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Poetry

Where Is Teal?

A plead as simple as bleeding,
To be free of the warm veins,
forged for survival.
Where?
Directions are lost,
Obscured by wind and stinging soot
Pulled relentlessly from the earth,
No longer stable and turning black.
Where?
Is it the prison of it ,
That shapes you the most?
Or the shapelessness of your keepers?
Reality is scarcely a fossil here
Where?
The chemical blood, smeared on forearm and thigh…
It brings out the best in us.
Bravery’s way of finding us, where mercy would not
And honor’s taste, heavy on a bitten lip that will never speak of this again.
 Where?
I am the only soul here,
The only thing living, besides molten,
That flows in slow, spitting rivers, breathed in by nostril and pore.
A living cadaver, in skin like wax that never melts.
As cold as the idea of this being not where I belong
or what I deserve,
has become.
Where?
The path of devastation, leads you in circles they say.
Back to the same Iron,
The same brand.
The same vision every way you see it.
You are a slave.
But the tears don’t come beyond the thousand degree heat, and the way it’s scarcely felt now, when it burns me.
Where?
Against what bones still un fragmented, and what flesh still un torn,
Fear is a rising tide.
The only thing I fear is fear it’s self.
It is the only thing telling me, life is not like this for any soul but mine.
But any love they drip to me will fall like blood in the end…
No way to take it in,
Once it’s outside you

Mosaic

All life is the fragmenting
of one collective soul.
All life is the finding
of one’s split soul.
To taste each other’s lips,
to feel each other’s hips.
To rage against each other
so that we feel the agony of our separation.
We are a mosaic.
We are the broken fragments of a masterpiece
that shattered.
It is only by finding our split soul
that we can re-unite the tesserae.
It is only by finding our split soul
that we will see the masterpiece consciously
for the very first time.
The warmth of love,
like an adhesive,
causes us to commit to each fragment
of our collective soul…
To commit because each fragment
is part of ourselves.

Some Of Us Are Lucky

Some of us are lucky.
We see ourselves in the faces that look back at us.
We are not strangers.
Some of us are lucky.
The stars of us belong in constellation.
We are not strangers.
Some of us are lucky.
We feel the warmth of our connection.
Its comfort is not worn thin by wariness.
We are not strangers.
Some of us are not so lucky.
Our cry is a wolf’s cry in a chorus of bleating.
We are strangers.
Some of us are not so lucky.
We recognize ourselves in people we have never met
and places we have never been to.
We are strangers.
Some of us are not so lucky.
The pith of connection fails us
again and again
As inconsistent and as short lived as a dream.
We are strangers.
We are strangers in this world. 

Only Love

War we cried
As if it were not of mankind’s own making.
The soul of man,
The synagogue of that most violent of battles;
Between good and evil.
Centuries of bloodshed in between those rivals.
Shall I pray that as the blood falls to Earth
It will end that war?
No messiah yet has managed it.
It rages on
The very sound of it
Is blasphemy
Blasphemy against the sanctuary of the human heart.
Neither side recognizing a trace of itself in the other.
Neither side lifting a white flag against the silence of the sky.
Only love can bring the silence of union
To this riot of parting between God’s children.
Only love
Only love
And Love, the only antidote
Excludes nothing,
Including evil.
Beyond the fail mortality
Of polarity,
It calls these two brothers back together as one.
Christ- the choice
Lucifer- the lack of choice…
To love
They called him the bearer of the light,
For without him
There could be no Christ.
Without determinism
We could not know the freedom of will;
Nor taste its sweetness
In the volition of our autonomy.
Each side calls for each other’s death.
But there will be no elegy.
There will be no elegy because one cannot die without the other.
One cannot live without the other.
Only love can quiet
Both the fervor of the devil’s tongue
And the fervor of the angel’s wing.
Only love
Only love
And love, the only antidote
Excludes nothing,
Including evil.
Only love will end this war.

Ayahuasca

I have something to show you it says.
Die to yourself to see it it says.
Die to the next self and the next self and the next self until no self is left.
An essence beyond form
Beyond the form of thought, the form of emotion, the form of body.
Like layers of illusion, they conceal the truth.
The truth of oneself.
A mirror of the truth of the universe at large.
The wooden snake moves with the life blood in your veins in search of that truth.
It writhes to clean you of illusion along the way.
To clean you by peeling back the layers one by one.
To die to yourself is as painful as it is freeing.
To see the truth is as painful as it is beautiful.
In the grip of the vine, you are set free.
Follow me it says.
Die to yourself
To find yourself.

Sunlight

Angst sings and howls through the aqueducts of flesh.
It cannot escape with the breath.
It is not softened by thought.
It is not melted away by the passing of time.
Uncertainty celebrates when it claims dominion and leaves what it finds in sensual ruin.
I lie on the floor in a shaft of sunlight.
I close my eyes to let it greet my face.
The dark world behind my eyelids is turned coquelicot.
Warmth is loud as it rejoices in the merciful stillness of light.
The angst is hushed.
It is paroled by the breath.
It is softened by the warmth.
It is melted away by the charity of light.
The angst of uncertainty falls silent and forfeits its fight.
For the light is constant…
The light is constant.

A Child's Voice

The voice of a child says
It is better that our hearts grow light
It is better to embrace instead of exile suffering
From instead of to it’s murdering breath
Mothers weep until their tears run dry
Their sons on distant streets decay
Kissed by the meritless fever of war
Stripped of life
And all souls die along with them
Just as all souls live
As a newborn embraces the joy of its mother’s breast
Relieved of the heavy husk of childhood 
Let our voices rise to denounce
All that kept us prisoner 
Like the undisturbed stars 
My heart flickers without falter
I use it’s light to turn around to face my real enemies
But all there is 
Is stillness and space
Row upon row of ramparts I have built
For an enemy that doesn’t exist
All souls are set free
As I tear down my walls
Brick by brick
But not by hating them
I have taken the child’s advice
It is better that our hearts grow light
It is better to love than to fear
And the voice of a child says
There is no better way to love 
Than to love the fear itself

This is Earth

Where each breath and step is none but a progression towards death.
Where pain is the loud and bloody birthing ground for peace.
Our cowardice saves us from nothing 
in a world where bravery was never a choice.
It leaks like sweat from the pores.
It is dried in the sun of our commitment to live.
Where a trillion lives are spinning through the cosmos;
at a thousand miles per hour 
with no destination in sight.
Our faith is placed in the color of our blood,
in the salt of our tears.
Where the heart is broken and it keeps on beating just the same.
Where love is the only evidence we have that God exists;
something greater than ourselves 
and the blindness with which we fumble through life.
Our cowardice saves us from nothing 
in a world where bravery was never a choice.
Where no matter how careful you are, you will die.
Some of us simply arrive at death safely.
But in honest defeat,
with a life half lived.
Drenched in the sweat of our own cowardice,
having made no commitment to fully live.
Where in some distant desert a flower opens,
offering it’s frailty to the world.
And therein lies its strength.
A coward is incapable of love.
And so he has no evidence that God exists;
something greater than himself.
Our cowardice saves us from nothing
in a world where bravery was never a choice…
So love
Because 
This is earth.
This is earth.

Forever Smile

We cannot forever smile 
To know the value of a smile.
Its symmetry is only known 
By the violent disagreement of woe 
Sorrow is the spot light 
That Illuminates joy 
On the stage of life
We must first clutch our griefs 
In quivering arms
To learn how to drop them
To learn how to embrace 
Relief instead
When you taste the value of a smile
When you feel its symmetry 
Against your lips
You will see that you are the richest man on earth
Who has been begging for a living
That you already made
You will see that you are the freest man on earth
Who has been banging on the jail bars
That you already escaped from
Both wealth and freedom 
Are meaningless 
Without the awareness 
Of what it is you are fighting for
What is the goal of your wealth?
What is the goal of your freedom?
If not to smile.
So smile today
And see
That the violent disagreement of woe
That the heaviness of grief and sorrow
Was worth it
Because 
We cannot forever smile 
To know the value of a smile
But once we know the value
We can smile.

The World My Father

The agonized sea 
of parting ways
heaves and cracks against the heart
His smile burns its ways across my grief
As if teasing
As if reminding me of what I have lost
The sound of heartbreak
Rings heavy like a bell underwater
The impact of the echo of it could be my undoing
But here I am
I have not broken under the blow of it
But I want to
The sun is setting
Both inside and out
I am capsized by the sound of my own voice
A plea to the listening sky
A renunciation
Instead of a wanting
I am done wanting
Done wanting for a life I never had
Done wanting from a man who would never give it
And cannot give it
And will never give it
I have written him a letter
I have read it aloud
My voice is nothing against an internal sea in torment.
It amounts to a whisper
But a whisper is still a vow
After perpetual defeat
You have to wonder
If you are powerless because you can’t stop and move on
You have to ask yourself
How much of you was happy while it lasted?
Do you not father me on the destroying sands of this earth because I’m not enough?
Not enough to value
Not enough to want
Not enough to try to understand
The cool of your indifferent waters cannot calm the fury of not being loved enough 
Only fire can calm the fury
Fire that consumes the letter I wrote to you
The violent orange of ember
Converts the pain to ash
The ash to smoke
The smoke to sky
Death has marked the hills tonight
But this time the death of a dream
My fingertips, disabled by the cold
Are none the less hooded in the ash
Veiled by the hollow silence of this act and promise
To never come after your love again
Picking through the ash and snow
For a message left behind by the fire
The finality of a lesson learned
Is summed up in the two remaining words I find 
The only two words not eaten by the flame 
Barely visible through the powder grey lien of the ash
And the words are
The world.

Flame and Ash

Grief
With it’s disheveled hands,
Pulls me back in time.
I stand before the life that was
In the marred silence of the black of night.
I see the buildings
The buildings that witnessed all
But said nothing
And did nothing
They, the containers of my grief
They, the keepers of the silence
Of the abominations that occurred there
Made monstrous by association,
They stand 
Like sniveling memorials.
They, the bystanders
To the breaking of my body
The desecration of my mind
The hewing of my soul
They, the tombs of my youth
Will hold me hostage no longer.
I
Having returned an intemperate heroine
Set fire to them all
With heavy torches.
The fire,
Like rampant water
Floods and bellows it’s way throughout the town
It consumes
Each and every building
The horror and the grief
That is imprinted 
Within these buildings
Sustains the burning.
Burning that lasts for hours
Burning that lasts for days
Burning that devours all the memories
One by one
I watch the memories
I watch them rip and tear apart 
Like images on burning filmstrip
All is mortal
In the path of the flame
The fire washes my childhood away
Until it is dead and gone
In the garden of my mind.
A vision splendid
The violent copper 
Of the flame
Fades
Into raven colored ash…
The final amen.

The Holy Grail

How far must we deviate from ourselves?
How long must we abandon ourselves?
Since the moment we first chose to do so
We abandon ourselves in birth.
And if we do not rejoin ourselves over the course of our lives 
We rejoin ourselves in death.
We must die to ourselves In order to be born
And all life is a process 
Of being re-born to ourselves.
And what of emotion?
Emotion is the tether
Emotion is the link that remains when all else is lost
Emotion is the only remnant of the true self 
Which we abandoned in order to be born here
Emotion is what leads you back to you
All things done on this planet 
Are done to escape emotion 
Every cigarette smoked
Every lover gained
Every book read
Every bite eaten
We even find our way to spirituality because we are desperate to escape the way we feel
But then we find that the only way to find joy and to set ourselves free permanently 
Is to walk into the eye of the storm
To be so ready to die as a result of our pain 
That we stop running or escaping
We stop trying to feel better
We stop trying to change the way we feel
And instead, we walk right into the eye of the storm 
Ready for it to swallow us up.

Even daring it to. 
For the first time in our lives 
We do not abandon ourselves 
Because for the first time 
We do not run from the way we feel 
We do not try to use positive focus to move away from ourselves
We do not use alcohol to suppress ourselves
We do not use a lover to protect us from ourselves
Instead, we move towards and into our feelings
We don’t ask them to change
We don’t want them to be different
We are simply in and of and with them
And because of it, we are completely in and of and with ourselves
And something beautiful happens…
After practicing the art of being with ourselves again and again
The universe reveals itself in its entirety 
There is a hole inside all people
A deep emptiness 
Wanting to be filled up
But what is that emptiness?
That emptiness is grief.
Grief is the baseline emotion for all people incarnated on this planet.
But what is it that we are all grieving?
The answer is the loss of self
We lost ourselves in our birth into physical form 
We abandon ourselves when we separate ourselves from that which we truly are 
From source
Like a stone dropped into still water
The ripples from that original transgression
Travel outward
After the original separation from our true selves,
We re-live that separation again and again
Separation from the womb
Separation from the breast
Separation from our parents
Separation from friends
Separation from lovers
Separation from our children
And eventually, separation from life itself upon our death day.
We suffer the original separation throughout the duration of our lives.

We suffer to the degree that the desire within us
To be whole again 
Is strong enough 
To draw us back to ourselves.
To draw us back to source
Because Source and self are one and the same.
Grief is at the core of all of our lives.
All of us abandoned ‘ourself’ to come here
We broke into a billion pieces
We call them by different names
I am Teal
You are John
Or Mary
Or William
Or Emily
All pain and suffering on this planet 
Is a ripple
Cast off from the original stone
Of Separation
All human behavior
Is seen accurately through the stages of grief
The entire emotional scale
Is in essence, the expression of a grief process
When we are separated from other people 
And feel as if we have lost them
As they leave us
As they die
The grief we feel 
Is none but a reflection
Of the original loss of ourselves upon our birth
And we will lose our loved ones 
As long as it takes 
To reunite 
With ourselves again
This grief process that is occurring within all of us 
Is the grief process of having lost a loved one
And we have all lost this loved one 
We have all lost ourselves
We could not be born unless we did
And so, this grief is shared by us all. 
We are united in this grief 
And yet, we are torn apart by it
This grief process now plays itself out upon the world.
It accounts for all of our actions as a species
We are utterly powerless at birth

We deny what has happened to us
We feel utterly isolated
We become angry
Because we are so scared
We start to bargain with our parents
And then we bargain with the world
We fall into depression
Because nothing can make the hole inside of us go away
And one day, we either die because of it 
Or we find acceptance.
To find acceptance for the separation
And to set ourselves free from the prison of it
We must go straight into the eye of the storm of grief. 
To be reunited with ourselves
We must let go
We must let ourselves grieve
We must let ourselves grieve for the loss of ourselves
And in every following thought and word and movement
We must make a vow to never abandon ourselves again
We must make a vow to be completely with ourselves 
In each and every moment of our lives
Without needing ourselves or the way we feel 
To be different
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