Fatherless, I became a father.
Motherless, I sought a love
that would not fade.
We are what we love, I thought,
consoled by the intensity
of my existence.

I wrote for the orphaned and the lost.

My ignorance, revealed, was mind
attempting to feel, and in its vanity
overwhelm the real.

As the ancient Indian wisdom states:
'The Real endures, the Unreal
passes away.'

But where was the core?

Lost but not lost,
kissing with half a heart
and a searching tongue.

My struggle was to keep to my road --
a road scholar, studying the mortal
dream: interstate 10 and 40,
highway 101 and route 58,
among others.

Stepping out of my body,
lost in love, the road reached
a cliff of despair or courage,
wanting wanting
a love that would not fade.

The natural world instructed me
along my idiot path of desires,
disguised as meaning,

until one day I reached no-place,
the indefinable abyss,
human perception overlooking a chasm
of mysterious longing -- I embraced
the music of my inner desert

sure that the way was before me,
both lost and found
in the paradox I had become.

Almost a man, then, I put the car
in gear and descended into
the noise and trouble,

knowing that I belonged
to a world of sad beings;
that I had to leave myself behind
and live among them;

that we were the mirror
of one another, devil and god
struggling with an unfathomable beauty.

Words washed upon my shore,
asking me to stand for what I believed,
to choose the path of a man,

the sun making way
for the sea-faring moon
in a dream of infinite stars.

I belonged, after all,
to a love that would never fade.

Traveling, traveling . . .

They began to call me poet,
although I had forsaken my name
with only a simple message
to convey.

And the sky grew bigger,
the road endless, the horizon
beautiful beyond speaking.