Early Morning Reflections

Suspended from sleep like a feather floating in primordial darkness,
The ways of the night I feel,
Like an all-knowing sense that pervades my entire being,
The wind of silence, I hear in the distance,
From my chamber like a tomb or spaceship,
The sky is silent, but in the deepest depths of my mind,
It's dark blue eternal and the stars burn their white phosphorescence,
Like matches in the pattern of the cold night.

There are sounds of distant traffic like echoes of faint ghosts,
I know this silence fills the forests and the graveyards as it does the room I'm in,
Eternity ticks by the moments that make up this life,
Self-contained within this chamber,
And I feel the aloneness that must be me for eternity,
But for the companionship of my two sphinxes.

At any moment, the sounds of night resound in the empty halls of this life,
And now I hear movement in this space between dreams,
The silence of night is a presence that seems to say, "I will be here forever,
Through the years, I will not end".

All is reduced to this endless dream,
And to the night, all is rendered meaningless,
And all life slips into dimness like distant lights on the midnight shore.

Can I ride this dark highway like a traveler,
Carrying my dreams and karma,
Or is my end in the blackness of a graveyard,
Will this be the way eternity speaks through the shifting of the seasons,
And the spinning of the stars,
Am I just another impression burned on the vault of heaven,
A face in a tomb of skulls, reflecting bittersweet stories in the depths of eternity.

The voices of the past are all silent now,
Their moment of time was brief candles that flickered,
Their essences surrendered to shadows of time and death.

These walls, but a brief container that shields me from the infinity of space and
collective unconsciousness,
Because I know this silence continues through trees, grass, meadows, and empty roads,
Streetlights shimmer in the morning wind,
And the ocean flows, wave upon wave like the emptiness of Genesis primordial night,
Because all living beings circle and dance within the pattern of life,
In the black ether of passing time beneath the glare of burning stars and modern skies,
All pretense dissolves in night's indifference,
Nothing speaks but eternity.

Were it not for this life that surrounds me, all would be an eternal presence,
Either in room or sky, all would continue in this unending moment,
The moment of poets and prophets who are called in these seasons.

The ancient night reigns over the ruins of the past,
The ages conceal the dreams and songs of mankind that endlessly radiate
out toward sky, beneath twinkling stars,
The wind continues swirling through the trees of the forest and over rivers that descend through hillsides,
All is rendered unreal through the song of this magic night.

note: This is a poem I wrote in 1999, and posted to some websites in 2007.