When the Smoke Clears is a poem from Paradox Locked about the moral and emotional middle ground between desire and suffering, hoping that, after everything burns away, love is what survives.
When the Smoke Clears
by BW Derge
I’ve always heard no other word
Than love
Is the way, the truth-
Honest blessings and humbleness, but...
What rests in the middle?
And I can tell sure enough,
Instinct fingers a sense
That arrogance and ignorance,
Even pinches of apathy
Are all the things which will ruin me,
Jealousy, hatred, malice-
The karma common sense
Knows to stay away from these demons,
Narcissistic avariciousness breeds cruelty-
Something deep within me knows to stay away
From the ubiquitous darkness of the soul,
And to reach for glimpses of beauty,
Love,
And life
Which avail themselves
In small life raft spaces,
A simple breeze laughter of children playing
Under the moon
Or the smile of a woman when release comes
At noon-
But what rests in the middle?
I have found there only to be desire,
Accentuated by an accompanied anger
While on the other side of the flip
Of a pennywise hemisphere
Desire causes a great suffering of pleasure,
It feels so good after the wounds heal,
Cicada moths remerge from decades
Of hibernation
Only to rush to the nearest flame once again
And burn up quickly-
Will wisdom and strength be enough
To fly with a phoenix?
Betwixt the higher wind thermals
Of astral planes-
The middle realms between truth and deceit-
The phantasm of desire; a holy orchestra
Of sex, death, drama, pain, and love-
Betwixt belligerence and equanimity
Lies a world in which we live everyday-
There is no god,
And so the demons are free to play,
Only when the deities sleep,
When there is stillness amongst the wreckage,
Some humility or grace can be salvaged
From what’s left of this circus called humanity.
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"When the Smoke Clears" was originally published in 2019