The Black Notebook: What Could Have Ben

What could have ben, 2013
the black notebook

There are those who give off warmth
For us to warm our hands and heart
Get too close and you will be burn
Never regret the scar
This heat, this light, that beacon bright
A guiding symbol in the dark.
We live as moths who’ve wholly lost
That prism that produced the spark.

Through those darkened corridors
Are memories smiling more and more
The fire out, the Autumn comes,
Smoke is the dying soul arising
The ash that falls with fire’s pall
Is but that silent creature’s call;

And we moths our beacon gone,
No answer says the monotone;
The sun has sat, that son has gone;
Impassive time must carry on:
When that white season takes us up–
We feel the kiss, we feel the dust
The memory is kissing us.

Without a son, that beacon gone,
Lost we moths must carry on.
That ring of smoke to me evokes
That dharma will, Samsara spoke;
We see in passing everlasting
The walk down Jericho road.
Where faces in our brain remain
Echoing what we cannot name,
to one day fade away,
Into the background of the day.

What we can’t forget
Will always all around us go
And we’ll see all of those lost faces
Smiling, lined up in a row.
Lincoln, Sigmund, Shakespeare, Dickens
What could have happened,
What could have Ben?
An organism innocent.
He’ll never get to drive a car
Or hear another song
He will sleep under our feet
And we must carry on.

He won’t get to have a wife
A glass of wine, a starry night,
In this world sans moon and night
We write and sing so it might bring
Anti-venom for the string,
If you get too close you will burn
But when you burn is when you learn
That it won’t last forever
Find a person whom you love
then die alone together.