The power of verse is in the shape of the words
As they flow out the mouth.
The metrics of sound
Coming not so much from the lines themselves
As from the articulated embodiment of the Self.
Like a living, breathing, sui-generated bell,
The knell is the shape of the flesh is the sound of the knell.
And in the tickey-tackey of a regulated line,
you find not the soul, but the mind.
The tools the mind measures with, our cells and curves,
Themselves organized, abstracted from the living fractal world,
This one-sided balance of straight crooked lines,
In which we orient ourselves with the realization of being Alive.
Now turn an eye back at that for a second for a second feature of verse,
That combinations of words can have more meanings than a first-
‘The realization of being alive’ pointing to this space inside us
and that we are all inside.
The recognition of awareness, the shared awareness of being
And Realization also meaning making real from dreaming,
And so this little phrase contains a profound truth,
And in its layered webs of reflected connections
Shines the one that’s always two:
We are here, we are moving, we are here, we are moving.
We one are two, and I am you.
And together we have never been apart,
And we separate and come together.
The realization of being alive!
There’s infinity in that phrase, I could talk in it forever,
But lest you mistake this for an exercise in acting clever
We’d best move on to the obvious objection, the question,
Isn’t my point clouded by poetic affection?
Well, I would say-
That the objection rests on the instrumental empirical assumption
Of the rational function of our communication
And an over emphasis on this material consensus
As the one reality location
When there’s every indication
That we only believe this because born in contemporary Western civilization,
And that it’s anything but a natural or granted perspectivilization.
So, yes, my riff technically was on the nature of languaging,
And whether spoken or sung, it’s almost the same thing.
Except we’ve become obsessed with giving our stories antiseptic cleanings,
When life is a mess, and that mess is the meaning,
And somewhere along the lines we’ve forgotten how to stop believing
That where we’re talking from is what our camera lenses are seeing.
So the objection doesn’t rise in the mind of a dipshit: I love Poetry,
But it takes this message and flips it,
Like you could have an objective without a subject to fill it.
The dry, and defined, we do well to an extreme,
And it’s time to re-awaken this definite life to the possible dream:
This poetry at the heart of all acts of speaking,
From The Lancet, to “hello,” to howling and weeping,
And while stretched and grown through prose we’re at the end of its rope,
And as we struggle it gets tighter and we’re beginning to choke.
We’ve practiced our scales on this umbilical noose,
And it’s time for solos of unmediated truth.
And if by the death of our pasts we’re to find birth again,
This spiraling path will lead us to become our own origins.
And while that may sound sloppy, or some kind of regression
To a culture that says ‘a simple chemical imbalance is the cause of depression,’
And in which it makes the news when a researcher says “we don’t know, exactly,
We’re a little bit surprised, our studies show that our studies may be compromised,’
And a pause. ‘It’s almost as if…our culture is a cause of that cause.”
And they’d trace that tired line of causation ad infinitum
Without a gut understanding that they’re never gonna find one causal cause
Unless they look behind themselves, to this moving place of stillness.
And though it’s still just an echoing rumor
That we might not simply be rational consumers
You can hear the first cracks and large scale shakings
Of a long taken for granted foundation of meaning making.
So as we lean over the edge of this experimental human inquiry,
Our sense making only makes sense in becoming human being poetry.
When ‘God is everything’ and ‘there is no God’ both speak of this reality,
Lines are revealed as meaningless without our intentionality.
Which is to say, our reason is a subset of our musicality.
So today, given this heavy world of apathy,
We must remember our capacity to become and overcome gravity,
Embracing this absurd body of comic tragedy.
Spoiler alert: though united everlastingly in love, we all die.
But if you play the melodies of love and death entwined,
Let your language be measured as bursts of living fire,
If you have the courage to aspire to construct of your limited life a creative act,
Accepting this sacred pact, then death is not for naught.
The world has never been built by some disembodied thought.
But by hearts and minds and eyes and feet choosing
Heartful, mindful, iambic foot like doing.
All this doing! And not a thing to do but rest.
And let each note rise as a silent ‘yes,’
Glowing like the morning of this One Turning in your breast.
Let your joyful play sing open. Open to the Love
That has gladly crawled eons of improbable labyrinths
For just this one fleeting audience with your warm and wounded heart.
I’d say ‘start,’ now! And I also mean “stop!”
Let all the burdens that you’re carrying drop.
Stop thinking, stop trying, stop just for one moment stop resisting and controlling
And live through your dying!
How to do it? What to do? How to do it what to do…
When you’re asking ‘what to do,’ and “Who am I” you’re doing it.
And when you’re doing it wrong, you’re doing it right--
And when you’re doing it right, you’re not doing a damn thing!
Shake everything off and let your empty soul sing!
And relaxing into the vibrato of the timeless and all time
You might be surprised when it already rhymes.
And whether you call your role in this symphony poetry or kung-fu knitting,
do it with the care of a blackbird sitting on a cedar limb.
And dancing to this carefully carefree hymn awakens a whole new seeing,
And the limits of lines, once binding, become freeing.
As this work: submitted with gratitude, and for the benefit of all beings.
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