A flame wihout its
   heat is as useless as a poetry without a thought.
              What is man without a soul? Can he be called human at all? How
             useful is an empty house that stands on a barren hill? A man
                         not capable of thinking? A blank book? Or a sun without the grace of a fire? How good is
           the wind without the trees?  Or the birds that worship its strength? How good is the ocean without
                              the fishes? Or the human that embraces its wealth? All things are interconnected and   interdependent.
    Like air to mankind and to the trees. And trees to mankind and to the soil. Like air to the waters.
                    Waters to mankind. Waters to the soil. As fire to man as to the trees. Mankind to the trees and
               to the soil. And trees to the soil, fire to the soil, man, fire. Fire and man. The fire within a man. Enflaming
                      the soul of another man. We are all relatives in the dance of life. We are integral part of the earth.
          The air, the waters, the sun and the moon. Everything is hitched to everything else. The air,
                                   the waters, the sun and the moon. The salt of the ocean is in our blood. The calcium of the rocks
is in our bones. The genes of ten thousand generations is in our cells. The fire of the sun king is in our spirits. The might of the winds is in our lungs. The most powerful element of the universe is in our hearts. The mighty winds
                     rage and we bend for them. The fields yield and we kneel for them.  The blossoms open and we  rejoice.
                               One could not pluck a flower without hurting a star. The wolves could not haunt for a
                        meal without troubling a heart. An atom could not deteriorate without worrying
                             the universe.  But along
                                  the way man seems
                                   to forget. And most
                                   of the time, man does
                                    not pay attention to
                                     its depth. Man be-
                                    comes too ignorant
                                    to understand. That
                                    man is the heart of it
                                   all. The pulse that keeps
                              the system alive. Man ne-
                                eds not observe but feel. M
                               an needs to penetrate quite-
                            ly as earthworms. Underst-
                            ands as soils absorb water. Pon-
                   der as the winds gather strength. Spread
               as the vines that overrun the yard. Let your flame be the
                                          guiding light.Do not let it be the fire that burns.

I'm not going to write about you in my journal
Because unfortunately I feel that that form of confession tends to backfire dramatically and leave me jinxed.
It's like those ink-stained secrets wrapped up in leather counteract the decadent visions I drift to sleep with at night
And so,
No
I'm not going to write about you in my journal
You see, I care about the concept of you far too deeply to chance our lingering moments on teenage whimsical compulsions to gush in secrecy
About the way your words shifted my anchored soul,
About the flooding in my heart when you bared yours,
About the mass amounts of internal riots
(The butterflies doth protest)
Of your pragmatic, flirtatious adequacy
Nay, mastery.
No
I'm not going to write about you in my journal
For fear of risking those moments of substance:
Secret-swapping
Joke-exchanging
Soul-bearing times where I wanted nothing more than to jump eight hours ahead so that I could see the undigitized blue of your eyes and feel the ends of my nerves explode off my skin like the Fourth of July.
How is it
That physical proximity has nothing to do with the closeness we seem to share?
I feel
Compelled
by some unexplainable piece of mind to insist and hope and wish that
Like you once told me under volumes of conversation,
We are connected.
I don't want to waste any of this enigmatic familiarity and sudden interdependency
On matters of my own private indulgence
And for this,
I'm not going to write about you in my journal
For you say that you are Atheist
But I know that you meant it when you told me
Your soul knows mine.

I don’t want to be locked into our relationship,
and neither do you.

I don’t want to ever feel trapped by our relationship,
and neither do you.

I don’t want to be smothered by our relationship,
and neither do you.

In our relationship I feel unrestrained,
and I pray you are.

In our relationship I know release.
and I sense you do.

In our relationship I breath free.
and I believe you do.

I am my own person, but I choose to depend on you.

You are your own person, but you choose to depend on me.

Let us never again fall into the prison of codependency.

Let us celebrate the freedom of our interdependency.

Let the only chains that bind us be the constraints of our love.

©1998 Michael S. Davis