Those who can make you believe absurdities...

can make you commit atrocities.

- Voltaire.

Poem Before Breakfast in Oakland Jail

© 1992, Troy K Spears

The sad and saddest moment
is the one of realization
when we turn and turn
the self-mending process
into the "thing" – durable, breakable.
The actual breaking
is only the sadness of the realization
come to pass.

God is just now emerging from his dream.
But the God who is was already dead
and was born dead.

What is most cannot be said and cannot be saved.
What is least, and the excretion of the least,
has been collected and catalogued as learning.
But our learning still stinks of the judgment of Christ,
and his carcass still rots beneath our too worldly gaze.

Who touches does not know, who knows does not touch.
And to hallow one moment is to be blessed forever.

I am and still only cannibal,
I am last of my species.
I decree the blessed eucharist and wither
beneath my too cultured taste.
I starve without kindred.

The Abyss of Perfect Knowledge

by Max Ehrman

I plunge myself into a sea
of duty, seeking escape from the
questions at the pit of consciousness.

O shadows of Renee, Obermann, De Guerin,
Amiel, and all holders of moral inquisitions -
I shake you off!
I go out into the sunlight,
and I bathe myself in human fellowship.

Under the leaden wings of nights
I see this brood of melancholy
half-gods and half-men,
pitiable because they are neither
the one nor the other.

I grow afraid and turn away
from the bottomless pit of
perfect knowledge. I see the withered
hand that touched all these
curious adventurers who would
search the caverns of the ideal.

I dissipate the thoughts in these
scribblings, to save myself;
therefore I plunge into the sea of
daily duty, to forget the lure of the abyss
of perfect knowledge, and to live and
laugh again.

If This Is

© 1993, Troy K Spears

If this is dream,
it is a good dream
that make me also good
by its charms and mystic devices.

If this is foolery,
history is full of fools,
loudhearted and big,
and falling at the feet of my dream,
I would be in good company.

If this is falsehood,
it is false as the moon is false,
and she must show her several faces
in order to be comprehended whole.

If this is truth,
it is a dangerous truth,
for each flower and gentle word,
each look and fond remembrance,
brings its own chance
of collapse.

To Be With You

by Max Ehrman

To be with you this evening,
rarest of the evenings all,
And listen to the whispering leaves
and to the night bird's call
The silvery moonlight on your face-
To be with you in some still place.

To be with you somewhere within
this evenings mystic shade,
To hear your plans and hopes
and tell you mine, all unafraid
That you'd forget to hold them dear,
When I'm away and you're not here

To be somewhere alone with you
and watch the myriad stars,
Far golden worlds beyond the noisy
earth's unkindly jars,
As quietly they sail the night's sea
Above all the world and you and me.

Sleep Sweetly

by Max Ehrman

Sleep sweetly now that the gates of the
crimson night are closed, and leave
tomorrow's struggle for tomorrow;
The earth is peaceful, only the stars and still moon
are abroad, and they wage no war.