Weighing in on the scales of Good and Evil

"I should dearly love that the world should be ever so little better for my presence. Even on this small stage we have our two sides, and something might be done by throwing all one's weight on the scale of breadth, tolerance, charity, temperance, peace, and kindliness to man and beast. We can't all strike very big blows, and even the little ones count for something."

Arthur Conan Doyle, physician and writer (1859-1930), in The Stark Munro Letters (1894).
 

Fragment #189

It was all too soon that we forgot what it was which made us what we were. Beasts of burden, that we became. They made us love the work. So we changed our mind. And we became intoxicated. We wouldn't question, after a while. We were thought important. We were overwhelmed. We thought we were central, that we were in control, that we had it all. We loved one another and when the stabbings began none batted an eye. It was the way life was, wasn't it, and had always been, hadn't it. We were we, and no one who mattered would be left behind. Words were what they had always been, yet were different now that we had only we to use. We didn't remember what we used before we, but we were so happy that we forgot. We was all which had weight. We were few, but the happy few. We were brothers, we had one another's back. We were formidable. We were infinite. We were and there would be no end to us, ever.

 

Fragment #177

"We thought it was over. We should have known better. We were tossed right inside the eye. The horizon had sunk behind billowing walls of grumbling wrath. The ship headwayed towards the edge, unseen in the growing darkness. Our sails, destroyed. The anchor line, snapped. Drifting inside the spiralling tower, electric arcs clawmarking the masts. Praying proved futile, Nature was stronger than any god."

 

Once heart

I know all too damn well
that I have a heart —
it’s pumping searing sadness
in my veins as I feel
the cold, unused space
on the other side of my bed

This be the end

"But hatred gripped his heart tightly, making him tremble from head to toe. He would have liked to fight, one last time. To have the enemy within his reach, to see a blood that wasn't his. He looked away from the myriad droplets around him and went back to contemplating his gaping wound. It was being sucked inside his chest. In turn, he was sucked in. He saw only vast plains bleached by waving floors of blazing daisies, under a bare sun and the silvery reflections of a river in the distance, edged with reeds and dragonflies – yes, thousands of dragonflies dancing in the green wind of the grass, their wings rustling furiously, deafening, whirling around the tips of his fingers; he felt the hair on the nape of his neck bristle; the sun was duplicated to infinity, dazzling, repeated in thousands more suns in the iridescent prisms of their finely metallic and diaphanous, ridged elytra, and each of the thousands of suns on each of the thousands of facets burst with such blinding rage and such opaline wrath on the coruscating plains lying before him that he was forced to shield his face with his hand, and to close his eyes."

 

Home

Home is where we are

together home is your

sunny laughter

I know I'm home when you

speak to me with

your eyes into mine

– your eyes so fleeting

with others –

I miss home when you call

and your voice rings

like waves of

sleeplessness

Home is why we are

together home is our

sundog slumber

I want to stay home when

you hug me so hard you

push the stars right

into my hair and

cry meteors

I feel home when

everything down to

the spoon on the counter

spells your presence

Home is when we are

anywhere home is a

deepsun silence

 

Fragment #54

a year ago

we didn't know

the other existed

today it's as if

he had always been there

Plume

when her idle fingertip

brushed past my heart

it left a trace in the dust

when she blew the smudge off

it fell like a dandelion of stars

 

Fragment #129

I wish she hadn't let her silences

stroke my soul and my eyes

I wish she hadn't looked at me

as if she kissed my whole body

I wish she hadn't written those words

which now echo in my house of cards

I wish she hadn't brushed her fingertips

over my chin, my cheeks, my lips.

But she did. And now that she's gone

I wish I had been heartspoken.

 

Components of resilience

"Knowing trees, I understand the meaning of patience. Knowing grass, I can appreciate persistence."

Hal Borland, American author and journalist, notably for the New York Times (1900-1978) in Countryman: A Summary of Belief, 1965.