Openings
I climb a mountain, and meet
a blind man, together we sing
favored, Cat Stevens' tunes while our bodies
feast
on clear San Diego skies and our moonshadows dance
out and over an azure Pacific.
I engage bodily, with a certain bald monk, who reads to me,
centuries-old prose, Rumi, while we lay under
Arcturus, on dirt-dusted driveways in
recently washed work-clothes.
I dig in soil, in my mama's dress
my hands reverberate on the land, together our pulse
becomes One. Slowly,
a yard that is simultaneously mine and not-mine, becomes.
I dive in backwards, and
upside down. I wash
with strawberries and chocolate syrup.
I hold conversations in sound
and silence,
in music and meaning,
in dance and action.
I crave connection, and seek humility.
I desire nothing
more
than to reach out and touch.
I feel, desperately,
alone, confined, trapped
within skin and bone,
muscle and memory,
nostalgia and fear. Still,
the adventure keeps me moving, walking
new paths, pursuing
electric connections, exploring
fruitful ideas and excavating deep-
seeded e-motions.
8-5MondaythruFriday
24/7 365
65 years of this
then what? Death
is written in these numbers
and figures which figure nothing
into my well-being, into my
depth of spirit.
Triumph is leading an embodied life
journeys taken, relationships pursued
and the pageantry of drama spelled out
explicitly.
More than
just a tenet,
embodiment is a ten-cent philosophy that you can pick up
down at the local Barber shop.
It is found in the hum-drum,
in the expansive consciousness as well as
in the bottom of a beer bottle
in a broken down old bar stool.
An embodied life is lived
in the rawness of your humanity.
I have stripped myself bare,
right down to a bald noggin,
with a disregard for panty wearing and a preference
to bleed without a barrier, without
some stupid piece of cotton
stuffing me up like a dike.
I have laid myself down on some God's
marital bed, with only the wish
to steal a mere pittance from the riff-raff's
jean pockets in the morning. I have been caught
transporting hashish across
a foreign border and I have spent
36 hours in an American jail listening
to the tale of a woman who smuggled
crystal meth in via her vagina.
I have bedded down in the shadows between
a boardwalk and a beach, in the dark
corners of a city at night. I have made friends
with 'street urchins,' beautiful, young men
who would sell their own bodies to earn a few
disappearing dollars. Together,
we would throw a beloved toy,
a Frisbee disc, around
the gardens of a Harare park.
I have come to understand
that there are not any actions that are either above
or below, for my uncle's fate of calling the streets
of Hollywood home, for the past twenty years, could
just as easily be my own.
I have come to understand that there is nothing
that separates heaven and hell
from Earth.
For I am mammal, cut from the very same cloth,
as my other Earthly neighbors.
I am Homo sapiens sapiens
descendant of Homo erectus wielding
tools of millennium past and creating
nothing new under the sun.
For I am the son,
I am Atom,
child of that revolving star of brilliance
and great magnitude found
at the center of our solar system and I am
Earthdaughter, my seed
will beget many moon, to continue
along this great march of time.
I am 21st century human.
I live in the future,
I have lived before
and I am living now.
