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.

how does a universe fit inside a human being?

There is a voice inside me
with the patience of the sea
twenty six flowers rest on one branch
by day's end
each has blossomed into a thousand trees
worlds of forests, deserts
valleys and undiscovered peaks
By moon rise
their petals sway into the spiraling arms of a galaxy
and the vast empty infinite of the cosmos
is kissed with the cloying fragrance of evening primrose
moonflowers, nightshade, gladiolus, geraniums
and drunk, the great starry void inhales
and breathes out all the colors of the dawn
The Beloved arrives
the Beloved is here
the Beloved was always here
(and never)
There is nothing but the Beloved here
There is nothing but the Beloved
I thought I existed
I and the world
I and so many other I's
I and the sun and earth and ocean and sky
I and Nature and the cosmos and you
and you and you and you and you
But I have never truly existed
How can something have existence
when it is here one moment and gone the next?

How does a universe fit inside a human being?
It curls into the body in the fetal position
like a prayer
or a question
whose answer requires an eternity of now

the great starry void of the cosmos is within
the vast stretches of infinity
the endless desert of space
star nurseries, galaxy clusters
and all the empty space between
is here, right here
Heat death and the expansion of the universe
the beginning, and the final trails of light
the big bang, the apocalypse and the end of our sun
all the moments of the cosmos and the earth
from the birth of light and time
to the end of eternity and the shores of pre-darkness
how can so much time fit into so small a body?
It curls into it in the fetal position
Like a prayer
or a spark from a fire leaping skyward
trailing light in the shape of a question
whose answer requires an eternity of now

To the flowers that have not yet bloomed;

turn your face toward the sun
let the shadows fall behind you
and soak up as much blood, water and tears
as your roots and veins can hold

The ancestry of language

They come and we break words
and wet tongue to speak to each
but you and I share something beyond words
a dance of light in the eyes
something rooted so deep in the seed of our being
that it precedes language...

What is the mother tongue of the Universe?
And what was its first word?

What were some of the earliest languages
of being and becoming?
And what was the first death
experienced by the Universe?

I think the Universe's first experience
of death, temporality and finitude
may be what preceded the birth of language

In coming face to face with its own mortality
did the silence of the cosmos
erupt with the ripples of language
each word a container
a souvenir from travels past
a glimpse into the untimebound for the timebound

confessions p 30

Mercy on mercy on mercy
Light on light on light
13 years in an instant
Then, now, always
The same question
At the heart of all I hold true
What did I do to deserve this?
Nothing
I did absolutely nothing
I just am
And You love me like this
For nothing
With no reason 
 I just want to learn how to love like that

Letters p II "Faceless Lover"

Who are you?
Where are you from?
Why does your shadow haunt the horizon of my dreams?

Whose face are you wearing today?
Whose voice have you borrowed?
Through which word shall I find you tonight?
With what mask will you kiss me in the morning?
With whose eyes shall you peer into my soul?

Oh faceless lover
Shrouded in shadow and cloth
I have only ever heard your echo through the walls
Once, I thought I heard your voice
Over the din of so many others in the marketplace
So that even now, I can't tell which throat was yours

Oh faceless lover
Who are you that awaits me at every ending?
Who are you that began with beginning?
Through whose eyes are you looking at the world?
Who are you that wears the face
of every lover I have known?
The mothers with which I have grown
Sisters and brothers, born and unknown
The was and the will be
The yet to be formed
And the seeds of the unsown?

How many lifetimes of memory must I accrue
Until I can remember what is to be with you?
Again and again and again and again
Until every moment of wakefulness is doused
And drenched with your scent
Until every breath spent unequivocally in surrender
And every moment
Every surface and layer
Alive
Ablaze

Oh faceless lover
Who is it looking from beneath your hundred veils
That with such a thing as simple as one gaze
Can split a single instant into a thousand ways to say
I remember

Oh faceless lover
Strike me blind!
Strike me blind
So I may never put a face to love

Letters p I

Rumi, what am I supposed to be doing?
Where is Shams? Where is the sun of the sun?
To which direction do I turn when sight fails
And the horizon reveals only mirages?
What tongue do I speak when my soul's night
has chased the words out of my mouth?
To which constellation do I turn when my eyes
swallow light like black holes?
In what language would the words of love
not flee from me
after tasting the kiss of my faithless lips?
Through which window do I fly
when the house of my soul
becomes too claustrophobic for my dreams?
Where do awakened dreams find refuge
from this sleeping reality?
What is the soul of the soul?
Who is the spirit of the spirit?
"Who am I? Where is my soul from?
And what am I supposed to be doing?"

continued...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZqAnIp5dMQ

*quotes: Rumi

Hiatus p II

Some nights

I write poetry

Some nights

poetry writes me

A feeling 

an idea unbirthed

a haunting melody

from a song I made into a home

or radio waves

accidentally picked up 

without reception

a stranger at my door

Scents carried by a passing breeze

my mothers' smile in a picture frame

a forgotten promise 

an undying wish

a blank piece of paper

A memory

of the moon

waning, glistening

like an apology

wet 

ready to be kissed

beneath a canopy of pine needles
as bodies of shadow merge with luminescence