forms of life

and antics of mind

Dear Friends,

I hope you spent a good deal of time fading into a landscape of earth and jewel tones this summer. 

I put my novel to one side for the time being.

I got very excited starting to alphabetize a big file I have called “fragments”, before I got pulled into one of the entries that is maybe no longer a fragment at close to 10,000 words. So I put that to one side as well.

At a non-duality retreat, I read Terrance Hayes’s poem, How to Draw a Perfect Circle, including the lines:
Everything is connected
By a line curling and canceling itself like the shape of a snake
Swallowing its own decadent tail or a mind that means to destroy itself,

Then I wrote something, about the behavior of mind trying to get beyond time. 

mind

I have been doing things 
I’m not supposed to:

drinking the tap water;

fantasizing about the not-two 
as two—
or not-one.

I have been writing this poem,

tending to my thoughts like precious offspring, 
supple and green.

I am alive—not-dead.

Even in the afterlife I persist, 
a critic of my own ending:

“Not those, these
can be my last words,”
and so on,

a hanger-on to life with contours,

nailbeds bleeding out neuroses.

I might kill my self with boredom,

singing the same old tired-ass hymn,
praise to a judgmental god:

“Try again,” etc.

Post-mortem is a funny word for analysis, 
isn’t it?

My last words must make the cut,
be worthy of all the anguish it took to build 
this Byzantine architecture of thought.

Elucidation, if not enlightenment!

So long as I won’t die, I can control 
the description of my deliverance before 
someday it comes for me,

‘til then each edit exhuming me, 
born again to the not-paradise of my head.

Tell me, what is “near-death”?
How is it only “near-” when 
a person crosses fully over before 
coming back?
Why is death ever presumed 
to be far and forever?
What is not death?

I am in a comma, inserted wherever possible 
to avoid finality.

It pleases me 
to commit the cardinal sin of the run-on 
sentence like a comet tail trailing 
lavender dust across the night sky,

ecstatic,

“I was here!”,

the period a black hole that will never pull me 
into it.

No end of the day, no sun setting ablaze 
the horizon my eyes read as a line—
the sentence my body took the form of
when my lover moved to invade it,
before even I noticed the substitution 
and so thought stood in, undisturbed.

A man can’t force open a sentence
that I write, end or prolong as I like.

I still had my mind.

“What are you?” a voice asked 
itself.

A ghost? 

No-thing?

I was born, in the backwaters 
of the collective unconscious learned to be 
split down the middle: 
two-brained, -armed and -legged,
speak untruths all day long.

I fell asleep in the tall crabgrass 
of my thoughts.

Now I rub my eyes, looking up into open-
ended blue. 

The voice speaks with a forked tongue,
one prong for every syllable of the word, 
kun-da-li-ni, meaning the space between 
words ever fewer and farther apart
as The Holy Spirit eats me out from the inside.

Lord, help me; I just want to feel 
the intersection of you and me as two
shapes meeting at the point of your pupil 
that is the symbol for everything.