Music I heard with you was more than music,
And bread I broke with you was more than bread;
Now that I am without you, all is desolate;
All that was once so beautiful is dead.

Your hands once touched this table and this silver,
And I have seen your fingers hold this glass.
These things do not remember you, beloved,--
And yet your touch upon them will not pass.

For it was in my heart you moved among them,
And blessed them with your hands and with your eyes;
And in my heart they will remember always,--
They knew you once, O beautiful and wise.

Panic strikes me
as I realize that
I'm alone

Alone for the first time--
and I don't know
what to do with myself

All these people
Insistent beeping, buzzing,
rolling, shutting

My collective mind
Unraveling
Before my eyes as I have
No one to talk to
to
Connect
with

Floundering
thumbing through
my contacts
to find someone

Anyone

To make me feel wanted,
to feel that my company,
even if through a phone,
is wanted, that I am
desirable

As I fold in on myelf
the Layers turning inward,
eating themselves--

The waitress leans down and asks:

Is everything okay?

I respond, muttering:

mmhm.

It's killing me from the outside in
you know...

But I don't say that

As the layers fold,
the only thing that remains
is a scared little girl
just as frightened as she was
the day she opened her eyes
underwater
and looked around
and realized how eerily
vast and deep the water was...

It still scares her.
It scares me.
And I realize
that the one thing
I can't stand more than
Anything
more than death itself:
is being alone.

Why?

Because when I am
alone with my thoughts
That vastness
that deep ocean of nothingness
bathed in a burning, purified chlorine
Haunts me

Because I cannot fill it,
not even with the deepest of thoughts,
the most vivid sentiments
Cannot satisfy the depths
of the reflective blue against
a slate of unfeeling cement

I dreamt last night
that I had
to sew a blanket
with a giant seam
straight down the middle.

The fabric was patterned
with the galaxies
swirling and whirling and shooting by;
changing
every second.

 My friends
were all around
to help me
but lifeless -
automatons sewing
blanket after perfect blanket
all the while
watching me
with unseeing eyes.

And as I sewed
one by one
they disappeared
until I was alone
with my starry blanket
and it’s giant seam.

I looked at it
to admire my work,
but could not stand the silence
or the
emptiness.

When before my eyes
the seam was torn apart
but a shooting star
and into that hole in the galaxy
was where i walked
in search of something new.

I walked into the seam
of my giant blanket
and what I found;
what I found was magical
beautiful
the most breath-taking vision
of perfect
tragic
loveliness -
but I only know
because when I awoke
I was crying
and could not remember.

that's always the first thing I think
                    love
when lofty           begins to
                                              sink.

Say you want a cat. A dog's too easy,
would wag when wag is inappropriate,
and slobber on the guests. You'll take the cat,
so different and strange, it drives you crazy,

its shiftlessness, its ins-and-outs, its chi.
You call. It does not come. Is this a pet,
this Dharma ***? You say you can't accept
its vacant gaze, its scorn, who yearned to be

at home with feral grace, with all you're not.
But you're a Body safely locked from Mind,
that Problem no Mind solves. This point's defined
for you by ****, who's not the pet you thought

but Otherness, one owned by God, or none.
Cat sleeps for hours, wants out. A job well done.

HAD I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

Seven long years has the desert rain
  Dropped on the clods that hide thy face;
Seven long years of sorrow and pain
  I have thought of thy burial-place.

Thought of thy fate in the distant west,
  Dying with none that loved thee near;
They who flung the earth on thy breast
  Turned from the spot williout a tear.

There, I think, on that lonely grave,
  Violets spring in the soft May shower;
There, in the summer breezes, wave
  Crimson phlox and moccasin flower.

There the turtles alight, and there
  Feeds with her fawn the timid doe;
There, when the winter woods are bare,
  Walks the wolf on the crackling snow.

Soon wilt thou wipe my tears away;
  All my task upon earth is done;
My poor father, old and gray,
  Slumbers beneath the churchyard stone.

In the dreams of my lonely bed,
  Ever thy form before me seems;
All night long I talk with the dead,
  All day long I think of my dreams.

This deep wound that bleeds and aches,
  This long pain, a sleepless pain--
When the Father my spirit takes,
  I shall feel it no more again.