Lucid Body
“By criticizing their own society they transcend it. “ Fromm
“Insanity is not being able to find anyone to stand you.” John Rickman
Words and their shadows
Our inventions
remaking us
in their own images
Pieces we leave out
become our histories
Waiting outside
where the bare cry
and the whole wet
invisible night
can find us
By my lost hand's light
in the weed's pretty kingdom
Everything rolling
in every other thing's arms
The true unutterable
world where we have
left ourselves behind
Reflection on a window
shadow in a building
across the street
rummaging through
smoke filled cupboards
in a ghost story
without once noticing
Everything is spinning
wedged apart by images
What shines
on the world
is the world
gentle radiant friend
Despite history
nothing is broken
Nothing leaves
because nothing comes
Sometimes I wear
this life for years pulled down
over my eyes and then
I look at you and see
sunlight on water
and I remember
what I am
You are visible and invisible
the earth seeing you
the air looking through you
the mineral within you
looking through you
into the changing transparency
You are so clear
I can see all the way
to the bottom of your life
into the same light
the undying
dreaming you
into being
dreaming everything
You your body and your life
like time rising in time
The language erasing itself
so that only space is left
like a question or a prayer
and something walking toward you now
hidden in the sounds
something that is not yourself
an animal or a fire or a song
It climbs into your bride's
left boot
on your wedding day
as if it knows
exactly what it's doing
braiding
your broken teeth
and the days together
It lays
its cold thread
across your life
So that now
in everything you touch
your own death
touches you
the same death
that looked at you
over your mother's left shoulder
one time
when you were a child
and you felt alone for the first time
forever
and your beating heart found you
Crowned now by that black hat
and shadow
by the power of your
own death and
the hours of its growth
you talk to me
your voice a swarm
the first sound
and its fire
every time
and the hornet's nest
you carry, full of grace
Decay, failure that doesn't want to be redeemed, advertisements for extinct merchandise and services, abandoned theaters, factories and hospitals, crime scenes, obsolete and inscrutable tools, the prosthesis of the dead and disappeared, exhortations in languages I don't understand. I see you in these things, angel, beholden to nothing that can be bought or sold.
I will be an ark.
Vandalism is a form of prayer
Whispering your own name
over and over
in the dark
room of the world
until it loses all sense
so you don't forget
the question naked
wrapped in the ache of it
To see
the first snow
of the new year
falling
there
Crime is a form of prayer
Bleed out
or scab over
Selling the child
back to the child
A thing all brittle and ghostly
The smoke
you love
comprehends you
If you can't be real
be successful
Like legless beggars
stationed at the gates
of our own lives
every day a century
of privation and waiting
Behind the iron gates
the splendid white mansion
of our true life
Look at the war orphans
cast like oracle bones
across the broken cities
that burn inside the promises
we've forgotten how to make
The more what I have learned to believe I am and must be founders the more my faith in this tender lucidity grows, a concerned intelligent exquisitely attuned presence continuing at the very epicenter of this failure. I trust it because I have not invented, but found it, or again and again as I fall from my personal history into reality, into Being, it finds me.
Space cradling space,
a sheltering immensity.
When all else fails,
create beauty.
Because of generations of war and abdicated spirit, because of this circling heritage, because we've forgotten how to hold our children, how to know ourselves immediately, without words or images, as presence; because we've forgotten how to mourn, we can't stand each other, we can't stand ourselves.
Hounded by half starved artifacts, dispossessed energies, chased from peace by the want of it, scared of our own light, the shrapnel crawling back to the bomb.
Never really together and never really alone, the way a fire is not a fire until it's burning, hunger eats us everywhere.
Instead of being with each other, restless and contagious, we feel lived by each other, stealing ourselves back from each other where we never were, so that loneliness becomes more real than we do and we live in a movie about ourselves flickering and ghostly, mesmerized all our lives by our own bullshit storytelling, as if we had never been born.
Miles from home everywhere
learning to love the wire mother
learning to be other
a perpetual stranger
Praise to my angels
the ones who leave me be
who never stop standing me,
holding me
from whatever distance
stirring the daylight I carry
to life, wishing me real; praise
for the rending and intricate ways
you rescue me
by leaving me alone
