We are not quite like monks,
although we, too, sit.

A monk sits and seeks
to find nothing in nothing.

We sit to create
something out of something.

Things float in our minds:
childhood slights and successes,
puberty, hormones, pain,
our first fumbling *****,
our first bewildering wars,
colleges, conquests, rebuffs,
disappointments, jobs,
marriages, children, divorce:

all that has brought
us to this moment alone.

The monk sits in
deepening quiet,
unmoving in silence.

We sit, hand
caressing a pen,
a typewriter, a computer,
waiting upon experience,
hoping that
its loose images
and uncertain memories
will coalesce into words.

When they do (not always),
we call that a poem
and we call ourselves poets.

The monk devolves
into a nothing that is.
The poet crafts
a something that isn't.

Is the something
we have wrought
more than the nothing
that swallows the monks?

Or is it very the same:

not an attempt to touch
the depth of being,
but to become the depth
itself.

Not to be a magician,
but to become magick
itself.

To bow to the god
within ourselves
and allow it voice
or silence.

We both, in our ways,
do what we must do.

Namaste.

  ~mce