Days Volume Two

* It went many years, But at last came a knock, And I though of the door With no lock to lock. I blew out the light, I tip-toed the floor, And raised both hands In prayer to the door. But the knock came again. My window was wide; I climbed on the sill And descended outside. Back over the sill I bade a 'Come in' To whatever the knock At the door may have been. So at a knock I emptied my cage To hide in the world And alter with age. Robert Frost The Lockless Door At first the news came across as just another odd event in the city, callous cruelty, the banality of evil. Two people had jumped from a balcony in Hunter Street, Waterloo, the neighbouring suburb to Redfern. There wasn't much peace now. Drugs, probably, they thought dismissively, barely able to arouse any interest, beyond the quirkiness of it. Ever since ice became the drug of choice for many of the city's alcoholic-addict-derelict fraternity strange things have been happening constantly. Were you there when she

* I see the boys of summer Where once the twilight locks A process in the weather of the heart Before I knocked The force that through the green fuse My hero bares his nerves Where once the waters of your face If I were tickled by the rub of love Our eunuch dreams Especially when the October wind When, like a running grave From love’s first fever In the beginning Light breaks where no sun shines I fellowed sleep I dreamed my genesis My world is pyramid All all and all Dylan Thomas All in shadows, all in giant floating egos. All his life he had wanted somewhere to escape, somewhere he wouldn't be bashed, ridiculed, beaten, humiliated, somewhere he could call his own, somewhere safe. In shadows and in lightning, in pain and triumph, these days were crawling over themselves like billowing clouds. He had made so many mistakes. He had longed for a solution, longed for warmth. That little stretch of pavement, that moment, kept coming back, the rivers of asphalt, the uncaring swish of the

* Out through the fields and the woods And over the walls I have wended; I have climbed the hills of view And looked at the world, and descended; I have come by the highway home, And lo, it is ended. The leaves are all dead on the ground, Save those that the oak is keeping To ravel them one by one And let them go scraping and creeping Out over the crusted snow, When others are sleeping. And the dead leaves lie huddled and still, No longer blown hither and thither; The last lone aster is gone; The flowers of the witch-hazel wither; The heart is still aching to seek, But the feet question 'Whither?' Ah, when to the heart of man Was it ever less than a treason To go with the drift of things, To yield with a grace to reason, And bow and accept the end Of a love or a season? Reluctance, Robert Frost. Well, if only the journey hadn't been internal. If only he had been allowed to laugh at the party. The quick and the dead. The soft echoes of recrimination. It was time to begin aga

* A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort. - Herm Albright Never face facts; if you do, you'll never get up in the morning. - Marlo Thomas The average man, who does not know what to do with his life, wants another one which will last forever. - Anatole France There he had built his stolen shack. It had to be a stolen shack Because of the fears of fire and logs That trouble the sleep of lumber folk: Visions of half the world burned black And the sun shrunken yellow in smoke. We know who when they come to town Bring berries under the wagon seat, Or a basket of eggs between their feet; What this man brought in a cotton sack Was gum, the gum of the mountain spruce. He showed me lumps of the scented stuff Like uncut jewels, dull and rough It comes to market golden brown; But turns to pink between the teeth. I told him this is a pleasant life To set your breast to the bark of trees That all your days are dim b

* Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveller, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth; Then took the other, as just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim, Because it was grassy and wanted wear; Though as for that the passing there Had worn them really about the same, And both that morning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black. Oh, I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back. I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-- I took the one less travelled by, And that has made all the difference. The Road Not Taken Robert Frost He found himself alone in an enormous warehouse. He was walking on a myriad of glassed in chambers. His shoe almost covered an entire world, a story, people, a microcosm. As he approached the meditation site, he knew his life was about

* For, dear me, why abandon a belief Merely because it ceases to be true. Cling to it long enough, and not a doubt It will turn true again, for so it goes. Most of the change we think we see in life Is due to truths being in and out of favour. As I sit here, and oftentimes, I wish I could be monarch of a desert land I could devote and dedicate forever To the truths we keep coming back and back to. So desert it would have to be, so walled By mountain ranges half in summer snow, No one would covet it or think it worth The pains of conquering to force change on. Scattered oases where men dwelt, but mostly Sand dunes held loosely in tamarisk Blown over and over themselves in idleness. Sand grains should sugar in the natal dew The babe born to the desert, the sand storm Retard mid-waste my cowering caravans-- "There are bees in this wall." He struck the clapboards, Fierce heads looked out; smal

* In the Drink He would have gone to Hell ageine, and earnest sute did make: But Charon would not suffer him to passe the Stygian lake. —Ovid, Metamorphoses (tr. Arthur Golding) Never mind phantom forms, the Keaton-crash that dumped us in that sea-fed swamp, the Dutch kill, Latin nihil, thing without opposite—attend instead the transcendent, the flying, for god's sake, what we saw the moment before we thwocked overboard: a heron stutter-flapped and lifted off, clumsy as a wind-mauled tarp at first, but couth beyond sublime once clear of cattail punks and saltgrass tips, the overturned rowboat's rusted hull. Or the cormorant that plunked and dipped, rose flipping fish from beak to tongue and down its neck, water beading on its head. But the crown that really pleased the crowd my maiden voyage was iridescent green, brilliantined, a merganser's spiky coxcomb. He swam right by, chasing red herrings and cackling so happily I had to pull a feather