chiaroscuro

Is it the dark encroaching? 

Or the light?

For the Cosmic Being all happenings are of equal moment:
the destroyer-tsunami,
the stalagmite’s creator-drip.
But I prefer.

Appetite for some one thing, indifferent
to the rest. If I survive,
I go on to something else—serial passions . . .

crucially fickle—else how outlive
our first fascination?

‘Alive’ itself’s an unstable status, Heaven imagined
as its steadied state,

wisdom, meanwhile, as cool perspective on it,

dignity as rising above it—

the refinement of being human as the emulation of not.