all the things you surround yourself with sit and gather dust
the landscape of your past
shadows, icons, only that.

a room full of objects
but empty of meaning
the ins and outs of your life as if on display
but in fact, no,
they are hidden away.

the energy that once filled these shells is long gone
without this,
their relevance, their spirits moved on.

sometime ago you acquired that book,
that candle,
that objet d’art
and you thought “look at this”
and you thought “this is me”
and you kept it.
And through it, you kept yourself,
frozen,
and apart.

I closed my eyes,
lids down against the fire of the afternoon sun,
and through those new curtains I could no longer penetrate.
And so I turned inward instead
seeing the fire within my head,
the glowing embers radiating
out in a spinning, shifting, turning
series of wheels and tiles, burning
a deep glowing red,
then cycling through to hottest white
And the purple and blue
of deoxygenated blood
Returning to my lungs for another breath,
To gather the elements to delay my death
Working with my heart
To keep me vibrating
Every part in tune,
Each cell cradling me within
A billion tiny wombs comprising my skin, my flesh,
Incubating every spark of me that is
(my spirit).
That fire that burns within those spiralling rainbow hues,
that welcoming tapestry of space connecting me to you
and everything.
I saw this only when I closed my eyes
and let the sunlight filter through.

The world looks freshly painted
directly after the rain,
each surface glistening in the streetlight:
newly created.
As if a great artist
in a flash of inspiration
(like the strike of lightning
that preceded this storm)
envisioned this all in her head,
called it instantaneously into being
on her canvas.
All the colors, still wet,
slowly flowing into each other.
The pavement, the fallen leaves,
my footprints trailing through.
At the corner, I look behind me.
My footprints are gone, ****** into the paint;
it smoothed itself out as I passed, in my wake.
Wet and breathing spring: a perpetually-renewing clean slate.

This murky grey of the everyday, of the ubiquitous pattern and structured time - these are the illusions, the straws to which I clutch and cling like a child at her mother's skirt. Afraid of the unknown, afraid it will hurt. Looking only backward at my old stories and truths, growing shabby with constant use, poor curating, and increasing age; I wear my willful blinders like a self-constructed cage. Wide roads open ahead, ready to explore, and yet I cringe, I cower:  weak, small and unsure.

Small spikes of... awareness, sharp sudden connections to the divine, in the midst of mundanity I am hit with moments of expansion, of elevation and escape. A soaring stretch of the soul, reaching its arms upward, yawn and strain, trying for something, reaching beyond its usual scope as if hoping to catch a half-remembered dream, yes -- chasing the remnants of a fantastic dream --

Is it still within my scope? This rush of potential, this flush of excited possibility, of hope? Am I walking into it, or waking from it? That feeling of joyful freedom - surely that is our natural state, when the mind and its anxieties are forgotten or put to rest. That heady elation that makes me feel larger than life: I will it to be so, for that stretch to stick, to rearrange my shape, the space I take, to alter the way I think, the decisions I make.

It could be, can be reality, can be more real than the press of uncertainties, the weight of worries and restless unease.

1.
One beat at a time,
Sound
Reaching in, pulling your core out
until you are exposed, open,
expanding.
Your chest flowering into eternity with the vibration
Following a stream of being
Mapped out by chords and rests,
pulses, breaths.
The sound navigates you through the waters
Avoiding obstacles
Demolishing barriers and erecting bridges to shores unknown,
so far from home:
Someone else’s epiphany, piped into your lungs and heart.

2.
You’re being pulled out to the event horizon
Stretching towards a black hole
A place of possibilities, not of endings:
Your own boundaries are blurring, erasing.
You, as you float out in space:
You are only your heartbeat, your blood,
life force being pushed forward in time.

3.
The sound
Dissolves your body, shakes apart molecular bonds,
temporality becoming vibration and simple infinity
You are nothing, obliterated
You are everything, integrated
(Perfectly,
Ultimately)
The sound

4.
You find yourself, alive
There in the deep, bass bones of it
And up in the high treble cry of it
And all the substance/flesh/marrow/meat
in between

Suffuse me with yourself
Like the reflected sunrise steeps the trembling drop of water struggling not to slide off its leaf.
Like swirls of amber-tinged tea spiralling out to fully claim the warmth of the cup.

I think as we press together how mostly we are space
How easy it would be to interweave our infinite vibrating tiny particles:
Little bits of you slipping between the little bits of me
completing what we hadn't known was incomplete.
A tapestry of shivering flesh.
Seamless as we share breath.

The sun sets,
the droplet shivers on the leaf, lays still.
Rests.

You step back
(back)
(back)
and then
everything exists in miniature.

You see it all at once, wide lens
Across the horizon
Each person’s little orbit
the scurrying of an ant.
Easy--yes!--to brush aside, pass blithely in your stride.

You hover, above it all, infinitely complex, a universe unto yourself.
Untouchable:  thus, invincible.
Untouchable.

Your head:  it expands, the universe
expands, stretches out--
You open your mouth--
Words fall flatly to earth, wounded birds
Moths that have been handled roughly, hurt
Inside your skull: an unyielding cage.

The world in miniature, there, there
Your hands extend
(empty hands, bursting skull)
but you are on the wrong end of the telescope.

Watch it pass from a car window
Through the glass
Mountains never get closer
Your reflection gazes placidly back
Eyes fathomless, liquid black
Your own eyes,
Cold eyes
reflected back
(back)
*(back)