Old friend, the tea kettle, left too long in its rightful place. Now apathetic on leaving, but still hungry for the Great Unknown of my youth. For the infinite space of being young and certain of such things
Today, nothing is mystery the way it should be, no stone unturned more than a click away, every path up the mountain, Google mapped and photographed, by good worker bees and the honest hum of the ruling hive.
Every turn I take within myself, mile marked and somehow still lonely.
How do we keep digging new wells and finding old rivers? How am I the first one in this body, and still find the porch light on? Porridge hot and the Welcome mat, wet mud waiting
Who is in here with me? In this dark place, I burrow to.
How am I to find MY WAY if all the right ways are already shrink wrapped? plastic bibles and styrofoam prayer mats, playmobil work boots and single use hard hats
How am I to know MY SELF if it is two pills, palm up, prescribed to me The required summer reading of some shifty Self seven layers back
Never before have there been so many answers to the same old question
The only one we’ve ever known to ask
What, exactly, am I? And am I doing whatever it is there is to do here? Am I doing it well enough? Is there a why and if so for what?
What exactly is the message of this magic, the meaning we can make, sure, but where is the call coming from?
Inside the house, again? Really?
What familiar island song am I caught humming along to? And am I to follow it or simply learn to listen closely?
Strap me to the mast and I will beg to go Toss me to the sea and I will sink to stay
Every holy book, my own thoughts Every song, my own voice echoed Every painting, my own brush left drying on the palette’s edge, ever tempted to keep straining my neck around the canvas, looking for whatever wisdom I am to paint with
Where is it all coming from, if I only find it here within?
How long can I chase the still small voice, before I catch my own tail? Dumbfounded again, mouthful again furry and fury filled again.
I have been writing myself, since I was a top-heavy toddler, but I keep toppling over keep finding myself, ten toes to heaven, and heaving
prayers, the pornography of the spirited path our words, cheap tricks for the knowing we can’t name
We keep talking, in spite of our ignorance We keep telling, in spite of our ignorance We keep writing, in spite of our ignorance
What is this slow boil, I have known to be the self?
The natural tension of the infinite confined to space, of the God bound by time. This feeling, I have learned to call a feeling, learned to call tension, learned to know as anxiety or angst or wanting. This desire to expand and express and articulate that which cannot be known. This is the essence of the presence of god, the butting against the outer dimension of being. It is breaking the fourth wall and knowing oneself to be both the camera and the stage, the audience and the actor, the director and writer and the light from which all action is cast.
The boil, as we will call it, is only as holy as we make it, only rolling and ineffable if we, choose to be unsatisfied by the limits of language if we, choose to keep fighting it like a shadow we will learn by losing
Someday, we and I, will realize that it is not our task to peel apart the universe and name it, to pick our nails and call each fractal a poem.
It is not our role to make graven what was given to us, to craft the small stillness in our own image until it is neither small nor still.
The boil, as we call it, is no place for good boys in Polos to hold space for proper learning
Not a worksheet looking for answers but a game of play and possibility of make believe and making better
It is a costume party and under every mask a mirror
every character a charade of self every curtain already drawn the play always just begun
the audience, all ways awaiting its encore
The boil, just poet talk for being here, already rolling and we, too thirsty to leave
sit steaming in our own silence
waiting to steep
for the milk and the honey
for the boil to finally make of us what we’ve always been
