By: S. B. Terebinth
A star should love the death of stars. Less agonistic light, and, in that striving solitary’s heart,
Less death for it, consuming all else but itself- death, the true elector, leaving the lives
That’ll outstretch life (and stretch death): so be- Life is All, thus death follows,
As we follow. The potentate triumphs triumph, so such is succession’s nature.
All power is first feigned in the heart: let us dream in error that death ‘s to us oblivious
As favor; no truth begins as truth but is forced true. Last light: first Light.
. B. Terebinth is a teacher currently living in Las Vegas.
"A musing more than a poem. An insecurity of mine is that I’m not a hard worker. It’s not much of an insecurity as I concede it. I don’t work hard. I’ve never worked hard; things get done (in general), but I’ve never evaluated any task as hard. Not everything is easy nor is everything done well, I just mention that to note that I don’t know what it is to say I work hard or labor over writing. I laborious evade it; though the evading comes easy; the consciousness of the evasion is laboring. This thought (is what I’m calling it) was spontaneous. It was riffed off and done in a second. I have poems that I have spent time crafting and that, if I were to qualify their process, I’d credit myself as having ‘written’ them, in the earned sense of having written, rather than the instinctual route, which is to have been possessed and then abandoned. None of those battled-for poems can seem to find acceptance; this brief whirlwind in the heart has. I don’t know what it is to feel successfully a poet or to write a poem. I avoid those titles (try to) when speaking of myself because I don’t feel I can bestow them on me. Other people have no qualms calling themselves this or that, and I have no qualms with them doing so. It’s a restrictive feeling of my own. When I pass, if I’ve done well, put POET on my epitaph; then I’ll have earned it. If I fail the mark, don’t mark the grave. What does all this have to do with the published thought? Nearly everything. It came to me in response to something I was reading, though I can’t say what. I nearly lost it, only to find it years later when I was scavenging through all stuff while my kids (students) were working on their semester exam preparations (so they didn’t need me- even if they did: what help am I? I often wonder.) because I decided that I was finally going to try and submit some things to places rather than mope in anonymity. I remember little about its genesis, but reading over it what I liked about it enough to believe it was worth something was that I thought I expressed vitality well enough to inspire it- or so the hope was. If the Will can force truth to Truth we fear a world so malleable to Power: every order’s discord, and all is in such flux; but that Power is arterial and venous, it is some of us as well. Take the will in sunshine. What’s to fear of it is what’s best for us. So Will can reshape the foundations: very well. Reshape them. When the last light lights and then is out, I shall will it lit again. The sun will set- why’s it rise? I will it. That’s something of the power stressed in “Life is All” that I thought I hit. I did my best. I fear I missed the title though. Since this little idea was so instantaneous I wasn’t able to retrieve the instinct of its birth to generate a line sufficient, so- thinking it better to not falsely call it some distraction or mis-spirit it- I went the traditional “title it by the opening” route."