The whole world that I now carry
inside my fevered brain
will collapse for good one day,
the memories, the thoughts, the songs:
all I dream, all I don’t dream,
all I feel, all I don’t feel,
all I keep, all I don’t keep,
gone, gone, gone.
My lifelong game
of building the daily illusion
of Tom will be over.
The leaf in the wind that
clings by a ribbon to a branch,
that solitary drama soon passes,
for the leaf has no meaning without the tree.
It is Hamlet’s “undiscovered country”
from which no traveler returns
that awaits us all.
Nature itself is my surest guide.
I listen to its interweaving song
in the wind through the trees
and it calms me from without
and from within.
To nature, life and death are one,
and thus it whispers, do not worry.
It is, simply, the clinging to a self
that causes us to suffer,
as the Buddha discovered.
If I seek refuge now,
it will only be in the heart.
I will enter heaven as a fool
through the gate of love,
for love binds us together,
forgives our every weakness,
and nurtures the earth with our bones.
tfg 11.16.2025