a Child
white Light painted over
my Eyes form his Contours:
Cheeks, Shoulders, Knees
his Toes curl over Matter’s obstinate Edge
leaning forward, his Fingers trace Inconscience
behind his precise Face
the Moon rises
pours Gold out of Black
Stars swarm and he breathes
and I rise: the Shadow of Immortality
I flow like Water over Stone
the Child bends to take a Drink
Out of freedom we are born
Like fingers from a hand
From tranquility we’re torn
Timeless, vast perspective shorn
Impaled by matter’s fragrant thorn
And loosed upon the land
Heritage nearly erased
But for a glimm’ring star
Gallant victory defaced
From loving kith and kin displaced
Confined in time and trapped in space
Uprooted avatar
Yet seeded deep within the self
That claims to know the way
A silent secret cloaked in stealth
Illness masquerading health
Poverty indebting wealth
The night conceals the day
So in the hour of deepest pain
When sorrow owns your life
When madness burns and trouble reigns
Be not beguiled by fleeting gains
Or golden moments hiding chains
Remember love, not strife
I am born here, destined to die here, encased in fear, trembling from birth on this isolated Earth in this devastating skin. Skin that separates, encapsulates my mind and heart and other parts. Keeps apart. A gaping impossible divide, with “them” on the other side. Outside of me. Beyond a circumscribed, self-involved, problem-solved pinwheel mind.
Outside like a shattered reflection, distorted by an urge for self-protection, but true as the distant blue above from which we came with our Names and verbs and complex linguistic curves that shape experience into something we can swallow to try to fill the hollow space within. Between gut and chin emptiness has been implanted like a birthmark – stark against the otherwise neutral contours of material existence.
Some defect of evolution? Some prophetic, golden-egg solution? What is aspiration? Hope? Longing? The willingness to bleed and give our lives for something more – what’s it for? And when does reaching become grasping, needing, taking without asking, killing mothers and their babies ’cause their brothers called us crazy?
A primal urge to reunite impels the battles that I fight, the feeding hand I bite, my terror of the night. I desire to be whole, to join together souls into a fabric interwoven without end. I expend myself in burning all the bridges that I build until I’m filled with self-destruction and defend. But still the yearning doesn’t cease, the reaching won’t release and despite myself I climb the golden stair.
Maybe hope is what defines us, not our minds and all our stuff, and maybe aspiration burns like that on purpose. Maybe longing isn’t worthless when it’s stripped of self-assurance. Perhaps the skin that we’re enclosed in is a catalyst for overcoming. And so we should feed the flames, bear the heat and burn the frames of mind that drown the fire in our hearts. And sex and drugs and alcohol aren’t gonna work at all, just spin us faster, farther and apart.
We drink and joke and work and smoke and text and kill and cry and try to fill the gaping painful hole that happens to be our soul that’s buried now alive beneath a million tons of lies and postured grief from others’ lives, and we’re scandalized when someone dares to point it out.
When someone dares to say “You! You are not what you say, the walls you build, the games you play, the fears you feed, the things you need, the lies you tell…that’s all Hell. You are Free! You are holy! You are chosen, you are here because you’re woven inseparably into the fabric of this world and we all evolve together toward something we can’t even imagine – like a dinosaur or dragon couldn’t fathom airplanes or microwaves or Plato or Dante or Einstein or you.
“We are headed somewhere new – uncharted, inconceivable from our current spot because it won’t be built with the tools we’ve got, but the tools we’ll gain along the way. So drop the defense, lose the pretense, and give yourself to this ride that’s gonna take what’s outside, like a moonrise tugging at the ocean tide, and let you feel it from the inside, like your skin sighed and opened wide and there was nothing left to hide.”
Even as I reject them, the words pierce my skin and settle in, gain some purchase beneath mind’s vigilance. And I’m slowly changed despite the same song singing itself softly while I dance.
Vast, unblemished soul
Portentous, unafraid
Gather me in
Bankrupt though I be
I offer everything
Even my sin
Shadows blur my mind
In grey falsehood I toil
Sensing no end
Space gives birth to time
Unveiling ceaselessly
Grasp and ascend
Krishna’s azure eyes
Eternal holy birth
Gather me in
Falling at your feet
Your radiance I sing
Into the wind
Soaked in caustic froth of rain
Moments organize themselves
Expanding like a silent stain
Emerging from a secret well
They slide toward what might have been
The glint of humor from an eye
Greedy, aching like a sin
A furtive glance from passerby
Fluid, with apparent skin
Moments organize themselves
Greedy, aching like a sin
Emerging from a secret well
They slide toward what might have been
Expanding like a silent stain
Fluid, with apparent skin
Stalwart, fortressed against pain
The glint of humor from an eye
Soaked in caustic froth of rain
Furtive glance from a passerby
Betrayed, yet heart aflame
Winter whispers softer than the shadows she betrays on lum’nous snowdrift nights between her days.
She’s hiding more than lupine in the space between her heart and mind, you know that’s where she fastens her displays.
Of nonchalance and debonaire and careless, wanton love, like Saturn wrapped in glory self-contained.
She spins the fabric of your life, then tears if from the loom, appraises it then stashes it away.
Winter’s lashes linger like they lay upon your skin, imprinted and emblazoned and enthroned.
You try to cool the burning with a draught of fire water but the caterwauling chills you to the bone.
And breaks your nerves off at the stem where prudence should have proven them as servants of your vanquished battle cry.
Yet not for naught was freedom bought, and patience owns the day, as spring portrays the astral lullaby.
The Master spun Himself
Into a million shards
Then shattered every one
And cast them all about
With precision
The Master veiled Himself
In vacant isolation
Then breathed into the mouth
Of every single self
And withdrew
Now dormant in the black
Unfathomable depths
The Master lays reclined
A power unrefined
Tinder box
We wake and look about
Examining our skin
We press against the glass
And hunger breathlessly
For everything
A drive to reunite
To integrate it all
To swallow everything
Consumes our shadow lives
Under mind
But this man I have become
Is capable of more
A higher synthesis
Guided by the Heart
And Divine
So gropingly we grow
Expanding inch by inch
Recovering the One
The Breath the woke the worldThe Promise
All is interwoven in the fabric of ascent
Intricately balanced, perfectly content
The threat of pulsing chaos, looming, grasping at your soul
Cannot upset the purposes that synergize the whole
You are one with all that is, You cannot stand alone
Your mind is to your body what flesh is to the bone
We all arose together from a pinprick in the night
Exploded forth from nothing into everything, Delight
We travel, now entwined, involved, an involuted song
Unraveling and singing ourselves skyward like a swan
We fight the light that animates us, erecting barricades
We shun the current carrying us toward a widened day
These efforts, though relentless, cannot cancel what is done
Postpone they may tomorrow, but the victory is won
So let us cast our weapons down, or armor and our pain
Abandon playing enemies, set our hearts aflame.
Want to see a trick?
A pebble, tossed into the sky,
falls into orbit around a fireball.
The pebble is molten
magma, churning and seething,
incessant rupture and pain.
Until clouds form and wring themselves out,
pouring boiling liquid on steaming rock;
chemical soup, pregnant with life
Tenderly holding the precursor to mind:
antecedent self-awareness, knowing.
You are there in the soup as well,
and slowly you emerge, wipe your eyes,
peer out into the black universe,
stagger to your feet.
The placid light of morning enfolds you.
Pink sky, born of fire and turmoil,
turning now to blue.
Through stolen eyes, the watcher dreams
Of conquest, though his promptings seem
Quite seamless, scarcely not my own –
Perhaps detectable by tone
Or varied pitch, a hair off-key
And hidden most ingeniously
Among my drifting raindrop thoughts:
The whos and whys and wheres and whats
That populate my liquid mind,
He lives within them, b’neath, behind,
Injects his wisdom now and then
With magic ink from silver pen –
A master artist, painting me
From inside out, clandestinely.
thelivinglight 