hamster

My heart is racingpumping madly.
I am a small thing, true
but this is beyond the norm
for my mammalian frame.

Rather, I feel like I've been quietly fed
into a new pushbutton universe, where
everything whirrs and clickhums
mechanically. I feel my clumsy flesh straining
to replicate the metal ballet, feel
its grossness, its lumpy and imperfect solidarity,
and know that if i tried once more to
compete with the machines I would be reduced
to a sliver, a ghost, a spark
to be consumed quickly in the circuits, by the need
intense and white
for human power.

So instead I become what my heart says I am
I am the hamster on the wheel,
I am the small warm thing trapped
and helpless by the powers that be
running swiftly
never knowing where I'm going
realizing slowly that it doesn't matter

and nursing small memories, childlike
of how it felt to run on grass.

knowing

There was a time I used to know
things in my inward heart, things
that only those you read know.

I don't know how I figured them out
but I had a few good years in which the world
revealed itself to me, cracked open like a clamshell.

I knew what gods know and
it all made sense, somehow.
I guess I was alone back then, so things were
simple; I was a quiet, lonely country.

When I started to know people better,
and love, I stopped understanding many things
or at least, I forgot thinking about them so much.

An intrepid messenger in me needed
to know about the warm craftings of others, and although
much of me revolted, scared
of how our serenity might be troubled,
he was determined and brave, so eventually
I readied my ships and we set out.

I live on a massive, shifting continent now. No longer
is my home a small crystalline bubble
suspended in bright space. There is color here and
such life! But still, often

I want to return to that place of knowing
that I still reach sometimes, only at the most
heady moments of conversation with a new
friend, one whose eyes show me they knew things too,
once, and perhaps still might.

O, once
I lived in a place unlike any; it was populated
by only myself
and my great thoughts.

nakedness

Something is wrong with me, a
coldness like the longest stretch of that
last week of winter, the one
before you start to catch sight of hoping
spring, when it seems as though all
your days and nights will end with the same mundane
routine of shedding layers too mindless
to examine what your numb
fingers are fumbling with.

We undress to sleep, we
quietly take off those things that
hide our nakedness from ourselves

I feel like I am forgetting to do that
I feel like every day I am
sleeping clothed, slowly
forgetting what my naked body looks like
in all its honesty.

doors flung open

and white light

In The Dark Tent

A dust storm raged and spat
angry mouthful of bitter alkali against
the walls of the swinging tent. Outside
my family worked, hard
trying to break camp
so we could return to the world.

Inside I sat, hunched, gripping
a flashlight in my teeth madly
scribbling what I could recall of the night
my heart burst open. They entreated me
'help!' but I glared beastly at them
baring the few teeth I had left
unobscured by the light.

From then on we worked
silently, all smudged, breathing
frantic particles, they furious while I
madly
came into being.

Night I

Last August, among crowds
of refugees from our culture, among the hum: their
third eyes nodding in syncopation
to the rhythm of the music drifting from the colored bus
the chant of the wandering monk, o
the guttering midnight wind and
the pulsation of a secret:
one inward heart beating through the machine
and briefly painting flames across the sky
it stained black by infinity,
by the letters describing each possibility
they ran together to form
a bottomless sea, a spiral void, a tube;

it was among this I burst open
alone
and the lotus within me flowered.

In The White Tent

There was
a moment
in which I stood transfixed
and watched colored lights
shimmer in and out of one another
and explode on the back walls
of my eyelids they watched
those things inside me
empty out
into the white tent
that dim room and disperse
like smoke among the linens;
they shrouded others, and in
the moment before I lost my
balance, I hung there
truly empty
like a star.



written 4.16.09
edited 9.3.09

I Would See

The fog crawls across the mountain
like an army of white termites
swallowing trees and

I can only see it because I'm
in the air. And if
there was an ant below me
I'd never know it
I'd pass it by unknowingly;
In sleep I pass by whole forests
unconsciously

I am just a particle
asleep in the air

If I were on the ground I'd see the ant
I'd see the air I'd see the trees
but I wouldn't see the fog like an army
instead it would see me like an ant,
and I would become invisible in whiteness
I would be the same, but hidden
and someone in the air would never see me.



written 4.16.09 at Reed College

Physics

I will conquer that
which oppresses my
coiled heart
I will unfold
the petals of sacred lilies and make
manifest the shining wisdom
I will know; trace
the spiraling patterns the orbitals
and meridians. I will find out
how everything is the same and how
it is all one and how
we all commingle brains
aligned in resonance with the planet core,
deep-thinking of

the movements of space and
the all-time
we secretly inhabit

Portrait

I sob on the floor for
you, your arched ribs
spreading
and the trail hollow
that leads from your marble hips
(I'm kissing it)