Everybody has a heartache.
If I think behind me, I might break.
If I think forward, I lose the Now.
I take a breath.
May all the doors in my heart be open.
♠️
I killed a woman in me: one I did not love.
But I do not want to kill that longing woman in me.
I miss who I was.
Once, I was brave, but I have grown weary of danger.
I am soundlessness amid the constant sounds of war.
I am sorry. I am sorry I have been so reckless with my life. How funny that I called it love and the whole time it was pain.
♠️
I work in the morning. I watch TV.
I wage Love, and worse.
I don’t call it sleep anymore.
I fight the nightly battle
between getting enough sleep and getting enough time.
I wake up and ache for my life.
♠️
Are you there, God?
It’s me, the Patron Saint of not good enough.
Let me be lonely but not invisible.
I don’t know when Love became elusive.
I am human, but I do not wear the world well.
Everything they did to me,
I remember.
♠️
I’m not doing especially well at being alive.
A body, I’ve read, can sustain its own hell for hours.
The mind cannot.
I cannot afford such idle delusions.
I understand the stars in the sky are already dead.
Even gods have gods.
I want to learn how to make something holy, then walk away. Be a one-man parade, Jehovah in drag, the church in a dress.
I may be irrelevant, but here I am the Old and the New Testament.
♠️
If I don’t laugh, I’ll cry.
When my body remembers, it bucks wildly.
While I wash my body I realize it is not my body.
And at the same time it’s the only body I have.
The water does what only the water can.
♠️
Hiding is underestimated.
It is a way of staying alive.
Hiding is an act of freedom from the misunderstanding of others.
Hiding is a bid for independence, from others, from mistaken ideas we
have about ourselves.
Hiding leaves life to itself, to become more of itself.
♠️
Sometimes all I have
are words and to write them means
they are no longer
prayers but are now animals.
Other people can hunt them.
♠️
You cannot drink poetry.
♠️
I don’t know how many births it takes to get reborn as not the flower but the scent. To be allowed to exist as air when the weight of being becomes too much.
A beautiful bird in a cage eventually becomes an empty cage and a dead bird.
♠️
I don’t know where prayers go, or what they do.
Every day I’m still looking for God.
I think of Schubert, scribbling on a café napkin.
If I were a Sufi for sure I’d be the spinning kind.
♠️
In the rear-view mirror suddenly I saw the bulk of Beauvais Cathedral.
Great things dwell in small ones for a moment.
Slowly the sun creeps along the floor; it is coming my way.
It touches my shoe.
♠️
To be held by the light was what I wanted.
This is how we love what is left.
♠️
For all I know, maybe everyone is screaming silently as they go through life –
the loneliness of what we did; the loneliness of what was done to us.
Underneath the smile is bitterness, and underneath the bitterness is grief, and underneath the grief the desire to survive at any cost.
The experiment failed; the lead did not change into gold.
But the alchemist remembers the lute hidden in his closet.
♠️
What does love mean?
What does it mean “to survive”?
No one lives in this room without living through some kind of crisis. Without contemplating the nature of poetry. The drive to connect. The dream of a common language.
We will not live to settle for less. We have dreamed of this all of our lives.
But we can’t call it a life until we start to move beyond this secret circle of fire and wake up the beast sleeping in the corner.
I am alive to want more than life.
I believe I am choosing something new.
I am choosing not to suffer uselessly.
I choose to love this time with all my intelligence. Not somewhere else, but here.
A whole new poetry, beginning here.
♠️
Ellen Bass wrote about a man who wanted to be in a body, who wanted to live in it so much that he marked it up like a book, underlining, highlighting, writing in the margins, I was here.
I, too, want to be alive like that.
♠️
I couldn’t name it, the sweet
sadness welling up in me for weeks.
I have always loved too much, or not enough.
Last night I read a poem about God and almost believed it—God sipping coffee, smoking cherry tobacco. I’ve arrived
at a time in my life when I could believe almost anything.
And I saw it didn’t matter who had loved me or who I loved. I was alone.
Nothing was mine.
And I understood finally, after a semester of philosophy, a thousand books of poetry, after death and childbirth and the startled cries of men who called out my name as they entered me, I finally believed I was alone, felt it in my actual, visceral heart, heard it echo like a thin bell.
I paid and climbed into my car as if nothing had happened— as if everything mattered —
What else could I do?
♠️
This is what I wish for myself: that I would one day be able to look at the simplest of things, and write about them so exquisitely.
♠️
I bring my hands together. Between my palms there forms a dark cave of prayer. Between my lips, there slips a faint breath of light.
A great wild goodness comes over me.
Nothing left to long for.
Nothing left to say.
Watch now as I burst into blossom.
♠️
Daily Braveries 