Apothegms Found in a Bottle at Lake Nowhere

1.
Too much remains left unsaid
when confusion rains defeat;
too many words pregnant with their own
denial, dramas planted with the seeds
of their own hubris. Seek what gives
without motive of return or repayment;
find the brass that garners honest self-regard;
hear the music that planets sing in space.

2.
No word defines itself; no act is left
undone without recourse.
Shelter the genius born in the light
of your own sight; relive the race
whose time is yours, but do not doubt
that you are you and always alone.

3.
Never lose what should not be lost.
Seek what might never be found.
Trust the passion that is the fruit
of its own success. Fear no sin
but never fear regret. Find what
forgiveness atones; fear no evil
but the one that inspires no fear.

4.
There is no truth but truth;
it does not exist but is.
Attack certainty with the uncertain fact;
attack the uncertain fact with faith and act.
Undermine finality with a cynic’s grin;
distrust the cynic’s reserve with love.

5.
Love brings its own discord, yet sets
you on the pilgrimage to peace.
Forego no dishonor or contempt
when you know that love is true;
find its proof in the silence it brings
to unrest and gibbering curiosity.

6.
There’s a price you pay when you doubt;
it steals your strength and lies without shame.
To doubt and tremble are not the same
as to doubt it all and build all you are on that.
A home will shake when earthquakes hit,
Yet doubt for its own sake is a house
built on sand and tumbles to ruin in wind.

7.
Do not misjudge the will to lie to and decieve
yourself. It is the animal in the human
to run from its own face in the glass.

The terror of awareness reveals
that there’s more to life than what the herd
believes. Never lose a true friend, but never
lose yourself to a friend’s desire to lose
themselves in you. A friend is a mirror
in which you should see more than just you.

8.
There is wisdom to be sought in the street;
the self-reliant stance that comes with a fight,
the courage when to run or to stand.
But the hangman’s noose in the hand
of the crowd is stark testament
to the deceit that comes when a mind
is one but has no thought.

9.
Death comes in many disguises and shapes;
do not be deceived in life to live a false death.
If spirit can open the hardest fist to a caress,
why not the steely will geared to destroy?

10.
Hate yourself as much as your enemy;
love yourself as much as your enemy.
There’s a love that relies on no account
that you can give; it forgives all
and it asks for all; give it your love and life,
and find in it the love that will always abide.

11.
Hair and fingernails grow in the grave.
Who knows about the light in the eye.

(c) copyright 2012 Charles David Miller. All rights reservef.