Commentary From A Dark Stage

 The meaning of life: It is not happy hour  
It is not your career. It is    
to teeter on the edge of obscurity      
because not all hope has yet been lost!      
To catch a glimpse of the waitress      
pretending not to notice a table      
full of torn notebook paper-      
     
But you noticed her and she held your hand    
in mediation that very morning.      
     
Poetry has done nothing for me!      
     
War made me fast and violent      
bloodied my knuckles with cigarette burns.      
Death made me a man without dreams of    
towering cities upon hills or lakes and rivers:      
     
And Spain and the world made life worth living,      
said to never look for God in a church, but      
to always look man in the eye-to understand      
astonishment has a cynics' heart.      
     
To love is best, to love unconditionally      
is always better, to love blindly is an opiate    
and easy  to forget that some things      
are not to be loved:      
     
That the populace must be reminded      
from decade to decade      
from son to father      
from mother to daughter      
to view theater and spectacle    
with suspicion:      
     
That fear is control and    
morality and myth are real:      
     
That fearlessness is freedom      
that freedom accepted is    
freedom given away.