Stay With It

Without hesitation,

I rush in with words outstretched,

heart held in my hand.

Devoid of sense-making

and too-full of feeling,

descriptions pour from

all my wounded places,

coloring the ever-changing scenery.

Bitterness emerges immediately,

self-doubt clawing at me

like some dirty, snarling

maggot of addiction,

smearing wide swaths of my blood

across the page.

I write on, persistent.

I'm not always pretty,

to myself especially,

but also to others.

I'm not always ugly, either.

I'm not always anything,

neither love and light

nor fear and dark.

I'm everything,

nameless as the patient union

of life and death themselves.

I expire

and am remade

a thousand times a day,

imagining a continuous trajectory of being

only because my cells,

just like the earth in the body of god,

are spinning too fast

for me to make sense of their motion.

I relinquish my hold on my self

and allow a resting of potential,

sick to death

of new age dogma

and old age karma

all at once.

"FUCK YOU BOTH"

screams one of the smallest voices inside,

petulant and angry

that he was born into a world

where some men offer ceaseless prayers

to their own greedy pocket-idols

while they feed bullets of deception

into sleek, shiny misinformation-machines...

"Fuck you both"

says that smallest voice,

scared and sad to be born into a world

where so many seem to prefer

to turn themselves into cringing lapdogs

or anonymous bigots en masse

rather than take responsibility

and shoulder the difficult burden

of their own hearts...

"fuck you both"

whispers that smallest voice,

desperately needing

all the blissfull bullshit to be true,

desiring nothing so much as escape.

Done apologizing for being,

done demanding

the heart of the world be healed.

Perhaps it's better off as it is,

for who am I to deem it broken?

Who am I to claim

to have deciphered

our global cardiactic cartography,

much less my own?

'This too shall pass'

is a truism always applicable,

although uttering those words

will not always

ease the sting of the moment.

I FEEL,

and I feel hard...

for I am a poet

and by definition

that's part of the job.

I also feel soft.

I also feel everything in between,

and other sensations

you could not even begin to imagine.

Perhaps I am nothing more

than a funnel for the emotions

of the universe,

allowing for a sort of

concentrated expression of existence.

If so,

then I am performing admirably.

The snarling maggot inside

settles back into slumber,

and fades away to nothing

as he drifts off to sleep,

no more true

than the opium-induced ecstasy

of an addict,

and fulfilling exactly the same function:

"I gotta get my fix, man."

I'm not interested

in rebounding from

one overwhelm to the next,

ping-ponging across

the spectrum of dualism,

nor am I interested in taking refuge

in spiritual materialism

or some escapist, narcotic religion.

Acknowledging that my judgement

of both is born of the transient understandings

of my small self,

nevertheless I do not

see either one as a solution -

- for there is nothing to be solved.

While there are muscles to be flexed and stretched,

meals to be eaten and dishes to be washed,

boards to be sawed,

holed to be drilled,

money to be made

poems to be written

wounds to be patched

and flawed systems to be re-imagined...

...simultaneously

we may find a grace

in the doing of all of this

which belies the need

to do it in the first place.

Yet we will, for we are here,

and were it not for the dirty dishes in the sink

and the dirty laundry

of our current shared global situation,

we would have no chance

to enact the performance of this grace,

no opportunity

to demonstrate

that despite all those snarling maggots

that seem all too-real,

despite everything done

in the name of 'God' or 'Freedom'

that in fact makes a mockery of both...

despite these illusions of

the myriad of inadequacies, imperfections,

and injustices of life

there is a dignity, a rightness,

and an essential integrity,

which somehow encompasses

the whole of it.

Incomprehensibly,

the resounding "YES!"

of creation

is never a "NO,"

no matter who's being addressed.

Inconceivably,

all of the bullshit and the pain

is enfolded alongside the joy,

and we've no need to choose

between the two,

or insist on one

at the expense of the other.

Let us become big enough

for all of it to be,

for only then

can we make our way forward

without replaying

the same tired scenes

we've all seen a thousand times.

Let us allow all of ourselves to be,

and rest in the steady breath of

"I don't know...

yet here I am."