In a coffee shop where people go between their homes and puppet shows, I found myself one typical day in a faraway land as a castaway. At an island table in a cramped human sea, surrounded by strangers so strange to me. Between a sense of shore and expanse, I erased the horizon and welcomed the trance.
Sailing away in a newfound lane, passing over the pious profane, across a cold dessert, past crippled trees, running from something in search of release.
Then something besides the something I feared, caught me up and a feeling appeared. There above my vain contradictions, it lifted me out of my dark inner fiction.
Like a child born to a painless birth, like a gentle whisper wrapped round the earth, warm blood flowed and flooded my veins, rays of light breathed through closed windowpanes. I could not step forward, I could not sit down, I was planted in place ecstatically bound.
An invisible clock drew me into its gears, time was a waterfall and minutes were tears. It shifted my ground to a realm beyond space, where no pain or suffering could ever take place. Then my outdated body recaptured its youth, and I wondered if this was a lie or the truth.
In that passing moment and once it had passed, I was freed from a need to know at long last. My eyes were my own, I was no longer blind, my vison now cleared by an untroubled mind.
Is there a heaven, some paradise then? A God who is willing to so condescend?
If all that I get is this taste, that’s enough, for what I have left while I’m left here on earth.
what comes upon me frightens me so much I run away
and thrills me while it chases me; leaves when I beg it stay.
who wrote that?
I remember doing it but now it seems at odds, a face without a name staring at me staring at it.
if I say it only came from me then I am alone denying the is of other.
then nothing else matters — only me and mine.
if I say it came from me and not me, I am not alone admitting the is of other.
then something else matters — not just me and mine.
who? from where? from what? by self? by chance? I ask; it will not say for sure; it grabs my hand to dance —
it goes to all I am
a body prone to pleasure mid suffering and pain, a thinker where my thoughts alone will never fully reign, a feeler where feelings need not say all I need to know, an actor where each action does not say the me I show, a creature where what I am is absolutely there for all to see ever and always becoming exactly how my other sets me free.
who wrote that?
a force I can not fully tame, a face without familiar name, strangely always wants to be
As time rolls us along in a chair diminished of all within our care.
Time will take our pocket knifes, our car keys, phones and money, our pets, our homes, our clothes and, finally, our precious dignity.
The losses will compile. The creeping cunning will hide an advancing daily shuffle, an encroaching daily slide.
Time!
Please take your time taking our time!
All sinning, all suffering, all pain leaves us with no earthly role, leaves us with joy or fear, our untethered soul with only one more thing to get or loose—the great all or all done.
There is so much time in eternity, all we ask is a few more minutes of mortality!
Sorry, the take won’t wait.
Oh yes! Oh no! Oh I don’t know! What to where? To grave? To end? To heaven? Or just the end?
Oh time beyond, time outside of time, grant us a sure sense — approaching death cures us of indifference—to beg the question, blessed to now confess our helplessness.
Before the take, grant us all one last dance, one fleeting chance to finally know your neglected name, to cast our needless wills in flame…
Corn Crib 