Backbone

 

Sometimes Mercury, Venus and Jupiter align themselves, and sometimes they don’t. Sit up straight, stop leaning on planets, and use your own backbone.

 

Immersed in their dance, the constellations circle and genuflect to one another, yet not in your direction. Become your own bow, flowing out of your center like a wheel.

 

Why trust fixed stars to observe your whirling? Just let them repose in the quandary of themselves.

 

Ancient lovers, the sun and moon, often kiss in the secret chamber between your heartbeats. Their mouths are colonies of microbes, their love a crimson chaos of uncertainties.

 

Gossiping, moaning, the brook and the river have never listened to their source, that mountain spring of Tartarean quietness. Have you?

 

The stars are only beautiful because the darkness around them is deep. And though you are not your mother, your body is made of her body.

 

Now become a wick, so inflamed with yearning that even from a great distance you ignite other candles, other lamps.

 

Can you feel your jugular throbbing, the pulse inside the pulse, drumming the throats of the unborn with chthonic hunger?

 

This is not an elegy for lips, but a poem about the unspoken, the touch of our minds spilling over, co-mingling their frantic circumferences in the abysmal silence that needs no concept of “self” or “other.”

 

The metaphor is death. Be a sheath for Shiva's blade, for Shakti's breath.

"Jesus said: He who seeks, let him not cease seeking until he finds; and when he finds he will be troubled, and when he is troubled he will be amazed, and he will reign over the All."
~Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, Saying 2