#3
The moon brings its fullness to fit
into the small of your eye. To blink
would be sacrilege. Would be to
count its failings. Is there a greater
love, a higher love? To seek love is
blasphemy. Your job is just to be.
love
Sweeter in its silence
#2
That which is not you, validates your
being. Pain completes love. Majnun
still wanders in the desert. Isn’t the
flute that sang of love sweeter in its
silence? Is waiting the exposition or
the denouement of togetherness?
Tao inspirations
#1
As a mystery
#1
When everything was still nameless,
desire made secret pacts with the primal
darkness. From the unmanifest antithesis,
love was birthed as mystery – as the changeable
constant . What else can simultaneously
be both cause and consequence?
Writing little poems inspired by the Tao Te Ching (with my own regional/cultural spin), after reading this post by a fellow blogger.
Also posting on instagram @tp_poetry
Just Math
Even Rumi, who could fit the entire
universe inside his poem, was yearning
for the grace of the Beloved. The universe
is not enough. It cannot love us the way
we want love. Its miracles are just math.
What would language do, or poems, if
the poet did not suffer the anguish of
loving a sunset? The sky just is. The poem
reaches out to touch your cheek. The
words wipe your tears. The poet burns
in the orange light until he becomes the
darkness. The Beloved holds back the
wine. Love is only an empty tavern, the
sun has been extinguished and the stars
in the window will be gone by morning.
More poems in the “Universe” series on my instagram page: @tp_poetry Trying to pull them all together – soon.
Have you spoken?
Have you spoken to the ocean recently? Or to Yemen? Or to
a yellow dinghy at the bottom of the Mediterranean? How
about a polar bear? Or a blueprint in a factory somewhere,
for a nastier gun? I can hardly make a list better than your
morning paper. What would you say to a bird perched on a
length of barbed wire separating this from that? Keeping
person from person? Me from you? Don’t ask me. I don’t
speak. I spend the evenings in the balcony, mourning a lost
love. Bemoaning the universe’s broken parts that collude
against me. Thinking about a young Krishna who opened
his mouth to show his mother the entire cosmos within.
Unbroken. I talk to myself. About silence. Endings. About
love. A little bird on the concrete parapet opens its beak to
to scare the encroaching dusk. Darkness falls over us like a
coarse blanket, all at once. Starless. Moonless. Skyless. How
can you bargain for peace when you have nothing to give?
How can you bargain for love? The night takes my hands
away from me. Like plastic, like chemicals, like everything
we made and used and threw away, won’t love turn up
on a distant shore, in the belly of a murdered sperm
whale? Have you talked recently to the naked mountains-
cold, their lips parched in this strange December rain?
Only the Mirror Changes
Only the mirror changes, showing vibrant orange wings instead
of creeping, hungry green. How vain is the heart that rolls the past
into an impotent caterpillar? What makes the butterfly think the
metamorphosis is complete? I tell myself I am distanced from you,
from that night, from that abrasion of skin upon skin. I am surprised
I can remember. I am surprised by the precision of detail, by the absence
of theatre. I am surprised I have the same eyes. Somewhere behind
a closed door is the opera of sunshine, where time does not exist
or self. Where you can step back into a sentence, where you can reach
out and feel again, where moments look different in each mirror
and you can stand before the one in which you smile. That night
still wears the August moon. I am surprised you have the same eyes.
Silence Burns Midnight Blue
Your poetry is a breaking of water, a
birth pang, let us talk instead of
seeds. Of skin. Of earth. Of before.
What did you really mean when you
wrote of love? How distant is the word
from the thought? Is silence the purest
word, stripped of pretence, emotion
submitting naked to the starlight? If I
imagine you -without words- silence burns
midnight blue, is the colour of afternoon
lust, I sense you like a second
wound, a noiseless picking of scab from
an unseen cut. I do not speak. Silence is where
we go when we go beyond love, where
we spool back our lines, unmask our
metaphors, where we accept that the
poem is a false reckoning, realize that silence
is a euphemism for scream.
