Enigma

“Why is it that when you wake to the world 

of realities you nearly always feel,

sometimes very vividly, that the vanished

dream has carried with it some enigma

which you failed to solve?”

                     ~Fyodor Dostoyevsky

i

Time is not horizontal,

if anything, its vertical.

Everything is happening

in a circular world,

perception is an onion.

Rising above

and going within

are not 

measured by distance.

Forget the perversion 

of the forward,

reject the seduction

of the backward.

Awareness is vertical.

Nothing is achieved

by racing toward it.

Only standing still

and becoming aware

of what is.

Learn the language of dreams

where distance is meaningless.

Consciousness is a spiral stairway
leading only to here.
When are you elsewhere?
Yesterday is a fever dream
and tomorrow is a fable.

Time is a contagion of the mind.

A mysterious illness

only a poet can translate.

Poetry as diagnosis.

Only night returns us 

to our natural state.

Day is for dreamers.

Night is for 

practitioners of soul.

Here, logic disowns you.

There is no distraction

from feeling everything.

We only think up

adventures for our bodies

to pretend they have

a life of their own.

ii

Our basement 
has a basement,

let’s face it.

Beneath the shadowy stairs

like the shadow 
of a shadow;

someone has to 
go down there.

Let the one who hurts 
the most go,

the one who feels his way

through darkness

by believing in the light.

Someone who can befriend

the neglected & rejected ones

even when they bite.

I’ll go, 

tethered to a thread.

You needn’t yank me out.

I will keep my head instead.

I’ll go.

With my faith’s sunny detachment,

like a wise fool who can’t tell

a compliment from condemnation.

This way,

if I turn the other cheek

I can rest the monster in my lap.

Peter Valentyne

April 8th, 2019