Totally wandering poem at 2am

The night has fallen thickly in the house;
Little ticks from clicking clocks;
A beagle snoring on the couch.
Christmas Eve you say it is?
The midnight hour has come and gone.
And so it is, for it must be;
But Christmas won't mean much to me.

Another night like so many gone before;
Another stately sit with feet grown cold upon the floor.
Another frozen stare at the glowing screen,
Writing and talking with friends that I don't see.
Hands like heavy weights upon the keys
Press my wrists that stick out from my sleeves.
Motion makes me feel how stiff I am,
So still I stay, and move the least I can.

Warmth is snoring from her blanket by my side -
Daisy keeps the still and chill out of the night.
Held within my hands, with breath and bone,
Her tiny life and shining eyes and furry folds of skin,
Curled in a wonderful cocoon,
Radiating heat and feeling life..
With Daisy here I know I'm not alone.

My head hangs listlessly, like my listless mind;
Close your eyes; leave the day behind..
Three Dr.Peppers have kept me sound and bright,
But surrender now to the power of the night.
Laptop's fanning never lets my ears
Open out and simply sit and hear.
And all around I know is busy sound,
For here in the heart of a stretching city is nothing but human working to be found.
Nothing but human working to be seen,
But for the sky where the airplanes haven't been.
Nothing but human working to be used -
Clean green grasses and buildings crisp and new.
Nothing but human working to keep us away
From the land that man had to fight in harder days.
Nothing but human working for miles around,
To keep my ears from never hearing a sound.

And miles and miles and stretches of ground away,
'Cross great green miles of trees and grass and hay,
Beneath great gaping stretches of silent sky,
On acres watched by the moon's sharp silver eye,
Where birds push on through unseen night,
Where tiny mammals forage out of sight,
And blades of grass bend with the unfelt wind,
Across the tracts of vast American land,
Far past the last steel work of modern man's hand,
Beneath black sky of night and blue of day,
A creek in a canyon toils along its way
Down a cleft of rock and dusty dirt of earth
Where the sounds of a planet's living can be heard.
West, in the deep long-lonesome forests of old,
West on the mountains of wind and thin-air cold;
West where a sagebrush lives and dies,
Never having been seen by human eyes;
West, where the mountain men lived by nail and tooth
In the undiluted gaze of nature's truth;
West, despite the sight of satellites keen,
Are places of beauty no man's ever seen.
West you can be where no one else is,
And stand on the earth the way God made it.

A life like that is not for me.
I love the comforts of community.
But somewhere lies a little part,
Deep within my social heart,
That wishes to stand in a ghastly blue night
And stare down vistas of lonely moon light;
To see the rocks and jagged horns
Of lands untouched since they were born.
Cold wind blowing under my skin,
No one knowing where I have been,
No one seeing what I have seen,
No one there to hear me scream
Or sit in silence and let the night
Soak through my flesh and fill my mind.
Let the vast all-swallowing sky
Stand above me, bigger than I.
Zoom the camera out from my seat
To a world that's so much bigger than me.
Let sink into and through my brain
The vastness and realness of earth untamed.

I wish there were two of me -- one to be me,
And one to live in that picture I see.
One to live for the comforts of home,
And one to live in the mountains alone.
One to chat and delight with my friends,
And one to flee the presence of men.
One to depend on the structures of ease,
And one to be gnarled like cliff-clinging trees.
One to be weak but happy, like me,
And one to stand on his own before the blast of the harsh grand land of untold wonders where no quarter is given, no corners are cut, no dangers are lessened, and your shoulders are broad, your skin is tough, your endurance is long, your patience is silent, and your mind holds wondrous experiences no one has seen or known.

One to fall down and worship God
And one to stand tall and be worshipped.

One I am
And one somehow stirs something in me.

One lives in the pokey hills of Pittsburgh
One flies out over the sea of lights in Salt Lake City valley, soars over the mountains in the thin air of night, wisps through foothills and mountains of deserted scrub and stones, peering into sharp-cut shadows of moonlight, abiding unto itself and feeling the living land under its flight.

One is about to go to bed
And one lives on in my mind--a weird and senseless phantasm of strange subjective feelings stirred by thoughts of the West, stories from Ken, and the strange allure of night.

--JPB