Horizons Around Us
By Robin Xavier Fontaine
Copyright © 2013 by Robin Xavier Fontaine
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Table of Contents
I Was Turning
The Cat Knows This
Not Truly Free, But On The Loose
The Dictator
Mystery
Would That The Fool Could Teach Her Ways
Horizons Around Us
Chaos
To Trifle, As It Were, With Life
The Criminal
The Opposite
The Good Friend
The Wish
The Poetry By Heart Series
Connect With Robin Xavier Fontaine
Horizons Around Us
I Was Turning
In order to reach that ephemeral state,
Where I could at last just be,
I had to wring myself of false notions,
And learn to become.
Sailing the uncharted waters that were my life,
I crashed onto a paradise atoll;
There a healer dispensed his wisdom
In words like “connection” and “universal being.”
From that my green heart soon inclined itself
To see.
It heard the thrums of other hearts around,
In people, animals, plants and the rocks;
My heart came to know no separations -
These convenient lines between us and things
Are but the gossamer threads of illusion;
And so I joined the One.
Next the sky opened above me to reveal
A myriad of lights that shone down from heaven;
And it was heaven now in my grasp,
And the stars were truly eternal and unchanging.
I joined that One,
And had found Meaning.
Finally I sailed to the edge of the world,
And saw the waters leave in a great fall;
Perilously close my ship came to the edge of all things,
And I knew that all ships, rudders and headwinds or not,
Eventually are carried by the currents of Time
To their worldly end;
What lies beyond the world's edge is anybody's guess -
But our days are numbered at birth,
And so we must struggle to live within the confines
Of mortal existence;
I became One with Time that day my life
Flashed before my eyes,
And I now had a trinity of eyes with which to see.
One eye sees all that is held separate by the senses to be truly One
In connection;
Another eye beholds the heavens and sees that Time has no
Horizon;
And the last eye sees that our time is but an infinitesimal bit
In the sea of Time itself.
I am One.
I am of something infinite and eternal.
I have an end.
So,
It came to pass,
That I could now just be.
The Cat Knows This
There is something that is elsewhere unseen within a cat,
That can sense things both fateful and opportune.
A cat just knows what it is to be alive,
And so takes care to frugally delay its ninth,
Ultimate ending.
What the cat knows, yet
Cannot express,
Is that this is all there is, and beyond this life
No more.
A cat can prove this to herself without need
For an algorithm;
A cat feels this in its sinuous spine as it tingles in a tree;
A cat looks mournfully on those who don't know what it
Knows -
A dog's life is the lot of those who believe
There really are second chances.
Not Truly Free, But On The Loose
If only we used that precious word only for things that are
Given away.
What can be free, when life is duty and obligation?
What can be free, when there is a spectre named Death?
What can be free, when it must eat and drink and sleep?
No -
We are not,
Cannot be
Truly free.
What we are though, if we care to shed the cruel bindings put on us
In this world -
Is on the loose;
Wild;
Feral;
Beasts of Nature,
Turned out into the world of people.
And so I carry my own leash,
And attach it to my children,
My lover,
The ones I love
And all the ones I must render tribute to.
Then, perhaps under the cloak of night,
Or, better still,
In broad revealing daylight,
I slip off the leash that binds me,
And I go on the loose for a time;
And this time on the loose is the only occasion in life
In which I truly choose.
Do not tell me to be free -
I will blunder into things that do harm;
Tell me instead to go out on the loose,
And then my feral nature will have its repast,
And I may be happy for a time,
And, it is free of charge.
The Dictator
Who has not indulged the fantasy of chaining humanity
To the gears of a state machinery,
And causing all that happens in the land?
How happy they would be, if only they did my bidding
And saw things as I do,
And loved me, their dictator.
Misery is to be held by the neck,
(A vulnerable position,)
And guided through a maze of an
Empty-headed lunatic's design,
And told this is meaning,
This is wisdom,
And this is love.
Better a beast in the wild, by far,
Than a pawn in the dull imaginings of a tyrant.
Let the revolutions against despots roll out and onward,
So that others may slip into the wild
At opportune times.
Mystery
What lies beyond the senses,
Beyond measuring instrument,
Beyond proof or disproof -
That is Mystery,
And it must be explored
In a life well-lived.
Would That The Fool Could Teach Her Ways
They are the happiest of all,
Yet their ways are scorned by the prudent and pragmatic;
Risk – perhaps even against hopeless odds -
Is what pulls them into swirling waters
Where they submerge -
Perhaps into Atlantis,
Or maybe they run short of breath and struggle back
To the surface.
They are always wet, these fools,
And their frowns are for those who cannot truly take chances;
The fool wants to share her joy,
Yet others only tell her to grow up -
And that is your problem!
The fool shouts to prudence -
You have grown up
And away
And lifeless.
The fool then slides herself yet again into the deeps,
Perhaps to never return,
Or, more likely,
With yet more of the treasures of Life.
No wonder we envy the Fool.
Horizons Around Us
The key to this life is the circle -
Around us a circle of loved ones,
r /> Then a circle of community,
Then the Great Circle of the globe:
Humanity.
And circles, it is noted, go on forever,
Unless a cruel fate cleaves it at some point -
Yet, yes, its potential is eternal,
And so we can stand,
And if we look up,
And turn in our own circle -
We can see that the horizon goes around each of us
Forever.
I will but choose a course, and walk toward the horizon
To discover what is there
And along the way -
Yet again, from there I will perceive
A new horizon,
Beckoning me to explore once more
By land, or by sea or by the way of the birds;
A life of horizons unseen
And left without investigation,
Is a life not truly lived.
In the circles of horizons around us, we are joined;
For it is also true of circles that they encompass all,
And all within are as one.
Perhaps, though I approach this horizon with caution,
It is possible to be truly free,
If ever we march on a path
To the eternal, encircling horizon.
Chaos
I say to myself sit;
Now I say remember;
Next I will say pine tree;
And on it will go all the days of my life.
Not once will I know what it is to live
(or not live)
In an orderly existence;
How could it be so when my very thoughts,
My heart of hearts,
My soul, perhaps,
Seem to roll dice
As they hand me my arrows.
Oh, I place knife beside spoon,
Pay bills before I indulge -
There is a place for the
Imposition of superficial order in life.
It has been said, by the sage,
That measured as creatures
We are all irrational -
And so, to the naive,
Or Draconian,
We may seem insane.
But more than irrational we are -
We are living, breathing chaos,
Going about our lives,
Passing by diners and giving alms to the poor -
Somehow, in light of our lives,
The certain shadow of death creates
A needed constraint on chaos;
So, take comfort in death,
For it is the one thing we know will happen,
Beyond the twisted, chaotic pulses of being human.
We reason, yet we say jump,
Jab, jabber and jingle,
As though we are comprehensible
Even to ourselves.
To Trifle, As It Were, With Life
Those kids who said I was a boy for loving girls -
They did it.
That alcoholic man who yelled abuse until he got his way -
He did it.
That holy roller who said I would burn by the devil -
She did it.
That man who flew a plane into a building -
He did it.
They did what should be impossible -
They trifled with my life;
They blew hot winds down my neck;
They stalked me -
They may even have raped me.
They disturbed me on my course in life;
Brought sorrow where there was no call for tears;
Burned the edges of my petals -
They took portions of my life,
And poured the substance out into a pyre of their making -
Ghouls they were.
So, philosophically,
One might imagine that in surviving
Cruel torment,
I have grown even stronger;
True, I am stronger;
Though never free of the impoverishment they brought
To my beating heart.
My heart.
The Criminal
I have been on this earth since its beginning -
Neither serpent nor gullible woman escaped my eye;
Though it is certain that my children will sin,
I see no end in calling them criminal
For simply striving to be free of enslavement.
The bringer of chains
And false hope
And false meaning
Is the criminal set loose upon my children;
He has become the very serpent of long ago.
He is the bane of life -
He must be banished.
The Opposite
An absence of free living is slavery -
The opposite of free living is stifled imagination.
Disturbed are they without gleeful random energetic impulses;
Sad, to be here, but not of the whole moving mass;
Grim, their prospects, for ever leaving the shores of existence
And learning to swim the currents of life;
Final, their deaths -
For no more opportunity
Will be known to them again.
The Good Friend
Nick's heart would leap for joy at the sound of my approaching voice,
It was plain to see;
He was at my side through all the troubles of those years we spent together
In the grace of good friendship.
Without Nick, I would have succumbed to the tribulations;
Without Nick I might have died, in truth;
And so, it has been my honour
My comfort,
My privilege to have him now,
Body spent, in a jar.
It is not macabre -
His mere presence lightens my load,
Even in shadowy death.
There never has been,
In my humble estimation,
A better friend than my dachshund Nick -
He now knows peace,
As will I,
When my turn to leave arises;
And I hope Nick is there waiting
For the sound of my approaching voice.
The Wish
I wish for all my friends
That they find the horizon bountiful;
That it fills the holes in their hearts;
That it heals what Time itself had no salve for;
That they know freedom is but illusion.
But, being alive -
There is no artifice in that;
As fluid as the leopard,
As darting as the kingfisher,
As thrifty as the ant,
As cunningly laid back as the carpet spider.
Yearn to be wild,
I would tell my friends,
And leave freedom for the gods.
The End
The Poetry By Heart Series
A Great Notion, This Love Is
Diamonds From The Void
Gonna Gotta Let My Hair Down
Spectacles Of Love
Horizons Around Us
Connecting With Robin Xavier Fontaine
You can find her on Twitter, @robinrobin55, by using this link:
https://twitter.com/robinrobin55