Letters IV

If i could sit at the seat of my soul
And look eye to eye with my heart
What words, what ideas, what feeling
Would pass i wonder

I could spend my life wondering
I could pass my days in wonder
Wandering from fire to fire
Knowing many homes and none

No words satisfy this heart's hunger
No water quenches its thirst
No names define its language
Where, where are my words
I could not speak them before the seat of my soul
I am forgetting how to speak in the tongue of tears
That river which leads so many hearts to the sea

confessions p. 34

I have been weeping

I am haunted, broken

I am losing

what is not mine for the keeping

I am touching a moment

that will never be again

I am hoarding these photographs

but they are not mine to keep

A broken tooth, a bloodied arm, potential lost

Another's wife, parents ignored through the divorce

Two sullied lungs, a father's shame 

A headline reading one million slain

And so many nights spent weeping over the beauty of it all

There is as much light in this world as darkness

And more perhaps, I think

And none of it 

Neither darkness nor light

Is mine for the keeping

This moment 

This home

This music

This body, in all its grace

These lips, and this speech

This light in our eyes when we speak

None of it is ours to keep

Letters p III

I wrote every name I have been called on a list
And could not find myself there

I imagined all the places that I have laid my roots 

I examined every fingerprint on the surface of my heart 

And every excess of scar tissue within its folds

I placed on the table, every possession
Souvenir and gift I have been given

I organized a calendar of every important date in my life

I catalogued each disappointment and triumph

I reread every poem I ever wrote

And still, I could not point and say

That
Right there
Is me. 

So exactly where am I? 

If not in these relics and nostalgic anchors

Exactly, who am I?

If not all these memories and emotions

And why am I?

If not to feel this way and ask such questions

confession p. 33

What am i doing?
I string sentences and dead words and call it life
A creation
What of madness and folly
of shelving the present to usher in the past

Do not show an artist beauty
unless you seek to attend beauty's funeral
Do not unveil the truth before an artist
the pen and the brush are a hangman's noose

What use do the blind have for mirrors?

This is an age of necromancy
For we are dismantling the world and replacing it
with an upgraded version
Earth 2.0
And it is alive and well in the imagination

I am not an artist
I am a necromancer

And this is a ritual
in which you and I are ritualistically
ceremoniously
playing God
and trying to breathe life into the dead and dying

confessions p 31

A heart is a word is a drum is a question.
A heart is a machete is a muscle is a classroom
is a lightbulb is an open door is a tide.
A heart is a glance is a secret
is a grimace is a kiss is a scar is a resignation of defiance.
A heart is a plug is a powerchord
is a battery is bio-luminescence
is a judge is a window is a mirror
is a curse is a prayer is a baby in the fetal position
is a wave is an eddy is an ocean is an eye.
A heart is a leaf is a valley is a breeze
is a sun is an oasis is a smile is a dawn
is a dam is a bridge is a train is a greeting.
A heart is a gun barrel is a black box
is a sail is an old couple in a park
is a hostel is the distances between stars.
A heart is a seat is a throne is a promise
is a witness is a mother's foot is forgiveness.