I've given poetry readings where less than a handful of people were present. It's a humbling experience. It’s also a deeply familiar experience.

"Poetry is useless," poet Geoffrey ****** said in a 2013 interview, "but it is useless the way the soul is useless—it is unnecessary, but we would not be what we are without it."

I was raised a Roman Catholic, and though I don’t go to Mass regularly anymore, I still remember early mornings during Advent when I went to liturgies at my parochial school. It was part of my offering—the sacrifice I made to honor the impending birth of the Savior—along with giving up candy at Lent. So few people attended at that hour that the priest turned on only a few lights near the altar. Approaching the front of the church, my plastic book bag rustling against my winter coat, I felt as if I were nearing the seashore at sunrise: the silhouettes of old widows on their kneelers at low tide, waiting for the priest to come in, starting the ritual in plain, unsung vernacular. No organist to blast us into reverence. No procession.

Every day, all over the world, these sparsely attended ceremonies still happen. Masses are said. Poetry is read. Poems are written on screens and scraps of paper. When I retire for the day, I move into a meditative, solitary, poetic space. These are the central filaments burning through my life, and the longer I live, the more they seem to be fused together.

Poetry is marginal, thankless, untethered from fame and fortune; it's also gut level, urgent, private yet yearning for connection. In all these ways, it's like prayer for me. I’m a not-quite-lapsed Catholic with Zen leanings, but I’ll always pray—and I’ll always write poems. Writing hasn’t brought me the Poetry Jackpot I once pursued, but it draws on the same inner wiring that flickers when I pray.        

• • •

In the 2012 collection A God in the House: Poets Talk About Faith, nineteen contemporary American poets, from Buddhist to Wiccan to Christian, discuss how their artistic and spiritual lives inform one another. Kazim Ali, who was raised a Shia Muslim, observes in his essay “Doubt and Seeking”:

[Prayer is] speaking to someone you know is not going to be able to speak back, so you're allowed to be the most honest that you can be. In prayer you're allowed to be as purely selfish as you like. You can ask for something completely irrational. I have written that prayer is a form of panic, because in prayer you don't really think you're going to be answered. You'll either get what you want or you won't.

You could replace the word "prayer" with "poetry" with little or no loss of meaning. I'd even go so far as to say that submitting my work to a journal often feels like this, too. Sometimes, when I get an answer in the form of an acceptance, I'm stunned.

"I never think of a possible God reading my poems, although the gods used to love the arts,” writes ***** Howe in her essay "Footsteps over Ground." She adds:

Poetry could be spoken into a well, of course, and drop like a penny into the black water. Sometimes I think that there is a heaven for poems and novels and music and dance and paintings, but they might only be hard-worked sparks off a great mill, which may add up to a whole-cloth in the infinite.

And here, you could easily replace the word "poetry" with "prayer." The penny falling to the bottom of a well is more often what we experience. But both poetry and prayer are things humans have learned to do in order to go on. Doubt is a given, but we do get to choose what it is we doubt.

A God in the House Book Cover
Quite a few authors in A God in the House (Howe, Gerald Stern, Jane Hirschfield, Christian Wiman) invoke the spiritual writing of Simone Weil, including her assertion that "absolutely unmixed attention is prayer." This sounds like the Zen concept of mindfulness. And it broadens the possibility for poetry as prayer, regardless of content, since writing poetry is an act of acute mindfulness. We mostly use words in the practical world to persuade or communicate, but prayers in various religious traditions can be lamentations of great sorrow. Help me, save me, take this pain away—I am in agony. In a church or a temple or a mosque, such prayerful lamentation is viewed as a form of expression for its own good, even when it doesn't lead immediately to a change of emotional state.

Perhaps the unmixed attention Weil wrote of is a unity of intention and utterance that’s far too rare in our own lives. We seldom match what we think or feel with what we actually say. When it happens spontaneously in poetry or prayer—Allen Ginsberg's "First thought, best thought" ideal —it feels like a miracle, as do all the moments when I manage to get out of my own way as a poet.

Many people who pray don’t envision a clear image of whom or what they’re praying to. But poets often have some sense of their potential readers. There are authorities whose approval I've tried to win or simply people I've tried to please: teachers, fellow writers, editors, contest judges—even my uncle, who actually reads my poems when they appear in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, where he used to work.

And yet, my most immersed writing is not done with those real faces in mind. I write to the same general entity to which I pray. It's as if the dome of my skull extends to the ceiling of the room I'm in, then to the dome of the sky and outward. It’s like the musings I had as a child lying awake at night, when my imagination took me to the farthest reaches of the galaxy. But then I emerge from this wide-open state and begin thinking about possible readers—and the faces appear.

This might also be where the magic ends.

• • •

I write poetry because it’s what I do, just as frogs croak and mathematicians ponder numbers. Poetry draws on something in me that has persisted over time, even as I’ve distracted myself with other goals, demands, and purposes; even as I’ve been forced by circumstance to strip writing poetry of certain expectations.

"Life on a Lily Pad" © Michelle Tribe
"Life on a Lily Pad"
© Michelle Tribe
At 21, I was sure I’d publish my first book before I was 25. I’m past my forties now and have yet to find a publisher for a book-length collection, though I've published more than a hundred individual poems and two chapbooks. So, if a “real” book is the equivalent of receiving indisputable evidence that your prayers are being answered, I’m still waiting.

It hasn’t been easy to shed the bitter urgency I’ve felt on learning that one of my manuscripts was a finalist in this or that contest, but was not the winner. Writing in order to attain external success can be as tainted and brittle as saying a prayer that, in truth, is more like a command: (Please), God, let me get through this difficulty (or else)—

Or else what? It’s a false threat, if there’s little else left to do but pray. When my partner is in the ICU, his lungs full of fluid backed up from a defective aortic valve; when my nephew is deployed to Afghanistan; when an ex is drowning in his addiction; when I hit a dead end in my job and don’t think I can do it one more day—every effort to imagine that these things might be gotten through is a kind of prayer that helps me weather a life over which I have little control.

Repeated disappointment in my quest to hit the Poetry Jackpot has taught me to recast the jackpot in the lowercase—locating it not in the outcome but in the act of writing itself, sorting out the healthy from the unhealthy intentions for doing it. Of course, this shift in perspective was not as neat as the preceding sentence makes it seem. There were years of thrashing about, of turning over stones and even throwing them, then moments of exhaustion when I just barely heard the message from within:

This is too fragile and fraught to be something that guides your whole life.

I didn't hear those words, exactly—and this is important. For decades, I’ve made my living as a writer. But I can't manipulate or edit total gut realizations. I can throw words at them, but it would be like shaking a water bottle at a forest fire; at best, I can chase the feeling with metaphors: It's like this—no, like this—or like this.

So, odd as this sounds for a poet, I now seek wordlessness. When I meditate, I intercept hundreds of times the impulse to shape a perception into words. Reduced to basics, the challenge facing any writer is knowing what to say—and what not to.

• • •

To read or listen to poetry requires unmixed attention just as writing it does. And when a poem is read aloud, there's a communal, at times ritualistic, element that can make a reading feel like collective prayer, even if there are only a few listeners in the audience or I’m listening by myself.

"Allen Ginsberg" © MDCArchives
Allen Ginsberg
© MDCArchives
When I want to feel moved and enlarged, all I have to do is play Patti Smith's rendition of Ginsberg's "Footnote to Howl." His long list poem from 1955 gathers people, places, objects, and abstractions onto a single exuberant altar. It’s certainly a prayer, one that opens this way:

Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!

The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy! The nose is holy! The tongue and **** and hand and ******* holy!

Everything is holy! everybody’s holy! everywhere is holy! everyday is in eternity! Everyman’s an angel!

Some parts of Ginsberg's list ("forgiveness! charity! faith! bodies! suffering! magnanimity!") belong in any conventional catalogue of what a prayer celebrates as sacred. Other profane elements ("the ***** of the grandfathers of Kansas!") gain admission because they are swept up into his ritualistic roll call.

I can easily parody Ginsberg's litany: Holy the Dairy Queen, holy the barns of the Amish where cheese is releasing its ambitious stench, holy the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Internet. But reading the poem aloud feels to me the way putting on ritual garments must to a shaman or rabbi or priest. Watching Patti Smith perform the poem (various versions are available on YouTube), I get shivers seeing how it transforms her, and it's clear why she titled her treatment of the poem "Spell."

A parody can't do that. It can't manifest as the palpable unity of intention and utterance. It can't do what Emily Dickinson famously said that poetry did to her:

If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only [ways] I know it. Is there any other way.

Like the process of prayer—to God, to a better and bigger self, to the atmosphere—writing can be a step toward unifying heart, mind, body, universe. Ginsberg's frenzied catalogue ends on "brilliant intelligent kindness of the soul"; Eliot's The Waste Land on "shantih," or "the peace that surpasseth understanding." Neither bang nor whimper, endings like these are at once humble and tenacious. They say "Amen" and step aside so that a greater wordlessness can work its magic.

I challenged him
burly ******* captain
stubbled beard as coarse as sandpaper
standing there in muggy dusk
arms akimbo,
mama san starched uniform stained with swagger and sweat

two silver captain's bars ******* any of my brilliance or bravado
all he had to do was speaketh the words
“need those maps, head out at 2230 hours”
and that was a death sentence
which was commuted to life
if four decades since has been life

there are not words for the black
of moonless jungle
except nothingness and paralytic fear
and through that lightless, lifeless, abyssness
I crawled, crouched and crept along
sometimes as slowly as the minute hand on my watch

the silence, the silence, the silence
became my splintered cross
to carry to my place of crucifixion
at my Calvary Hill behind barbed wire, blue lead barrels and
fearful eyes

silence, silence, silence, black wordlessness
black soundlessness
punctuated by shallow precious breaths
and imagined slant-eyed demons
waiting behind each berm
to turn the timeless night into timelessness
of more black

should I chamber a round?
and follow its solitary sound
into the silent holy night
and shatter my own fragile fright?
would that end this knowing without knowing?
and answer the question,
“is this fear worse than the answer?”
since questions have answers but answers have nothing
the nothing of which I was sure I would become a part
in the silence, the silence, the silence
of the black canopied jungle
in Tay Ninh Province
in 1967

where I was sentenced to death but allowed to live
in silent, black wordlessness
sentenced to live
to wonder, after all these years of shivering fright and flickering light
did the captain become a human?
And was I really allowed to live?

There I stood
In a long hallway
Stretching thinly
To a lit point

Lined with doors
Opening as they closed

Its prisms transposing
Euphoria as it shone

Lifting my chest
It dragged me breathless
Down its stretches

As I was reflected
In my own projections
Of sentients

Until innocence
Was all there is

And that is
Where thoughtless
Narrative lives

Where languidly it gives
Wordlessness meaning

And that is
Where fraughtless
Intentions can win

Acting replacing thinking

Incentive in Zen
Awaking and thinking again

Was is and gonna be
Everything I believe
Even while deceived
In sets of themes

Numeric categories
And the tragic stories
Of grander things

Things of grandeurous dreams
That I wring out in the sink
While winking
The well wishes away
In splashes
Of graying
Paint

My hate
Is displayed
In the mourning
Of Mondays

And with relatable monotony
And some mundane

Everything goes back to the same

Or at least
That's the philosophy

never fall in love with a boy who
speaks in lavender soliloquy and
smells like cigarettes and melancholy;
whose kisses leave you in nirvana and
whose flesh lays in some lovely façade;
for he is a poet, a philosopher, and a believer
whose mind will disappear into breathless purgatory
when you're not even looking
and by the time you'll find out
you'll already have lost him somewhere,
between wandering verbosity,
and ashen wordlessness

Never finding expectation to exist beyond the last known blip of the past, projected through my back, in tackled grounds, bound, in the banter of spectators, speculating the specifications of specialised  weaponry, silencing the empathy, and seducing my enemies in the isolated idolatry of their stupidity that i sculpted from the scrutiny, that was wished to have eluded me but soothed my playful solidarity to my sickly game called reap and sow instead.

We are all dead, all dead inside, residing in thriving wounds.

Left unsaid in rhymes etched in tombs.

In the lies of old bafoons

I shall not fight, myself, as they do, nor shall i defy whats right just to eat tonight.

I will fight until I am mine and sleep.

Cradled in my shrine of thoughts amiss, in the frost of loss vs reward.

I am torn, between torture and a vultures wait of the prize to pedal the pestilent pettiness to the edges of my testaments, in the truth of youth-less suicide, slicing social structures into cylinders to swing in circles around the room.

Swooning, in my looming threat of self immolation to warm the heart with shopping carts of satire, killing the sad away.

Delaying the the decay of hope.

A stay of patience in my irrelevance,never hesitant in my clever projections of nothing.

I feed you nothing

But emptiness

Shuttering in the sultry shade of my suffering and loving every moment of it.

Saying nothing too much in things of such insignificance.

Spilling the mizpellings and settling for wordlessness after a good ***** of belligerent arrogance.

Im tempted to quit but my wick is lit and to submit now, would just put the fire out and i want to watch the burn.

Heat waves in iced water.
Chilled moonshine on the scorching sun.
Blades of green earth on a long-lit fire.
Fresh-water creatures in the salty sea.

A glow, brighter than, and in the ocean of night.
A rock in the sky and birds that can't fly.
A whale on the beach with the sea out of reach. And Blossoms in a dark room.

An infant on his feet soon to fall into defeat.
Ever-greens in winter and ghosts in mid-day. Lungs underwater and gills in air. Like drugs in one's system that slowly pass through.

Owls at dawn, daylight birds in nocturnal song and eyes staring at the sun.
A snake on smooth surface and a worm on the rough.
Like a house cat in the wild mountains and rivers in suburban territory.

Like pillows stuffed with stones and a child with evil inside.
Free spirits in a cage and prisoners freed.
Like a stick in quick sand, a weighted mass floating on a light surface.
Like a dog, a cat and rat peacefully below one roof.

Like a beaten lion and a victorious antelope.
Like the colour of green against the shadow of black. Like hopping on concrete and civil wars. The hood in a college girl and a college girl in the hood.

Like curtains in the morning and yawning windows at dusk. Like an aged oak in the midst of a flood, like a water lily in the days of drought.
Like a forgotten pearl in a waste dump and fake gold on a woman's index.

Like a loud song muted by those who fear volume and a soft one forced to yell above its pitch.
Like a ladybug on a pesticide- poisoned crop.
Like a polar bear in the African Sahara.

Like a camel by the coast, ants with no work and busybodied sloths. A scarf in summer and crop tops in autumn. Plants dying in September and coming back to life in June.

Like a written-on page on a brand new day and wordlessness when that day is old and weary.
Like a torch at midnight. Like cellphones in a filled bath tub.

Like a fat man sprinting and the turtle losing the race. Like a homeless mother in a mansion.
Like a teenage girl with no tongue, and oppressors with no power.

Like David and Goliath, like a insane Albert Einstein. Like a flame on the ocean floor. Like me in this world, I shouldn't be, but I can be and I will be.

**** you for making me
Open my eyes to the
Outterness.

And for making me smile in my
Sleep.
Hell, I don't even know if I

Could ever fall for someone as
Perfect as your first-to-fifth
Digital

Impressions have made you
Out to be.
I zen my shoulders back down

And breathe, embracing the
Adventure of having even so much
As whispered to your

Shadow. Tomorrow
Or a decade's time away
Or a swift aeon's,

You'll be gone from my life.
I'll still be grateful.
No flower disregards

Even a second of petal-stroking
Sunlight.
In a world as dumb

As this one, your very being
Is a drop of supernova in a very
Silent *** of cosmic wordlessness.

I hope you're not
Scared of
Poets.

Cross the distance
Close the gap,
Make a stride traverse a
Infinite chasm.
Every pale replacement
Is a soft lie
Whispered inward
At a truth, a need
To accept that
The otherside has faded to myth;
Fallen to shadow.

Having recall
Of the way oasis feels
With certainty, the grass is greener
Back in the place
Filled with emerald eyes
White teeth smiles,
Skin like guilded earth.
These
Recollections
Made me certain I was touching eternity
When the waves brushed my skin.
There is wordlessness in this knowledge
A sublimity, a divine loneliness
Knowing the expanse that
Divides lands,
Stretching beyond sight, perception, and physicality
Feels like nothing
In the distance between us.

what kind of movement was it?
that brought the head to the knees
a curled spiraling whimper
unhitched to the winds round the room?
what kind of act,
blue through and through
could topple such bonds that were deeper?

what were the thoughts
that built up like bricks
due each meiotic mutation?
what brute could so brash
dried out heavy headed
to full careless crush
the gentlest swath
her two hands ?

where went the time
day by day through each slot
like coins I collected
each morning each night,
pearl afternoons

the glint off your brow,
the stoop of your chest the
scoop of your back-blades,
more leaves of memory
now slipped out by the breeze through my mind with a cry,
theived hollow,
out the window and gone

where now is the murmur of glow
with thunder softened out through the trees
electrons spinning the push of your atoms to mine
where now the wordlessness,
you with me?

It was raining and it was morning.
They sat in the car underneath a tree, upon a hill, overlooking the vast cemetery below.  Clichès still have the potential to be beautiful, they know. Intellectual awareness allows for understood symbolism, the death of that which dies at a cemetery, the emotional downpour demarcated by rain, the interstitial distance of looking forward and down.
Silence and language working symbiotically as a stratagem to both hide and reveal vulnerability.  The clichè of their location works with the conversation.
He is sad. She knows.
She knows the emotional location he lives within, she purposefully disregarded his eyes, those eyes that have always stared at her from the mirror, her eyes. The eyes of those with hollow love for themselves. The selfishness of selflessness, the facticity of unfortunate neurological tendencies, the self-imposed limitations.
They speak. He speaks.
She hears him speak, she who is devoid of empathy, she reaches empathy through his words, she hears the thesis of her own thoughts, she cries. She cries because he narrates her perception of herself, through narrating his perception of himself, and she knows the meaning of it.
He cries because it is his.
He looks away.
He says I don't want you to know the things about me. The things that are disgusting.
She loves those things. It's not enough. She knows.
She talks to herself, she talks to him.
She takes his hand, they cling to the ephemeral union.
It stops raining.
They walk into the chapel, the ashes of those who lived resting upon glass bookshelves, behind glass cases. They sit upon a couch in silence. They collapse, against each other.
Two women observe the marble of the mausoleum.
They arise. The women are startled. The women didn't see them sitting; they were three feet away.
He takes her home. They fade into wordlessness during the drive. They look at each other with desperation at a stop sign.
She says goodbye. She walks away.
They walk away.

let's sit across from each other
lay down our weapons and shields consisting of words and see what the silence makes of us
see what truths surface
maybe we'll stifle a laugh at first-
a natural awkward reaction to the taboo act of staring at someone without reason or explanation
to look directly into someones eyes to (if nothing else) reassure them of  their own existence
to remind them that they are seen
and so pass the first thirty seconds
two hundred and ten more beautiful horrible seconds that unfold themselves between us
and once they past we are again allowed access to the gift that is expression
to communicate, talk, listen, laugh, cry, ask, answer

but what if when the silence ended
when the honesty presented itself?
when we were stripped bare; made simple?
what if after all the wordlessness and contemplation there was nothing left to say?

real is the form.

here now is a colony of words,
or an empire of assault from the
many truths that smite us.

our hearts gallop altogether
past the prairie of imaginations:
this movement, this locutionary,
this waltz adagios its way
to a pace that knows no sojourn.
let us raise our clenched fists
always angelward.
we are young in this agronomy.
our hands remind us of their increasing responsibilities.
our inner light realizes the throng of our shadows - away from the dark
we go pursuant to all effulgence.
let us unpin our juvenile wings
  from the clasp of what startles
us back to our flawed origins.
a flumine of flawlessness awaits
the steep end of our possibilities.

let us not neglect this.
let us, hand in hand, straightforwardly, break from our nascent states and unfurl in a craze of the so many things that capture our potentials.
outside my home, the streets are vacuous, famished from the twirling laughter of children.
once, the grass is giddy from the lightsome meanderings of our superfluous feet! where did all the days crawl to? these limbless serpents that pillage the fruits of our sageness.

i look outside and the mellow moon
enters with its lithe figure
through the hollow spaces of doors
to lairs where the youth are sleeping, unmindful of what dreams log onto the papers of their souls.
heed the call and do not let
it go, running off into another hapless length of waiting.

real is the form.
there is no lie in our rawness.
the voice inside us is tender
with message, purging our poisons
into detox and preparing with
new energies, our
flesh for our consigned ventures.

the voluminous pages are still
white and new, words besmirched still yearn to be written - there is no getting realer than the realization of our clarion call:

real is the form
and in the blank veranda of green
we sift through wordlessness,
gaping our mouths now,
contributing a verse,
     or a song!

Necessities
BY RUSTY MORRISON
In through our bedroom window, the full dawn-scape concusses.
Difficult to sustain sleep's equilibrium of wordlessness.
Naming anything, like stepping barefoot in wet sand up to my ankles. . . .

from the doctor's lightsome bed
   after being examined in the bone
to my side of the lenient road

  we are in the heat
   of assault.
  no dead lampposts
  no macabre of alleys
  harbinger dampened silence.

only this thing of us now
   deconstructed to you
  and i with no relevance
  believing nothing but the
  instantaneous rupture
   of any thrown word
  in the neighborhood of parks.

slam on the dashboard
   and the groan of the engine:
hurtling at speeds faster
   than any ******.
  across the knobby knee tawny
   slivered burgeoning words
  escape compartments ajar

  objects unkempt
    dissipating on the svelte ragamuffin
  linen, faded masquerades of feeling
    trying to destroy the riddle

  lunging with uproarious wordlessness
    like a den of lions set loose
     here speeding 110 kilometers
    in arbitrary roads finding each other
    again, this time
       making furious love.

Two photographs merged into one vague composition -
A world of wordlessness;
A two-dimensional space made of faded lights and shadows.
As my pulse dances into the rhythm of clockworks,
With eyes wide open, I continue to fall stead fast on solid grounds.
I fear that time will mercilessly refuse to stop when it should.

how i wish to hurry
  back to arms, hurtling

bearing me into the hollow
of hand full of hours rearing me prolongations of wordlessness —

   bell-jar, your lip,
  smashed into concrete, my lip.

  bleeding, your lip,
quenching the tractable beast, my lip.

  silence annuls, your lip
leaving the noise in me borderless, my lip,

wanting it more than
   how dead trees desire autumn
     light, your lip
  left nocturnal, pulse dare drunkenly away, slovenly from the ground, my lip

  i cannot have it
    anymore.

The siren isn't just a warning,
as its white Icicles fall to the ground.
My conscience has a clarity
We swim to the brink of the river,
where I fear the swirls of an whirlpool,
holding myself up from drowning,
breathing and fastening the wordlessness
of  heavenwards

The residual feeling of
politest departure with
the loving manner,
sings out its heart to you.

This systematic means of the
language entreats its unquietly
wordlessness to give an
affectionate embrace to
your benignity.

The lover of this epic love
seems to be astounded by the
expounding intervention of your
tender verses.

-Restoring overtures of a trouveur endures an unnecessarily
worrying heart.

Shivpriya
#beautifulthingsandemotions

כֹּפֶר the price of a life, ransom {Kopher}
for a captive... long now global science of us
we, the users of knowledge, by grace.
we, the conscious...
asking who or even if,
we even imagine we know
what is being governed, now,
after history fed to the greatest generation
has proven detrimental to mental satisfaction,
after the information age unleashed all we ever knew,
at once, into the first television advised generation
Boom, watchadodame,
- why does it feel so right to break rules, reasoning
really, if we did have fore thought, as a gift,
that also held hope and all the hell's imaginable,
to which any living in a city have been exposed
using retellings of Homer et al... so who made the rules?
From point A,
something feels wrong
smart people believing war the good evil,
best defense is a good offence, a will to ****,
for duty and post humus glory, guaranteed.
----------------

How much of the lifestyle,
manifested by industrial wealth,

and war regulated trade agreements,
and a royal arrangement of ancient gens,
and primogeniture passed on in trust, true
riches never rest, history hides the old wisdom
--
scribe, find records of Haman's service to the king.

According to the laws of the Medes and Persians, also
Daniel, the name from the clock set to messiah proof,
--------------------

I laugh, inside, not O L, but
I laugh, it counts, does good, like
a medicine, heals a rift right ghine
phine fine, fine as may be, infinitely
small or large, as may be, infinitely
expressed as ever itself, ever in always,
luckyghucker
time
to think and make do
with probable
cause, slight smile,
so small that none could notice,
but the maker of the slight adjustment
from inside the face,
looking at you.

Did you feel watched?
Did you feel watched over?

Me and you, anonymous, us
time takers, wind breathers,
horizonal scanners set at right angles,
perpendicular, flat plane, smooth
to ever's inside edge, flat as a puddle.

-----------------------

Come and see, he said,
we hear, he said, the very next day,
we assume, some unnamed happening,

time and chance, place and position,
facing or looking away, per haps
as haps may,
occur in curving spacetimed minds

dragged into ever decreasing space
and ever increasing mass, until
energy loses any reason and ceases.

---------------------

A hap, a done deed, a past
intensity set to vibrate, in tune

a mileau of all we imagine known,
all the why, indeed, all the how,
all the non this thats
all the not that thiss, and thoses

hissing lizard language, legendary
tellings of sacred made firsts, first man
first wombed man, first figuring self will,
auto both knowing, first communion, join

objects to subjects, I am you and you, me,
eye to eye we see each the other, and if
you ever once saw your self in another's
pupil, reflected back from the shiny surface
of the arranging eye connector linking our mind

into init we form, initiation locking gnosis, recon
complete, proceed enfolding all we thought to ask.

If can is proven indeed, done, then
now was done in wordlessness, then,

and now we think we can know that,
we think we can predict the emptiness,

beyond all we think or ask, here we are,
carrying our sanity for peace sake, acting as
if the material tenon and taches
and
כֹּפֶר the price of a life, ransom for a captive,

knowing, from the oldest whole tales told,
by those who take pride in privileged knowing,

we wander as the learners, long, long, longing
to learn for ever, loving learning left behind
in song and dance and ritual geometry,

vectors from point to point, looking up,
noticing the motion, feeling the earth move,
watching the red wanderer sink in the west,

as we watch our world roll around as a ball
of dough rolled into a loaf, to be baked,
in a fire hot enough to seal the spirit in,

fried bread invention came after horses,
stories change as fast as reasons to believe,

just imagine, knowing of the existance
of these tools we use with out needing
years to learn to tune the ideas into words
communicating meaning sought for through

instants in prayer to the unknown, spirit form
life and the universe share, as spacetimemind.

Okeh.
We agree, we think in ways the Andrew Carnegie,
could not imagine, we have watched children
play multi player global war, in virtual reality,

we have sat in grand theatrical kivas, in cities
builded on shifting shores of pre ice age oceans,

not all that long ago, in our long now dreams,
looking through today to yesterday, holding
certain truths self evident, if, just ifery per se,

chance, indeed, pure luck, peaceable, wise
to take such a chance, otherwise, you miss

the fit, pocket, proper cache for fallen stars,
caught in literate child private interpretations,

hey, kid, what'd'ya make of that, one knot,
Phrygian Turk's head, knowledge found, held,
loops in thought that have one side,
one edge and potentially infinite width and length,

and infinite points in between all pastless,
until one manifests in common sense, as certain
aha,
gravity is to materiality as wisdom is to life.
Thought then do, wisdom indeed, grace
for grace, deep calleth unto deep,
fret naught, the curve is gentle,

we discern, we learn, war has never,
and can never, win, for one reason,

one cost of knowing the truth, and dieing,
for it, as that was the set price  כֹּפֶר nicht wahr?

One and done, live and learn, yearn to make
peace seem the easiest option to war prep economy.

Be ye warmed and filled, and find that often
enough to dare to share because, you know,
knowing hap in happiness is luck in life,
and the entire precept reception system,
is cross wired behind a chirality governing on
and off.
And when we, or any so sighted form of us,
see eye to eye, face to face, we engage circuitry,

we enable agreement, mind to mind, I see you
imagining timelessness between us, as a distance
mere words bridge with no slippery stones to step

where there
is the pedestal, the pedal to push, to open a fore
thought judgement,

a precedent, I once followed such a thread as this,
with just such a muse as this, described as clear text
derived from imaginary messages killed as carriers,

open the window atop yo' head, go up… old bald head

chrome domed ****** spy, I
never believed your cover story, so

The Metaphor, or Parable, or Symbolic Containment

Field, vast expanse of horizontal and hither and yon,
as vast as
ever, plain plane flat out out from me/you on
any of seven points, counting now a time deemed
right now
six planes slice us in communions, centered here,
and now
spinning with effectual prayers to counter balance
recognized jolts
of merest word gnosis, recoknown, recommuned,

ah, we,
yes, us, the people filling *** holes in dementiatic
wishes to be left to sort ourselves out,
if you do not mind, after the rapture,
there you are, of another mind,
entwined with winning being truth's only edge,

no thread we cannot catch breaking, and watch
as we once knew the truth never broke, we
let be a big old lie, and that old lie became the law,

and writing spoken scrambled words, became power,
as it is written, so it must be done, the spoken spell,
has been offered and recorded in the times of us,
we who read at will in any script known,
on a thrown away phone, fixed for seven dollars,
and a passing focused attention on the techne,
old idea, wisdom, principal known, fret not,
stop it
right now,
this is the way we came, we are not lost,
nor dead… this was an exciting concurrency.

Peace be left with us, let us think we all imagined so

I sit down with a pen in my hand
after months of wordlessness
to tell you where I’ve been.

I have not written about you in awhile
or had any dreams where you’re there
you haven’t vanished from my life,
I still think about you everyday.
but I’ve found other things to occupy my mind.

The last letter you received was after you
were confronted.
Since then I have been a mess of emotions and
confusion.
I am back on medications for my episodes
but i have not experienced one in 4 days.
It’s funny… i used to believe i was unloved-
because that’s how you made me feel
but last month i looked up and found myself
surrounded by people that love me.

I was crippled with fear last summer
where everything was difficult to do-
I couldn’t live with it.
Now, it’s like there's every opportunity, choice,
decision in front of me.
it’s a lot to handle sometimes.

I’ve told you how I wanted to end my life
that i’ve been planning for years.
I couldn’t see a few months ahead of me,
I knew I would be dead before Christmas.
I don’t know what’s going to come next,
or what will happen to me.
but I’m planning to be there for it.

You sent a lawyer after me.
Which i expected, but it still surprised me that you would.
I hope your lawyer shares pictures of me living
and being happy. Free.
How does it make you feel?

I write letters about the hard times,
not many about the good.
I’m trying to change that.

I chose this cinematic hell
However wide or narrow the day feels like being;
And all the while feigning leaving
Cause I know I’ll return very well
In the depths of June when the morning lurches
Into day, and all the wordlessness
Leaks through my fingertips
In quicksilver rivulets searching
The boiler of this house is no more than an attraction
And what does it do? Powers whimsy and pity
And what powers this house? Frigid electricity
Plain old, plain old, and nothing remotely passionate
It’s fake, dark, miserable, whimsical turbulence
And my jealousy stands in the way of anything
And everything done right is just so utterly wrong
Impatience lingers like a wildfire glow in the distance
The phone never rings. Do these hands belong to me?
But worst of all, why won’t they do…Do anything?

Sub title- An implicative thin line!


O striving thin line! O hard to bear the feeling!

O tenacious enduring struggle!

Skill the frame of my internal heart with your prudent and apprising conditioning.

The heart wants to learn how many heavy-going, demanding situations and exhaustion are more to cross!

The journeying quest of my heart is beholding a variant of endeavoring for impelling the direction of a fragmentary wanting.

I can feel its maladjusted, related affecting.

It is inexperient. The unsuited anger seems to be a thankful friend of heedless botheration! They inanely meet each other!

The diminutival granules of the dear heart say- I can't be a deal for an opportunist! I feel this is how decisiveness is always disposing of with clarity!

The tenderheartedness knows about an enchanted and delicate space of love. It is constantly dissipating the unexhausted anger!

Come, have a look inside my madded heart!

There is wordlessness and lots of tunes. Both are having a fairish time celebrating each other's heartbreaks, anguishes, and unhappiness!

©️shivpoetesspriya

No words follow your visage.
I think of you
And my mind materializes your face,
Your shoulders,
Your hands.

I see your blue eyes
Clear as a stream,
Your wispy blonde hair
Balled up in my fist,
Your jagged nose bumping mine.

My heart jumps,
I hear your slow laugh.
I smirk,
Watching you turn away,
Looking up to the side,
Your hands deep in your pockets.

You are every sensation
As stark as memory allows,
With no definition,
No rhetorical root,
So I struggle to write about you.

You don’t say much
So it follows
That my mind has not assigned a vocabulary
For mourning you,
Though I continue to.

The regret resounds
And I’m at no loss
For names to call myself,
Knowing that I held you
And let misguided indecision
Let you go.

If I could take it all back,
Un-drink all that wine,
Un-cry all your tears,
Go back in time and tell you I love you
The second I thought to,
Maybe you might still love me too.

But the damage is done,
Our bodies untangled,
The pills have all been swallowed,
And you’d rather
I just give up.

So I will lie in the mess I’ve made,
Drenching myself in the blood,
The drinks I have spilled.
Soaking up the guilt,
Absorbing the hurt I let spew.

I will grapple with wordlessness,
Yearning to poeticize my longing.
But I will get what I deserve,
Silence and prosaic grief.

Only images remain,
Flashes of your face.
Tactile memories come in pieces
And I hear your exasperation
In short breaths.

This is what I have left of you
And with this
I must make do.

How intense can be the longing to escape from the emptiness and dullness of human verbosity, to take refuge in nature, apparently so inarticulate, or in the wordlessness of long, grinding labour, of sound sleep, of true music, or of a human understanding rendered speechless by emotion!

Silence
is wordlessness
no sensual arousal
no restlessness.

Zen
silence
in wordlessness
there's no sentence

She does not write poems
that rhyme with her seeping heart
anymore
glittering hymns had long been lost behind valleys impermable
posing questions of loneliness, heartlessness and darkness
caged souls
and sealed memories
are left behind
as unspoken means of hopes
oh nymhs of woes
outbursts of hurts
neglected says and nays
a menacing drowsiness of wordlessness betrayed  souls leaving deep holes

Don't have to make your life worse, frustrating your well-meaning will with my possessive wordlessness

at least it belongs to me.
Can't take it away.

Don't have to waste paint when I subdue my past embracefully to my grave

at least it will choke on to its foreshortened death.
I'm happy for that fresh air in your coffin.

Don't need to take your worries and broad questions with a serious degree
even a psychiatry scholar can burn themselves seriously.

I smile when I'm warming you, blind to the shadows that my fire screams in some way.

Don't need to be target, your stonable clown of explicit shame or guilt.

Won't die as a ******.
Won't ****** as a lost cause.

Couldn't be more glad to somehow resemble myself.
If I was you, who would be me?

What's
the core of Zen?
it's that unity
within you--
being un-fragmented
devoid of definition
analysis or question
you dwell in blissful harmony
in silence and wordlessness
anchored in the immediacy
of the very moment
without the interference
of the future
nor memory
of the gone-before then.