Unsettled

Unsettled

If you are a man of learning
read something classic,
a history of the human struggle
and don’t settle for mediocre verse.
Rumi

If you don’t fall for the dream
of living, you won’t believe
the dream of dying,
because voiding an ending
is really searching for a start,
and all that remains is yearning
to find where we now belong,
invisible, a swan among swans,
afire still, because you must have burning
if you are a man of learning.

By twelve you already knew
your father’s business;
but what was your face
before you were born?
In your beginning you came to heal
the prophetic wounds of mantic
liturgy, setting out alone
for the ancient desert
where eons had passed since the Jurassic
and you read something classic.
　
The adversary you meet
is the one you always expected,
offering a beggar’s dream
for a bigger promise.
What good losing a soul
if you can’t smuggle
your dream into the world scheme,
or find the will to know it?
or watch a troupe of mimes juggle
a history of the human struggle?

Any text read in depth
discovers puzzled possibilities;
only in sound is the silence
inferred, the soundless
of the unrecognized unknown.
In the beginning is the curse
of illusion yet we walk free,
slapping away fear with love;
no need for Presence to rehearse,
and don’t settle for mediocre verse.