Titles For Truth Poem by Thomas Ware

Cryptic patchwork, foundation,
Unrelated passwords, damnation,
Shattered clues to a mystery long gone,
Remaining spoofs of licorice for all songs,
Art, science, death, despair,
Coming closer to a truth that's almost there:
Omnipresent and yet somehow faded,
Only available with the expenditure of great effort.
Our consciousness flows, grasping,
But really never actually trapping,
The real answer, only facsimiles,
Cannot express what is found only in similes,
Metaphors, we use prose to find more,
Achieving greatness only by indirect doors,
Leaping from phrase to verse,
From verse to ancient curse,
Hinting at a truth that's far worse.

Mind straining, reaching, contorting,
Finding handholds to a god that's all-knowing,
Finally on the cusp, head filling with pungent wine,
Slipping, falling back, and now the dogs dine,
On remnants, brutalizing civilized,
Scraps of light and dark laying dusty for all time;
Or maybe you make it up, grasp that cliff edge,
At the end of a mental journey, from the basement,
The wise man flickers, sometimes flips to a monster,
Greedy, ravenous, it's that face that haunts her,
Back to aged crone, back to dead monk,
Gives you the secret to the universe.
But only one among millions, billions,
Great scholar pushes us down, we see vermillion,
As we topple back over ignorance rock,
We see that face of a merciless, cruel clock,
Memory fading, light and truth effervescent,
Knowledge of the cosmos sparkling iridescent,
Like the stars, is torn from our grasp,
With nirvana, enlightenment goes back in that trance...

You snap awake, the starlight shining through,
The holes in your brain glowed, the best beaming down too,
What is left is close, almost a fragment,
Never able to find it again? Fire crackling,
Dust gleaming,
Book open,
Your zen broken and the door to light swings, closing,
What is left is sensation, a brief image,
Even that is gone, now sleep, scrimmage,
Sex, thirst, anger, hunger, malice,
Back to base urges, struggle for the chalice:
Grail of odd portions, treasure of pyritic gold,
The secrets lie untold, and the knowledge lays untroubled,
You had your little glimpse of heaven,
Now back to the rat race, hell on earth, bread leavened,
You have a little bit of truth now, true,
But in your nightmares you see the real truth, the monster's you,
You pushed yourself off that high precipice,
Dead unfeeling body, a trickle this,
Your brain is unable to comprehend grace,
Your pain cannot distill to the fine taste,
Only sour with the sweet,
A bitter realization of all rotten meat,
Some eat the putrid ham,
Some decry the gross beef,
Sometimes truth is second to happiness.

Read between the lines,
Never settle,
What is fine to find,
Is dread to a man's mettle.
But if you're strong you can take it,
I can too,
Search for the lies,
They're the first step to being you:
Not being human, humans are just sacks of flesh,
Be who you are, never be anything less,
Be a man, an individual,
Not part of a horde,
The only virtue of mob mind is failing more.
Be brave and don't falter, find the light,
Examine clues and judge them by their own right.
Nirvana is fleeting, less a state of mind,
More a concrete place where you'd never really ever find,
Amorphous, prismatic, substantial, spectral,
Mostly ghostly but sometimes corporeal,
You can get there, then slip right back,
Examine the Elder Scrolls, get the light black,
See the truth, we're all specks of dust,
Inferno raging, but be doused we never must.
You are fire consuming knowledge,
We are all that holy blaze,
You are the wood fuel,
And we are plasma haze.
Climb, reach, aspire, then fall,
A constant struggle hallmarked by the self-made walls.
Constraints built around us for ourselves,
So we cannot see the passage behind the shelves.