To Be Human

I hold you in great esteem no matter the mood

It is not important whether your words slight daggers of painful knowns 

Or if they swell up in tears of laughter and joy

It is all the same beautiful day lest light or dark, dawn or dusk

For in this ever-present state, one is drawn to truth

And oft the weary traveler, the dedicated soldier of life,

will lay down his head and cry tears of contempt

Not to stir the darkness but to lay waste what he holds dear -to tempt what he does not understand within himself

It is then that he receives the greatest miracle of ALL

It is then that the silence becomes filled with what his soul understands

So that he may proceed into Greatness.

-----------------------------------

This poem was written in respect to the life of Stanley the Sand Man

I once had a very gifted poet friend that wrote the most beautiful poems...very deep and pure, very wise.  I ended up calling him, 'Stanley the Sand Man' because he would often disappear for days at a time to the beach where he would numb his brokenness.  I never learned why.

Every once in a while he would go on a rampage of poetic suicide, punishing everyone in his path for his own inner darkness. I couldn't tell you what was going on in his personal life but I could tell he carried a lot. It was upsetting to me and everyone else to witness this. In fact, this very last time, he had pushed the limits of the community so much outside of the lines that he was on his way to being banned.

Ironically, he never spoke in regular sentences, he only spoke in prose - an odd bird, indeed, but he had many times pushed me to the edges of my own human understanding and provoked some of my best poems. There was a respect between us spoken only in the language of poetry that I felt compelled to send him off with a poem to leave him with some vestiges of grace.

As his last gesture, for the first time in four years, he spoke in normal language, "Thank you for this, I am humbled."

This is what self projection looks like when we hold onto the endless ocean of suffering to which we are unable to carry the full measure of that sorrow within ourselves. This affects 'everyone' as the circles of connection between us as a human family are very linked by the lives we lead.

I always wonder what happened to Stanley the Sand Man.  He will never know that he played such an important role as my Muse and this poem that truly took me on a wild ride of self reflection and wisdom.