One Law

 

There is only one law: be both Lover and Beloved. When you get tired of following commandments, follow the aching in your lost rib.

 

It will lead you to an ancient garden, where two dally on a swing inside breathing. Here holy rivers kiss, the Ida and Pingala, flowing through the valley of your backbone.

 

Honor the rhythmic throb. Find the path without a way to the land of entanglement, where man and woman, right and left, the dead and unborn meet in a single pulse of your jugular vein.

 

What you call "the world" is just foreplay, a rehearsal for the real consummation, a rare kind of love-making that happens at midnight, or just before dawn, when no desire arises, only prior fulfillment.

 

You become a flute that rests on the cowherd's half-parted lips, and Christ melts your bones beyond light.

 

Your addiction to stillness and serenity ends here, in a tumult of dark energy, a ferment of naked awareness, the most ancient wine.

 

Musk in a seed before the sunbeam's touch. The loam of your belly, fertile and warm as a burial mound.

 

Stop somnambulating through the tomb of Tammuz, rubbing hyssop on a dead god's toes.

 

Or trying to press nectar from a stone, high up where white clouds sting, like tears of regret for a life not lived, only examined.

 

Can you survive without Radha's yearning, or the loneliness of Ishtar, or the worm of voracious emptiness, who bores through seven persimmons on your spine?

 

Now leave this mountain cave and find a womb. Friend, you’re not ready to be anywhere but here.

Engraving by William Blake. Hear a reading of this poem: LINK