Follow This Breath



The Unborn call me.

Come! they sing.

"How shall I come?"

Follow this breath.


Walk barefoot in the night

until you find a mushroom,

the toe of Dionysius

buried upside-down in loam

where He suckles

at the planetary teat.

"But where shall I, who am no God,

find this nipple?"


Return on a breath

to the center of each proton

in your body.
The milk of the underworld

is black and sweet.

And the jolt of arriving

right here! in your own flesh!

is the electric flower

of the universe.


Now the Ancestors call me

from the bruise of dawn

on the first day.

Come! they sing.

"How shall I come?"

Follow your inhalation.

Yes, I hear angels of fire,

air, water, and stone.

Come, they sing,

fall into your diaphragm,

your abdomen, your loin.

Sink into the blossom

of annihilation

through the gravity

of this breath.

 

Somewhere even deeper

inside me than I am,

stars extinguished long before

their light has reached this world

whisper my electrons

out of emptiness.

Galaxies whose distant

magnetisms whirl

the sun in my sacrum

call me to taste
a timeless respiration that evaporates

the dream of distances.
Come!

"How?"

Ascend on this breath!

 

This is why I sink, I drown

in the wilderness of the interior.

Where the soul cannot go,

I rise by uncloaking.

Within my rind is the ocean

of what, once rotted, ripens again.

Within this ocean is the fragrance

of mind, flavored with the silence

between thoughts.

And within this darkness is the fire

of eternal chaos,

the bliss storm.

 

"And what is within that nectar?"

Death.

Go there to be born.

Go there each morning,

and every sunset.

"How?"

Follow this breath.

 

Stay, endure, embrace the pain

of your hollow places

and be whole.

Gather the flames

of numbness from your marrow

like sheaves.

Harvest the seed of tears.


Crush your unbearable disappointments

to an umber chrism the color of skin.

Spread it all over.

Spread it all over the earth and moon.

Bathe in the secret musk of what

you already are.


Chalk mandala by biology teacher Caryn Babaian

No comments: