The Evil That Does Good

When the harvests have been reaped and stored
and winter’s dark grasp encloses all light,
appear the shadows that cling to hubs of still warmth
as if they were the wheels that spun events
out of the rolling hills of one’s history.

Certainty is a mangy survivor that precedes all truth,
as light as it is heavy, it provides as well as takes
provides when it lets go
and takes when it holds on
and can turn the most despicable to beauty,
morally depraved to noble excellence.

But is the devil not the more courteous?
never entering uninvited
and appearing only when everything is truly lost
to that sacred point of losing even desire
losing that sense of loss, that furious engine of vitality
losing one’s humanity.

Grizzled does truth carry on its orderly routine
and worship some great ambition in eye-cast view,
when in truth, certainty beheld a verdant desire
in plain perception creep at the mind’s tendrils
where a rose flowers remembrance of failures dear
and unseats all the tasks, save for the one
long thought lost
closest to the heart.

But then come the judges, arrayed in court
with their persecutors and defendants
pros and cons, bring evidence and play argument
for a die that is long since cast
tears at the heart’s certainty, all while the mind
exercises its feigned retreat upon itself
pretending certainty is unseemly
and buying time on rented space.

Identity’s authentication is action
verification not of who you are, but of who you will be
this authorizes your being to return from nothing
and renew the connection to reality;
none of morality’s yawning foibles could make the heart pause
but press upon the vessels that give life and it skips a beat.

The heart begets a thought to mind its own,
but what it owns is open to all minds everywhere forever
and when the heart turned against itself to become its other
did the other see itself in the heart and the all knots it was tangled in,
seeing its own entanglements presented afresh, the mind rode with fury
to untangle itself in its other.

Determined, with rage and anger, the mind spread its web
co-located and gathered, analyzed and weighted
but for each analysis another point of data emerged,
and what was weighted weighted weight in compounding arsenal
as the stocks grew in mesmerizing anticipation
and certainty vanished from view in echoing circuits of indignation.

The fire that burns everything burns itself
running aground in the ash of its destruction
what moved with feverish regimen collapsed to dull inertia
becoming soil that another may nourish itself
and in this giving, it found its redemption
for it now is becoming what the other became.

The heart had let the mind in
but the mind, being the slow one, eventually
learned to let the heart in;
each putting the other before itself,
set themselves free.

What is the truth’s truth?
And certainty’s certainty?
One asks to leap up and beyond
while the other answers by going down and within;
however do these partners revolve against the other
calm together in endless jaunt
without some surplus?

As two lovers of different languages
cannot speak but through their eyes
are pulled together by what they see
and pulled apart by what they cannot hear
their touch forms the bed of their understanding
as their souls sizzle with incandescent tension
through what both is and is not
in this moment
nevermore and always.