The good news is I have found a new Good Book. I first heard of it from a distant (in miles) blogging Friend (you know who you are). I found it at a used book sale, and it stayed for a while in the corner of the living room in the stack of books on the floor, waiting for the long awaited expansion of bookshelf space. I kept putting off reading it because of a (false) impression I had gotten, of possible foreignness and dry subject matter, from the unfortunate back cover description.

I picked it from the stack and started reading it this week, and have been swept away into that too rare state of being torn between wanting to abandon all else in life to just read it, and wanting to read for ten minutes and put it away for a while. In the same way I always eat chocolates in the slowly melted in mouth method, to prolong the pleasure.

I don't usually recommend a book before I even finish it, and it may disappoint by the ending, but I seriously doubt it. There are references to opera music, which I like to find on YouTube and play as I read, dramatically enhancing my reading enjoyment.

What a good feeling, being in the middle of a new Good Book.

In the dark

there is no help from false lights.

I don't mean to blow yours out

but your sketch of pretty candles

will not guide you in the dark,

in the shadow of the dark,

in the pit below the shadow of the raging rolling dark.

You will know the dark is winning

if you find yourself so low.

Only hold, you can,

to memory of knowledge of a light,

and hope someday to catch

a flicker

of a lighter shadow shown

and by intuition known:

that somewhere beyond the darkness

an almost unknown distant light,

and that you are in its sight.

Oct 2, 2013 5:45-6:00 am, after a dream of oppression from confining and restricting societal laws, and anger, and gang danger, including a poem duel and then I woke up with the first two lines, having seen a knife drawn. (Even in my dream I was struck by the novelty of a poem fight, hoping I had a good sonnet or two in my holster. But after the unfair introduction of a knife, oh well!)

Are you afraid of life?

Is your head still ringing from the last blow dealt?

And have you seen his blade?

Have you seen the blood where the last one knelt?

And does your pulse pound out,

does your breath come gasping and your sight grow dim?

Does the dizziness and the nausea come

at the knowing you have no chance against him?

Will you stand up tall?

Will your quaking legs hold you up through it all?

Or will fear of pain

Lay you down with a whimper and a sob as you fall?