Alignment

 

 

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

 

Immersed in their dance, constellations circle and genuflect to one another, but not to you. Bow down to your own heart. Flow out of your center like a wheel. 

 

Why trust fixed stars to observe your whirling? They have problems too. Just let them ponder the quandary of where light comes from.

 

The sun and moon kiss like ancient lovers in the chuppah between your heartbeats. Their mouths are colonies of microbes. Their passion is the crimson chaos of uncertainty.

 

Gossiping about rocks and trout, the snow-melt mountain stream has never listened to its source in crystal quietness. Have you?

 

Stars are beautiful because the darkness around them is deep. Though you are not your mother, your body is made of her body.

 

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

 

Can you feel the pulse inside the pulse, drumming your ancestor's jugular vein, throbbing in throats of the unborn with chthonic hunger?

 

This elegy is not for lips. It is a poem about the unspoken, the moment the mind spills over, co-mingling with all minds, entangling frantic circumferences in abysmal silence that needs no concept of “self” or “other.”

 

Your nervous system is the habitat of galaxies so distant their light has not yet arrived in your body. Death is only a metaphor. 

The flame of the un-created is the true wine. Savor it. Be a sheath for Shiva's blade, a polished grail for Shakti's breath.