Every photograph untaken
Every brush stroke unpainted
Every stanza unwritten
Every story untold
A small darkness left unilluminated
These are the affirmations
With which we keep hope alive
And find in ourselves
The tenacity to persevere
This is how we establish
Purpose and meaning
Our reason for being
No matter the undertaking
These beacons
Were not set by fate
Nor any divine intervention
But by our own dreams
A life without dreams
Is a life of darkness
A blackened terrain
Unmarked by beacons
Dreams create hope
Hope creates purpose
Purpose creates meaning
Meaning lights the beacons
Crossing terrain and distance
The minutes pass as days once did
For greater men than me
When only Prometheus
Had tested the sky
The land rolls by
All the while stoking awe
Not just for historical men
Bound to Earth
Also for this small speck of stone
This mote of blue
With its invisible billions
In an incomprehensible emptiness
Then, awe too for this small speck of flesh
His hubris of no small magnitude
Believing he matters at all
For the mere fact of knowing his existence
His feeble attempt for eternity
Words released into the twin fantasies
Of consciousness and silicone
Lost in the detail
Context and meaning
Evasive and fractured
I swirl in a sea of the minute
Fruitlessly distracted
Diverted from the present
By endless possibilities
So must I be alert
To the scale of perception
Find the balance between
A piece and the whole
A detail and its meaning
An event and its context
how a brush stroke
or a phrase
can create
an icon
how few lines
or words
are required
to tell a story
and how every story
and every icon
means something different
to everyone
Sometimes
I know
Sometimes not
Which will touch
Which will not
Surprised, too
Often
By how they are read
By what is seen
By others
No small finite creature I
Of sight and hands
Of heart and mind and spirit
If it comes down to the question
Is my living owed a purpose
I answer, oh so surely
I live to live
To love and give
My existence is, quite simply, these
Pix to Words 