A word grown with deliberate strong strokes on an unblank page:

the world is full of beautiful things I do not understand.

I wish it were as easy as casting a line into the space between the stars and feeling something infinite pull at the other end.
It hurts sometimes, the endless reaching of my heart towards things of which it knows nothing.

They tell me there is meaning and beauty in the simple things for a clear mind
until I feel I should be able to grasp a philosophy
in a single word composed of thick black strokes of ink on white paper,
in the feeling of a sound in my mouth,
but these heavy delicate symbols have no meaning except what we give them and
we cannot give ourselves a philosophy any more than we can cast the line and watch it curve back towards the horizon until it meets itself in a broken circle and then call it something infinite.

The single word is black on white on darkness on light
but there is nothing of starlight in it.
The paper is cold and smooth and the printed edges of lines are as hard as right angles and as soft as two dimensions
and they have no meaning aside from this:

two cents worth of ink and three cents worth of paper.

I stare at the word, but no thought forms itself out of the inanimate thing,
and the line falls and falls back to earth and never
reaches the imperfect horizon
and it hurts often, this falling away from the space between the stars.