-note, although I cannot take credit for this poem, I just love it so
much I thought I would share it with you all.

Unless

Had a whole dream once
full of nothing else.
A bottomless pit,
eyes bulged out across it,
neck stretched
over it.

A whole life I know of
fell into it
once
and never came back.

Therefore

Three white lines
joining exactly,
all the angles
equal.

Inside it-
symmetrical
cross-legged
one finger up,
expounding a simple fact
sits Nobody.

Enough

No use, we'll never catch it.
It's just ahead,
a puff
of flying light.

Want it! want it!
Wake up at night
crying for it
walk around all day
needing it.

Till one day
it's there.
Not needed any more
not even wanted.

Look at it without a smile
Turn away.

Never

Should never have done it, never.
Should never have left that country
where I was queen entirely.
Treacherous thwas betrayed me.

That land of I-will-never
gleaming with snow and silence
suited me with its iceblink,
its blue eyes fixed as mirrors.

Set on my peak, I queened it.
It was the spring that took me,
drowning in warmer waters
out to the lands of sometimes

Here in the lands of sometimes
I stretched out hands lamenting,
but I'm queen no longer,
melted my snows and glaciers.

They were so strong, so solid,
crystal as tears long frozen.
here I'm at risk, half-drowning,
wanting my season, winter.

It will return and find me
caught in a depth of water,
freezing unseen in ice-depths,
never again to queen it.

to sit on my peak unmoving
the sceptre cold in my fingers,
my eyes on the blue-eyed glacier.
Should never have left it, never.

Forever

Ah, but I had to leave it.
No one can live there always,
the frost-bound queen of Never.
Once the blood moves, the flood moves.

the thaw begins, the ice-peaks
crumble, dissolve to river,
in which I swim or founder
through the warm lands of sometimes

swim, drown, but now am human.
change is my true condition,
to take and give and promise,
to fight and fail and alter.

I aim towards Forever,
but that is no one's country,
till in perhaps one moment,
dying, I'll recognise it

those peaks not ice but sunlit
from sources past my knowing,
its beauty of completion
the end of being human.

Penned by my hand on the 23rd of Valnuary, in the year 278 AF.