Aphorisms

Despair, it comes in many colours, many shapes,
And only one taste.

                          *****

I slept in a blue lake, far form the world,
before waking up in a singing day.

                          *****

Loneliness, it wears either like a coat
Too big, or too tight.

                          *****

Loneliness : a frightened heart
Splintering to silent screams.


                          ******

Shyly, the birds in your ebony eyes
Hovered by my blue heart.

                          *****

They talked, trying to mend bleeding wounds,
With silence a vulture, watching them.

                          *****

He wore his boredom
Like a crown of thorns.

                          *****

These are from a collection of  aphorisms I wrote between February and April of 1981, when I was an undergraduate student at TCU, in Fort Worth, Texas, the last year I was there before graduating in the spring of 1981, and moving on to a Master's degree in Spanish at UT in Austin, Texas. I was 23 when I wrote these. My interest in aphorisms stems from a collection I read in Flemish when I was 17, "Zwervende Vogels", "Stray Birds" by the formidable Indian Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore. It left a lasting impression on my psyche and heart, as did Kahlil Gibrans' collection "Sand and Foam " I read two years later.