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The book The House of the World has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and is now available on Amazon.

Everything in Reverse

I would like to see
everything upside down
from the center out,
people walking backward,
time reliving itself,
death retreating into youth,
childhood,
a poem disappearing into itself,
logic undone.
Cause following effect.

For I have come to a conclusion.
Everything has a purpose
only in beginning.
Love explodes.
Beauty happens.
The color of eyes reveal sunsets
as well as dawns,
and to find anything
we must go back to its entrance.

The woman before she enters,
before love finds her,
before a cry in the dark
was ever shouted.
The beach without shells,
the darkness before being kissed
with light.

And then we would know,
how undetermined everything is.
How radiant it enters the world,
how pure the air
that’s never been filled with smoke,
the earth baring a face
of clean stone.

But the door I came through is shut.
The past is more buried
than any future.
The past is eternal,
the coming dawn will rise and fade
followed by another.
Seeing things in reverse
is no better than looking into the distance,
except,
being born was a triumph.
The rest
is up to us.

Published inIndex of all Poems