We stumble along in semidark,

a patchwork of epiphanies,

an amalgam of antipathies,

with a celestial chaperone,

or maybe freer yet more

alone, armed with half

a Rosetta stone, trying

to transliterate hieroglyphs 

into an alphabet of runes, but

crude metaphrasts that we are,

we never seem to land

on a lingua franca,

one that might afford us

a common place in the sun,

each of us a gleaming

tabula rasa...