The Nature of Things

What is the nature of life? Is it good or evil?
It is good when it fulfils our desires and evil when it does not.
What is the nature of immortality? Is it heaven or is it hell?
It is heaven when it fulfils our desires and hell when it does not.
Nothing is fixed. Nothing is absolute. Even eternity changes.

A Distant Mirror

This is a strange mirror...
In it I gazed thinking to see another, only to see myself,
Or someone like me, made better.The bent arrow
Now flies straight. The blunt instrument cuts
Cleanly. The cracked glass reveals again the hidden detail.
Touch not the image, lest the illusion be broken
And myself confronted once again with all my imperfections.

1:22

Silence is its own sound. In the dead of night you hear it
Prowling round the midnight gate, lifting latches;
Shadowless, it slips around corners into blackness.

Nothing can drown it out. Like the empty place
At the table, the blank spot where a coat should be
Silence mocks. Leave a space in your mind and silence

Will fill it. Silence is a shoe without a foot, a hat without
A head, a burial without the dead. Silence is the hole
That remains when the donut has gone. Merciless.

The hollow laugh, the flat blank eye of the mannikin,
The handshake that never touches your skin,
The pictureless frame are its hallmarks. Then suddenly,

In a mirror, you glimpse movement, a face.
Ears ring, the heart hammers at the gates: salvation.