My Loneliness Is False

Moving before me is a blank universe,

like an empty page on which I may compose as I wish

words that have their own dance of meaning,

and to me a meaning clear and full as I may desire.

And to those who see them I may wish

comportment with my own heart and mind.

I am a single animal, a human I am called,

bestowed with speech I may inscribe upon this page

to only my avail as to its fullest weight,

and yet my expectation is such

that my brother humans will connect with me

and touch my heart as I touch theirs

in some arcane calculus of human quality.

I walk the pavements as do others, stopping

here and there for pleasure or compulsion

as do others in my wake, and try to fit my skin

around their private will and see the store fronts,

as they do; feel the heat of the day, quench my thirst

in much the same way, to the same sensuous thrill,

and yet…..

this is not the way of the world in which I live.

I am so completely private, so insulated in my mind,

that all attempts at verisimilitude in this regard

are wisps of hopeful meanderings

that come and go like motes in a spring morning.

This is not to say I do not hope.

This not to say I may not be wrong.

This is not to say I am so alone

that a dream of brotherhood is all I have

in the world of man, woman and child.

or even in the vegetable world of trees.

If I am alone, the tragedy is so whole

I may be forgiven for anger at my state,

and desire to be dead if this is all there is to life.

If I am not connected as the note is to the melody,

if I am not a consequential part of all there is,

if I am not a component in the fact of light

or an ingredient in the consummation of lights impingement,

if I am not a muscular movement in the twisting of Orion

around its energetic center,

then I am not what the cells of my body confirm me to be….

a shape of existence formed to relate

what it is that makes me relate,

and what I relate is all there is to relate.

This is the center of gravity of my self,

and it is lonely, but it is tirelessly connected.

It is ephemeral, but it is permanent.

It is minuscule, but it is massive.

Thus I confess my loneliness is false.

I live in the tribe of the atom and the leaf,

of the wind and the blood, of the war and the peace.

I am an element of the forest and the book,

I am an animal of the street and of the comet.

This may not make for pleasant dreams,

since the windings of my mind are filled with error,

but in the consequence of error,

I find the consequence of truth.