anything not fed eats itself:
body, mind, heart.
Tag: poets
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There is no such thing as poetry!
Just speak! No — bellow!
Do not contort yourself. Those screams in your gut were meant to echo through mountain ranges. Do not place them in a closet shoebox.
Do not “try” to make it sound pretty, do not “try” to make it poetry— else, what was meant to be the liberation of your soul will become its jail cell.
Every poem: a love letter, a confession. A love letter to yourself, to the natural world, to another. Write it for the ears of to whom the letter is dedicated— not for the eyes of who might later stumble upon it, who might judge whether this love was love.
No, there is no such thing as poetry. Do not look at a paper and say, “I am going to write a poem.” Look at your heart and ask what it has to say. Do not judge its answer. Give it the pen. Do not stand in the way. The river will flow. You will later look and say: that is a poem. Almost by accident, it happened.
More important than the what of your writing is the why, the why is where the “poem” exists. “Why” is the lifeblood of human existence; the lifeblood of human existence is poetry’s ink.
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I’ve come to worship
at your body’s temple.
I am on my knees
confessing the sin of my desire.
Your curves are scripture—
I touch the divine—
I’m in ecstasy.
Light, white, blinding.
No—
this is false.
I know not anyone
worth bowing to.
I cannot
make you my idol.
I will not.
I’ve had quite enough
of love
that puts me on my knees.
We meet face to face,
or we do not meet at all.
I give—
but I also receive.
No more love
that is a one-way street.
Done am I
placing the divine in another,
as if they, and they alone,
hold
all that is holy,
like I am damned,
and my salvation
is bought
through martyrdom,
dying
for an unfeeling God.
If you are holy, then I am too.
If I am damned, you are too.
Scales of my love: balance.
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Sometimes, the old Catholic in me
rears its pious head, telling me
that prayer looks like aching knees
and the scrubbing of my shame,
until the grime of my very aliveness
soon after builds again—
but that gentler voice within
blows this smoke away
with but a whisper,
asking me how I want to pray today,
and what part of my body would like to do the praying?
is it my feet,
dancing in the grass,
is it my hands,
tracing an oak?
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There are some people who will make you feel like a fool
through moving lips, an upturned chin.
Like putting my spirit on its knees, commanding I listen
to all but my heart.
There are some people who, through their deafening, humble silence,
still make me feel like a fool, but only because
they make me hear the message I’ve been ignoring, that quiet but sure one,
a tea light in me, a brazier in them.
That silent teacher said not a thing, but only pointed to that voice
in my breast.
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my revolutionary ideologies
are capable of utter destruction.
do you know how loud a hushed mouth is?
listen: there is no greater noise.
a hurricane of silence.
I made myself delicate,
public displays of my underbelly.
I dressed a fortress in a house of cards:
meanwhile,
I saw the straw that they called a castle.
silent observation: toppled.
at least to my eyes.
there is no gaze more piercing
than a gentle one.
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there’s so many different parts of you capable of picking up a pen and writing.
don’t let the perfect hand
of aesthetic sense
pick up your pen.
she writes beautifully,
but her wrists are cuffed.
don’t let the hand of order,
of patterning,
take your pen:
he is exacting,
& will entrap you
in his cell bar grid lines.
but the base of your spine
is illiterate, and your gut
communicates in grunts:
still—
they’re better suited for the task.
the animal of your being
cannot weave falsehoods.
Dive, Persephone,
into your underworld—
for that is where you
and where the poem
hide.
Remember: your depths cannot lie.
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to labor over a poem,
or to splatter it:
ink on a page.
to tell your reader of liberation,
to twirl freely
on life’s dance floor,
to open the cage
they’ve freely stepped into and locked—
while you labor
over such wishes of merriment,
while you struggle
to say what you plainly feel,
to tell yourself no, over and over—
this is encouraging medicine
using poison as its ingredients,
writing
like an expert on freedom
from the inside of a cell.
THE CLOSET MYSTIC 