Time Do Not Stop is built around meditations on family, eternity, the joys of life, the pondering of mortality and loss, the grinding mill of continuous change, illusions and realities, and the plight of small humans in a vast cosmos.

Guest’s diverse experiences as a lawyer, business executive, and sculptor lend perspective to many of life’s most ineffable emotional and intellectual quandaries. Through all of this, he provides us with a myriad of ways to see and feel the vitality of being, even when ultimate meaning, if any, remains elusive.

This sharing of decades of observant poems is more about the questions of the world than any presumed answers. Time Do Not Stop makes us ask, Would we ever want to stop time?

No. It’s too beautiful, what we have.

Available soon on Amazon. And below are the book’s first two poems!

*****

Love Poem

When I said one hundred million years
she laughed, slid a casserole into the oven.
Not a laugh of scorn but one of funny.

To change the temperature
of the casserole’s molecules, the clusters,
the little galaxies, I drift to rhymes—

luster, bluster, muster—and dimmer
more distant stars. They blend like bands
of bees into one another’s space—

stars and eyes and points of light
and lips and nipples and that persisting
question: could it be that streams

of Sagittarius got pulled from its neighborhood
into the crowning halo of our Milky Way?
Honey, she says, will you come to bed?

And why do I say: later—I want to work
on migrating galaxies and their supernovas.
And she says, instead of making love?

She does not care how galaxies are formed
and merge. And Lord knows I have
a peculiar way of living in this world.

*****

The Candle

We camped around the candlelight,
and knew that this was true.
Our backs pressed against the night,
there was nothing we could do.

There were four of us, or five,
certain and calm, in our way.
We watched a candle burn alive,
there was nothing for us to say.

Behind our backs who knew
how much can darkness mask?
A whole universe or two?
No one thought to ask.

The candle burned, an orange pit
alone with tips of bluish white.
All we knew to do was sit
and feel the wonder of the sight.