poetry 2019

I am not (you are)

You want me to be specific
This person right here. Here she is
Look at her
She walks like this. Wears these clothes
She doesn’t talk
But you talk
And this is what I think: your thoughts
And how I spend my time
Is how you spend your time

And every value a reflection of yours
I puppet, mimic, marionette
Dig your fingertips deeper into my jaw
And open your hand
The words that come out: they’re yours

Satisfied?
Happy now?
That I am SO VERY YOU
but you aren’t

Because you don’t like you
And now that I am a mirror of you
The fear you thought would be satiated
With the morsal of my soul
(It’s us it’s us we’re safe it’s US)
Is choking on my conformity

Shinning back your insecurity

I am not your reflection

You don’t have any power over me
Maybe you hate that this slipping finger grasping shows
I am out of your control
(and so are you)

I Am A Story I Am Telling

If we are not surprised by death
Who are we?
That it has always been this one moment
That it will always be
Now

It is something I am sure of
More sure than the wind that plays the trees
More certain than the sun that loves my skin
I am of this

I feel eternity deep in my cells
All the way down to the swirling dip
Of space and stars
That surely I am the cresting mountain peak
Island

I am

So death will be a great surprise if it isn’t
A
Oh. Right. Of course
I’ve always been here
I never was there

And still it is now
And all I was
Is

The Answer to The Question

The answer to the question

What is the meaning of life
Why are we here

IS

That we ask that question

That is the answer

The meaning of life is that we ask ourselves, and each other: what is the meaning of life?

That we are lacking an answer, posing a question, looking for meaning: that IS the meaning

We are here to ask
We are here to seek
We are to lack
And build
And create
And need
And find
And want
And want more

We are not here to be stationary
Still
Perfect
Existing in a state of perpetual joy

We are here to move
To dance
To be building
To exist in a state of perpetual change

The goal is to unravel from perfection

And weave a new story

I Am My Own

My life is for me
It’s for myself
Not you. You’re not it
I’m not value priced
I’m not even on a shelf

I’m far up in a forest
On a ledge
Behind some stretching firs
In a circle of sunshine

And I am looking up at my own
Hands
As they weave through the air
Creating many beautiful things
That no one will
Hold

Only I hold them
And only for a moment
Only I hold me
Only for a moment:
Then the slightest breeze
Catches me up into the sky

So you’ll understand
When I say,
This life is for me
I’m only my own.

Ghosts Who Carry

Some people just have a feel
Is it a story?
A story that sits on my left shoulder
My right shoulder too
Whispering that this is funny
We are laughing at this
I’m laughing with you

And i am laughing with ghosts
At our inside jokes
Even more inside now
Inside my mind, tucked into my soul
Whisperings, whisperings, we slay the world
Together
Set it right
Set it upside down

A story I am holding
incomplete I am completing
Voiceless I am voicing
Yes. Yes. We would have found this funny
We still do

Comfort Yourself First

This whole world around you seems separate as if you are one in a billion people. You are more than this. You know you are connected. You see that you are all that you perceive. Moreso all that you perceive you are. So when you attribute hate you are hate. When you attribute malice you are malice. Even from a psychological perspective this is true as even a materialist would agree that your perspective is subjective.

From a spiritual perspective, which is scientific, and indeed science is catching up, we also see this is true. We are not separate from the earth. We are not separate from each other. We came from the earth. We grow upon her. We go back to her. Our consciousness is creating the creation we have created. We consider ourselves to be one among many, among a hard and fixed reality. Yet when we expire all expires with us.

So what matters what happens outside our perspective? Outside our consciousness? Say we live and breathe and grow in violence and horror but are peace ourselves. This is good. But what if we ourselves are violence and horror in an attempt to gain peace? We have gained nothing. There is no “our world” and “our soul”. It is solely our soul. Anyway, horror and violence can never gain peace. The means cannot justify the ends because the means are the ends. It is better to be love and peace in a sea of violence than to be violence and fear in a sea of peace. But neither is the case.

We think this to be possible. We ask ourselves: how can we be happy, peaceful, content with a world in the shambles it is in? But it is exactly our happiness peacefulness and contentedness that will bring the world out of shambles. We create the world from our innermost selves. And if we look deeply we will find our inner selves to be peace and love and goodness. More so we will see other selves to be made likewise.

Consider this, what of a man who is angry. If you meet him with anger he will only become more angry. But if you meet him with peace and compassion you will find the fear and hurt behind his anger. And fear is only an absence of love. It is not a thing in and of itself. And anger is fear turned outward, the fear that we may not gain love and peace ourselves.

But we are love and peace. And the sooner we recognise it the sooner we will find it not only in ourselves but in the world around us.

To create a loving world we need to do nothing more than to claim peace, love, joy, and happiness for ourselves. Not only this, but to see that everything else is either love or a call for love. When there is hate or anger in you there is a call for love, likewise when there is hate or anger in another: it is a call for love. We are like toddlers masquerading as adults.
Let all other illusions go. And do not imagine the world the enemy you have seen it as. It is a crying child, not a villain. Comfort yourself first that you may comfort the world.

To have. To breath.

Why do we become these frail creatures?
A single page in the volume of eternity?
Less than the breath of a sun
Barely a crest of a wave

A single caption
A still frame of a film

We are a bright and brief gleaming
Yet
We are
a
A joy the moon is jealous of
Envious
In her ever spinning days

To walk
To breathe air
To have the fingertips of wind
lift the hairs
On the nape of a neck

The caress of the sun coated in the dreams
Of the clouds as his rays sprint down
To earth to coat her inhabitants in
His ever rich and golden glory

What WISH! What whisper! What golden dream
Is this?

To be human so briefly and so brightly
To be such a flame
That mountains fall down in worship
Of these fleeting lives
Lie tumbled in the aching trees
Their hearts slow
With their steady march of years

It is a firefly
Mortality
Moths to eternity
Ever circling the bright
Of skin
And sweat and a tongue that tastes
Each bite

I am not ready yet to say goodbye
To the power of this dying life

What joy to exist
This wake and sleep life

What point is this
To be so brief upon this billion year
Earth

I do not know

But i will not waste it

What Other People Think

To be truly free of what other people think,
Is it a triumph?

To be truly free of my own judgements
I see them and step out
They are clothes I no longer wear
It is all our own judgement anyway,
also that which I attribute to you,
Even when you speak it:

YOU OUGHT TO
YOU SHOULD

Even then, it is my OWN when I believe that it is directed at me

I know my own judgements of you,
worn as outerwear, are

dress-up clothes

They speak of who I am,
How I feel about myself,
Fragments I have knit together from disparate parts,
And offered to others as if they actually fit anyone
Other than the maker,
Myself,
They don’t

So I know these judgements offered to me
Say very little about my own size and stature

All we give out
Speaks little about those we craft it for
And volumes about the crafter

So I shed these clothes in the sunshine
Which illumines my true form

And to me it is a walking through
A whisper and a dance,
No instagram profile even,

And certainly no set standard expected to
ACHIEVE
before I can be:

the whole aching splendor of her humanity

I am her already