The Poetry of Mark Daniel Milbocker 
Reality

Resplendent
Yet veiled in the plainness of my finissitude
Glorious
A web of more echoing wavelets than I can attend to
Beauty
You are both the song and each note inside each note
One
What is, simply is, in all its complexities

Oh, Reality, you simple are before me
I speak to you?  Because you speak to me.
Though you have no voice, no limbs, 
no complicity in my humanity.
I speak in thoughts, in actions 
like a fish drowning in the wide ocean,
thrashing about, forgetting simply to breathe.
My thoughts give no testimony that I see you
	But only ramble babbling forth from my restlessness.

I thought I heard something...

I hear but do not comprehend, I see but no image enters me
I feel and shudder as a shiver races down my spine.

Who are you?  
Your symmetric order betrays the fact of your intelligence
What is your name?
Though I have never met you, I've known you my whole life.
The others speak of you in legends, 
in words that bear your life, 
they call you Jesus, the Christ.
You are the bearer of God's Law, 
Order incarnated into humanity,
Revelation himself,
the great sacrifice of Love,
for I have heard of what you did for us.

The thing about legends and language and stories 
from long ago is they always fall short of reality.
Who do I say that you are?
How shall I say?  when my answer is a thousand memories bubbling up 
from within me, face after face echoing emotions, joys and pains, lies 
and revelations of truth.
Even if I could annunciate the sum of my experience, 
synthesizing so many disparate echoings into a simple matrix, even if 
my mind could hold such a perfect ordering (which would surely be 
beyond my mental ability), I would be speechless.  

Such a conception would be like a ship built within a glass bottle 
whose neck allows but a penny through.  

But there is a way to get the ship out...if not by language, then by a 
projection of its image, carefully focused by our will into action.  
Thus all the experiences that crafted that fragile matrix need not 
speak, but rather lend the sparkle to one's eye that tells another you 
understand and it is good.  When the river of one's actions runs pure, 
it paints a more colorful image of what's in one's heart than any words 
or canvas can convey.

When one finds
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©2002 Mark Daniel Milbocker  All rights reserved.