Foreword

It has now been over one year since I was ambushed by reality on my leisure stroll through the flowering landscape of my personal garden of Eden. I remember watching as it stepped out from within the shade of my tree of knowledge and briskly approached me with an amiable smile on its face. Before I even had the time to return its expression, my jaw shattered and my vision was saturated with crimson. As I blacked out, I noticed fault lines forming along the sky…

As all the preconceived notions I had about the nature of life fractured in front of me, the floor gave way and I began to fall. I somersaulted through the air in desperation, trying to brace my body for the inevitable impact, but in spite of my best efforts, my descent was punctuated by a sickening crunch as I cracked my conscience open on the cold, unforgiving front-row pew of the Chapel. The time was 8:27 PM and the date was February 21st, 2018, but I feebly pushed back against the hands of the clock, struggling for a few more minutes to say goodbye to Malcolm.

As a result of my own mortal limitations, I lost my battle against time and could only watch as a day and a life came to a juxtaposed resolution, followed by the passing of another day, and then a third. Now, after 455 consecutive sunrises and sunsets set the stage for rebuilding, reevaluating, and soul-searching, I sit at the peak of a snow-covered mountain overlooking the quagmire of uncertainty that I nearly drowned in. The silence is tinged with the whispers of the wind, and I can visualize the wisdom they dispense if I just close my eyes.

The Lebanese-American poet Kahlil Gibran wrote that “if you would indeed behold the spirit of death, open your heart wide unto the body of life. For life and death are one, even as the river and the sea are one.” Looking back, I realize that I reached a more profound understanding of that interconnectedness through poetry. I taught the ink of my pen to percolate and trickle from my travails as if it were sweat, to swell and overflow from my passion as if it were tears, to gush and cascade from my turmoil as if it were blood, and through these endeavors I developed a sense of awareness that is both human and transcendent.

Even by the most favorable measure, the poetry in this blog is crude. However, it is also at the very least speculative. Perhaps that is how poetry should be. Because when the perfect love is lost, or when the perfect life is spent, or even when the perfect day is used up, reality remains, and there is untapped beauty lying within humanity’s approach to it.