Sunrise and the Kris of Interrogation

There's nothing I hear beside the butterfly's wing,
the birds, sheepish-silent, struggling to sing,
and a long line of angels, alert on a branch,
barely breathing, stilled.
every dawn unfailing save three,
their light gathers on hills and peaks,
to greet the rising sun, the resurrection
of morning - they shed their grief
on the grasses, the dewdrop tears
of heavens, and ascend: joy complete.
the grassy knoll on which I stand
hushes, and the birds nestled deep
in frosty trees, the butterflies,
asleep, and the cities far beneath
mutter no sounds, not even disbelief -
for in the morning, everything knows God
must be, and gracefully doth the silence sing



A busy and enjoyable weekend, with the best-friend-Matthew visiting me to celebrate my birthday. I'm plumb tuckered (do I sound like a cowboy, Matthew?), and haven't really done much of anything for the last several hours, though I feel content, I think. Like a natural psychiatrist, Matthew, in our moments of conversation, poked at my subconscious and asked me questions about my future, and my current emotional status.
I'm really quite horrible at answering these questions about myself. I'd rather listen and converse about someone else's joys and struggles, pains and triumphs and trials all day long rather than shed one sentence of my own heart. It isn't even because I'm hoarding all of them inside, like a volcano burbling and building up pressure until an eventual eruption (a fire in the belly), though it may have originated with a similar strategy. No. More and more I wonder whether I even know my own emotions. I don't lack self-awareness, just an awareness of how to express the emotional ebb and flow, rise and trough, or that a sense of shyness and introspective privacy once allowed me the impetus for quelling such feelings so strongly that relaying them now seems impossible.
And it seems like the words provided me are too simplistic a description for a state of being. "Happy", "Sad", "Content", "Angry"? I need words like exultant, jubilant, shipwrecked, sundered, but even these are too mono-dimensional. And it gets more and more ambiguous, naming those feelings that soar past, though I think sometimes I find the answers best engaging poetry (not writing - I'm no good at that yet). When Langston Hughes says: life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly / Hold fast to dreams or when Yeats says: But I, being poor, have only my dreams; / I have spread my dreams under your feet; / Tread softly because you tread on my dreams. Or when Frost says: The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep.
These are the things I feel and dream. The determination, the submission of dreams, the feeling of failed flight and clinging to belief, and these are the tiniest reaches of the glaciers of my emotional capacity - I'm not a creature of the now and only, but of the ever and eternity, and that is what I bring to the table when you flash the scalpel at me.