take two

she smiles
"Have you given yourself entirely to your Beloved?"

"No" he responds.
"I have given away my clothes
and come before Her naked.
I have folded the paper wrapper of my self
and returned it to the world
as the debt I owed it upon birth.
To my Beloved, I dare not impose
such a burden as a self, no matter how refined.
All the packaging in the world, no matter how elaborate
will capture even a moment of Her attention.
It is my very self that keeps me from my Beloved.
Were She to glimpse even a shred of it
I would be left with only Her shadow
and She would leave me for another more selfless.
My Beloved resides not in the realm of words
She flees from the false countenance
of the currencies of words and images.
The only receptacle for Her terrible brilliance
lies in the inner ocean of the heart of man."

confessions p 15

It is a dance, whirling before me

like a constant drop and buildup

of rolling melodies against a sea of cacophony.

It is the growth of seed to tree

It is the eating of a fruit

It is the laughing bloom of the rose

and its slow growth through the heavy earth.

It is the passing of seasons. 

An accumulation of now.

It is a single dot of punctuation

in the greatest story ever told.

****

We are like the drops 

that make up the crest of ocean waves

like the rays from the sun

and the blessing of darkness.

We are the words to the greatest story ever told

and the impossible notes on the scale of infinity.

We are the individual breaths 

of god's human life

one leading to the next.

We came from the light.
Innumerable.
Immeasurable.
Immaterial.
We came from the endless fields of pre-eternity
to taste one moment of this now. 

birds and lashes

They say you are yourself
when you are alone.
If that is so, this chapter in my story
can be summed up in a single teardrop
quivering on the cusp of vision
melting perception and perceived together.
O you who would know the song of my lament
I've spent so many nights
asking my heart "what are you?"
I've bled so many tears
over the bones of my breast
that a path has been carved
through the sinew and flesh
seeping straight to the bloody beat of my being.
I chase sorrow like love hangs in the balance.
I want to taste all of them, every heartache
I long for the notes of every one of those songs.
I race along the foreign shores of imagination.
I become the teardrop coursing down the cheek
of every broken-hearted soul.
I am like the smoke to the smoldering heat
of their searing stories.
They breathe through me
I release their fumes.
The flames breath, and I bleed
till it is no longer me bleeding.
I am just a single teardrop
offering myself to every cheek
that has a [love] story to tell.

the confinement of words p 6

We will come up with different ways
to describe ourselves
and names with which to identify.
Being names, they will never truly contain
the spectrum of our being.
We are not of the realm of names.
By virtue words can not hold us.
Come away with me
let's step outside
the glass house of these words.

confessions p 14

This is for
all the days and nights
that I wrote with a broken pen
all the floors that soaked the salt of my story.
This is for the stirring in my heart, the swelling in my chest
which melts my vision, squeezes out of my eyes
and courses over my hands down the length of the pen.
This is for the shadows of the tears
that sometimes trail down the length
to the tip of my pen onto the page.

Breathless

I can't help but to imagine your face.
I start at the tip of just one hair on your head,
and that is about as far as I ever get.
I try to conjure the taste of your breath;
but I get stuck at the word 'taste,'
I talk about the meaning of 'you' for ten minutes
and by the time I get to the last word
my mouth has forgotten how to breathe.
I said the "taste" of "your" "breath". Without your breath
I could not taste a thing, without your taste
on my lips, I could not take a breath,
all taste is yours, the taste of the tasteless,
without 'your', there is no life, no eye
can discern the veils of the word 'you,'
else the mirror and its reflection would be one.
Because of 'you' there is no me, only the aftertaste
of that first mortal kiss, and that first breath
after the beautiful death of a world without mirrors.
In the broken corner of this intersection between you and I
I am dying for a 'taste of your breath.' Let me die,
and remember the 'your' before 'breath' is deathless
Let me die, and become the breath of the breathless.

We're all the 1%

We think ourselves higher than all else

yet we don't have the patience of trees,

or the loyalty of a dog.

We don't have the mercy of water

or the tolerance of great spaces,

we don't have the freedom of the wind,

in our greed, we try to hoard the sun

and confine the stars to our prisons. 

*****

All this talk of who's the 99% who's the 1%

I'm tired of playing the blame game and
getting up on toy horses and pointing fingers

when we are barely the Earth's 1% 

confessions p 13

These tears are not my own
randomly shed dreamscapes
passed down the hands of time
bleeding into my pores.
Strangers begging audience
they're flooding profusely
over my clutching hands
believing me into unbelief
stripping me of every absolute.

To whom it may concern

I owe every word
to anyone who ever played a part in my life, near or far
every emblem of pain or symbol of beauty
every fire that burned me to life
every cold wind that will one day help me die
and to every traveler on this journey of the heart.

a sneaking suspicion

I have a sneaking suspicion:
that when we move the stars watch with envy
 that this moment is timeless, and hence eternal
  and that we are all on a pilgrimage.
I have a sneaking suspicion:
 that there is an ocean inside every one of us
  that there is a potential supernova within our breasts
   and love, and love!
I'm not talking about the excuse of the word
that we package n sprinkle with a bit of affection
to ration out with so many strings attached-
and the fine print! oh the fine print.
No. I'm talking about that complete consummation
which leaves no room for the consideration of self.
And the eventual eruption of that dormant volcano      
that makes you want to stab through your own chest
so the fountain of your torn heart may write in blood
that poem which no pen can write!

confessions p 12

I'm hanging on to the bottom rungs of this ladder
like everything depends on it
as if I want to be alone among the stars
as if their cold light could warm my belly.
Fuck reaching for the stars
I'd rather know the constellations that shine
in the dark sky of my own heart.

the alchemy of tears and dreams

Some days I leave these pages blank
but when I hear the passage of seasons
whispering of setting suns
and I remember that I have
only this moment
then I am so overwhelmed
with what I have to say
that I can speak only in tears.
I live to turn these tears to words
to give them expression.
I am a drop, a trickle
a splash in a stream
singing in praise of the sea.