The Poetry of Mark Daniel Milbocker 
The Hall of Beautiful Doors

a boy begins with four walls 
and passes between institutions
til one day he finds an unlocked precipice
and falls into a dungeon of darkness
so he climbs between destitutions
til he learns to read the grain of the burl
and passes his time exiting to enter
so he hastens his slam and sally
til he gropes along a whorl and finds an 
open corridor so long and slender that
midway down the stairs he finds himself
in an ocean between unturnable shores 
and the forgotten lit houses of home;
his arrival was as inevitable as the
contagion of wanderlust, and thrust upon
this way he pauses to return only
to find polaris astray and caught in a
field of stasis blooming on a moonless night,
visited by the passings of phantom affect,
once the grieving passes and the
finger of mania beckons, a humbler heart
may begin to see the portraiture of 
cobblestones and the porosity of mortar
and walls that shimmer in the gaslight
and relaxing his molecules, welcome the
dawn of passing, at first without finality
but upon a ground solid enough to bear the
weight of enlightenment; every brick
a lovely portal to an outward vector
forever flush with ponder of an end or
a recursive beginning where perception
rests sated between imaginings and
the pontifical stretchings of wonderlust;
not the presence of potential 
but bud becoming blossom of accustomedness 
to the ubiquity of beauty found in 
the kind and humble eye of the self-similar
symmetry of an evolving key
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©2024 Mark Daniel Milbocker  All rights reserved.