inherently without reason,
Countless languages giving it rhyme,
And death heralded by the passage of the seasons,
A single moment is extended in time,
into en eternity, intended to contain,
The quantum mystery of uncertainty,
In a single grain
And the band marches on,
So we dance, we dance, we dance till we die.