QUOTE: Vaclav Havel “Transcendence as a hand reached out to those close to us, to foreigners, to the human community, to all living creatures, to nature, to the universe; transcendence as a deeply and joyously experienced need to be in harmony even with what we ourselves are not, what we do not understand, what seems distant from us in time and space, but with which we are nevertheless mysteriously linked because, together with us, all this constitutes a single world. Transcendence as the only real alternative to extinction.”   Vaclav Havel (1936 – 2011) was a Czech playwright, essayist, poet, dissident and politician. Havel was the ninth and last president of Czechoslovakia and the first president of the Czech Republic.   NOTE: During the summer of 1998 I returned to Prague, Czech Republic. I had last traveled to the country in the winter of 1997. The following Ode to Vaclav Havel were first written as a journal entry. It has been updated along the way, and twice since his death in December 2011. I find that the words are changing with time, morphing from their nascent existence as a lengthy journal of written words into a much more succinct reading. Split into five parts, I attempt to grapple with my own thoughts and feelings upon learning more about the history of the Czech Republic, while in Prague, 1998.   My Ode to Vaclav Havel   Part I Loneliness; Prague, A square to Czech;   Wonderful moments; Solitude and emptiness; Cold;   Incomplete;   Part II Relationships and roles; Without friends; You, a woman; Rest my life, feel;   Love exists, no longer than attachment; Alone in this world; A circle in a square;   Minutes deeper; I can’t grasp; Trapped;   I’ve noticed; Passion in the refuge of a refugee;   Fighting and persisting; Self-imposed, restlessly;   Centered loneliness; Intriguing nights; Desperately sinking, sunk;   My heart, unable to swallow; Tears flowing freely; Eyes like a knot untied; Feel lonely, sad;   Oh my, how I am contained within this body; Conscious subconsciousness; Mind, its space; Surface struggles; Torn to think; My body;   Existence, universe, God Contained within and without; Innately late;   Swept by desire; Change me; Others, the world;   Move thee; Being’s inertia; Forget another;   Individualistic, it is time; Forget one another; And lose alone; but for each other;   Part III   In the forms; An encounter in day; No reason to jump on the underground; Doing whatever it is they’re doing; Droned, stoned, cold face; Emptiness;   Tied to nothing;   Afraid, compelled; Ignore the distance; Move alone; Hop over hope, hello;   Good morning, a smile; Feel good, a hand; Reach beyond struggle; I can’t understand;   Ruin happy; Talking down instead of UP; Nails scattered, abrupt;   Interject to be polite; Politically correct, right;   Sayings straight forward beg to confused; Lost and lonely, dried up and used;   Surprise, Surprise, Surprise   Too sensitive to be real; Too real to be sensitive; Open-minded to say;   Part IV Verbal bullies stroll the streets; Talking tears to shreds beneath the feet; Decipher truth, you Sherlock Holmes; Persons, perceptions, all alone;   Flaws of defecated crazy; We are who neither to be; Flexible breathing, knowing;   Throat slit and groaning; Disabled walking talking under my feet; Thinking how long this street;   Wake up, passed away; Thinking of nights, cocktails, and sex for free;   Part V Laughing goats play their jokes; Life finds way too funny, gloat; Run away and hide again; Move past this square of ugly sins;   Take heed to-night, pointless ways; Life’s performance nothing but a play; Magic Lantern lit the day;   A mirage in a desert waiting, drank within; Dank souls; sounds and voices of oceans gone; Passion continuously taking us through; It’s here, no there, anywhere and everywhere;   Excuses and blame where hope fails; Amens and hallelujahs to no avail; Hope reality when dreams attained; Trucks with brooms cleaning these stains;   Fruition crushed in its midst; A castle on a hill, resting in mist; Facing ourselves in a thousand mirrors; Walls torn down so that they could hear us; Absorbed reflections, a place called peace; If only freedom could lie East;   Self inflicted loneliness bleeds; In bloods of trials failed; Pain and suffering, no one to tell the tale; Czech beneath these crowded streets; Listen to the voices yell!