From the Chronicles of Absolem

“I said you were not hardly Alice. But you're much more her now.

In fact, you're almost Alice.” ~Absolem the Caterpillar by Lewis Carroll

Imagine our surprise

finding out we are being

observed from the inside

through a backwards telescope

trained on a mirror.

Ever since passing through

that mirror, we were divided

like an ameba on a slide,

only to find ourselves

curiously alone.

“Who are you?”

There are two of you now.

One, all can see

while the other

aspires to see all.

Were you ever

merely one, or

instead possessed by

a dubious double

bidding their time

before bleeding through

what had long

been painted over?

We would be

forgiven in thinking

our duplicates seem to

look down on us

(as from a sideways height)

with a kind of disdain,

insisting we are

not all we could be.

It would be nothing

less than offensive

coming from a stranger,

but our doubles, being

frightfully familiar

with everything we do,

sees all.

So much so

we begin revising

ourselves to avoid

further disapproval.

What you do,

what you think,

what you feel,

now disconcertingly

up for review.

The way you dress.

How you brush your teeth.

What you make for dinner.

The length of time

you wash each plate.

What you watch on tv.

The pills you take

in your bid for wellness.

All while your duplicate

watches, listens,

assessing every incongruous prayer…

Please God don’t let my hair fall out.

Please God keep my teeth intact.

Please God help ease Robert’s misery.

Please God heal Mrs. Webster’s back.

Please God end David’s chronic insomnia.

Please God let today go smoothly.

Please God grant me stamina to

do what needs to be done…

Please God.

“You” he said, “are a terribly real

thing in a terribly false world.”

Every choice we make

either meets with

approval or disapproval

as the other takes unsparing

stock of our every move.

Now that there are two of you

it's a fool's errand

to ignore the other,

owing as you do

to the other's

chilly perseverance.

“Have I gone mad?”

“I’m afraid so. You’re entirely bonkers.

But I’ll tell you a secret…

all the best people are”.

Then again, why object

to having someone to live up to

in the most trying of times

especially if that person should

end up a more conscientious

rendition of oneself?

So, the question arises:

why not let them take the reins?

What would we be giving up?

Fears, insecurities, sorrows,

a nagging lack of self-confidence?

What if they arrive

precisely when we are ready,

their sole intent for us

to take our proper place?

“I can’t go back to yesterday because

I was a different person then.”

One night we will dream

a manuscript arrives in the mail;

a careworn version of ourselves

tucked inside.

We leaf through its pages

bracing for what we'll see

even from the safe distance

of a life that now

feels very far away.

Would who we were

still hold true?

We open the book

bracing for dismay

only to discover

that moment

we, no You,

had

finally begun

to sing.

11/26/24

 

Good

Mourning

Hemingway once wrote:

“You have to be hurt like hell

before you can write seriously”.

I get that.

To me he meant pain

is not the enemy

and nothing is for naught.

He may have been

referring to Fitzgerald

whose mourning of his lost past

created Gatsby.

How else to elucidate

the birth of a masterpiece

into the world?

How many of us would bother

evolving

if it were not for heartache?

How better to water a wound

than with the brine of tears?

Both are preservatory.

As the Sufi Rumi

elucidated so adroitly:

the wound

is where the light

enters you,

later dissolving;

a paper note in a pool of water

when the lessons

are absorbed.

I recommend learning the

what, where, how, why, and when

of all our wounds,

so when ready

they can then

slowly disappear.

To that end

I begin each day

determined to retrieve

the lessons of yesterday

and watch as

all my joys age

into morning.

 

The Forever Stamp

Because this body

is my last address,

my soul is like

a Forever stamp;

possessed of

the authorial

assurance

of reaching

any destination

without fear of

expiration.

Therefore,

any day now

I can decide

to follow

my sorrow

back to its

origin of joy.

 

The Inherent Culpability

in Every Given Moment

Imagine if folded hands were

the secret to fruitful prayer.

Hands un-idle, joined

in mutual cause.

Hands shaken in agreement

with ourselves.

What if this is our dilemma?

To grasp the ability

to walk about inside a dream

while at the same time not know

we are dreaming

yet simultaneously examine

its intimations as if

what we are experiencing is meaningful

even when our presence at its center

may be a fallacy 

wrested from sleep;

all references hopelessly subjective.

As if to surrender to

or to manage each moment

were to know the difference between

what is being bestowed upon us

and what is being invoked

or both.

Since we can witness

and be witnessed

as well as witness

our selves witnessing,

how are we to separate

what part we play

in the slightest occurrence?

If A misbehaves and causes B

to anger

where is the line of culpability drawn

if both A and B share cause and effect?

It must be that cause is its own effect

and the only way out

of this insidious collaboration

is a conscious response as opposed

to an unconscious reaction.

One perceives, digests, weighs,

while the other merely rhymes.

To that end

I'm here to dismantle a prayer.

One of mine.

Dear God, thank you for this day.

Please help me to be the man

you would have me be.

This is, in a sense,

a postmortem.

Where is the proof

in an equation

whole-heartedly constructed

from spiritual yearning?

As if every prayer were

a feeling one’s way

through the dark.

Now, imagine

twin hands

taking hold of each other,

agreeing,

guiding,

reassuring themselves

as they recycle their energies

as deliberately as

an elixir of Life

in a retort.

Prayer engages with the invisible.

In other words,

we choose to concentrate 

on the unseen.

Since things seen are temporary,

and things unseen are intangible,

think of what this means.

All great qualities are incorporeal;

God, grace, love, hope.

They are incorruptible,

preserved by their visible absence

and our compulsory faith in them.

So why give 

so much credence

to things corruptible?

What if from here on out

everything we did were

a kind of prayer,

hand-made

and from the heart;

as if the heart

were an opera house

in need of our singing,

a telescope

longing for a glimpse of the moon,

a branch begging for

the weight of a bird.

If I am a ship, then you are the sea.

If I am a bird, then you are a tree.

If I am a mirror, then you are me:

A God as gracious as we are.

A God as loving as we are.

A God as disappointed as we are.

A God as thankful as we are.

A God as generous as we are.

A God as fearless as we are.

A God who is, in fact,

praying back at us.

10/27/24

The Sprouting

Every time I water the flowers

I water myself.

Every time I water myself

I flower.

Do the flowers know

who and what we are?

We are hybrids surely.

Our arms and hands

gradations of green,

our faces,

if one can call a blossom that,

a variety of shades

conducive to the light,

but our thoughts

are a cornucopia of colors.

Our feet below ground

are something of a riddle.

For instance, what are we to do

in all that dirt?

What if we have it wrong

and the soil is life itself

and we its propitious offspring?

Either way, we must learn

to care for ourselves.

Life has its seasons,

even one to die in,

if only to sprout again

in inexorable Spring.

Try seeing it like this:

We are the gardeners

of our selves

in as much as

we tend

to the garden 

within.

Now take note of the man

hovering above and below you.

To live inside his head

instead of inside this room

is equally precarious.

He sits at his computer

as if it were a piano

to see what music

he might make.

At his disposal:

a world of flowers

sprouting from

heart to head.

10/11/24

The Subterraneans

Welcome to the entrails of the city.

To arrive here entails a descent.

With a sole swipe

we’ve the privilege

of immersing ourselves

in the collective unconscious.

Down here,

we are Orpheus.

We are Persephone.

We are Jonah

swallowed whole.

Characters in search

of an author.

The subway

a shadowy stairway

to subconsciousness itself.

Here, below the surface

things take on primordial meanings.

This is where Ionesco

gathered his twelve chairs,

where Tennessee wrestled the Iguana,

and Shakespeare stirred his tempest.

Where those tiny circus lizards

mature into alligators

years after being mistaken for dead.

Where witches concoct their incantations

to get even with, well, other witches.

Here are where breakdowns

and breakthroughs

begin.

Yet what of the rest of us?

We, who simply want to

get where we are going?

Who sit in postures of surrender

content to appear normal,

to look unthreatened

and unthreatening.

To the trembling Shih Tzu

curled in the refuge

of a woman’s handbag,

I too, am being carried.

As I hold my breath

not to inhale

the curried lamb kabob

being devoured across from me,

I come to the conclusion

to be human

is to be ravenous.

Not wanting to draw

attention, I sit quietly

ruminating on how fate

has brought us all together.

Across the aisle

a man in a torn tee shirt

sizes me up

like a leg of lamb

in a Turkish marketplace.

I look away aware

of the dangers

of meeting

a stranger's eyes.

Why I’m so determined

to keep the doors

of my soul shut tight,

I’m sure I don’t know.

As if I feared

some feral creature

might breach the walls

of my inner sanctum.

My gaze settles on

a tall Swedish couple

assailing the car

with their wholesomeness;

film stars touring the Inferno.

At the back of the train

a trio of noisy teens

are daring us all to judge them,

their eyes ricocheting

from face to face

like flames to a moth.

I catch the word “baguette”

followed by raucous laughter

and wish I could turn up

a bossa nova

to drown out the ignorance

of the world.

We are here

to be ferried.

Our baggage,

all in our heads.

Then again,

who died and made me

solo protagonist of

the subway system?

It’s a reasonable question.

But I’m not here

to simply utilize

mass transit,

I’ve come in search

of beauty.

The first thing I notice:

nearly everyone in the car

is staring at their phones,

heads bowed as if

in Godless prayer.

Why come here

only to ignore

each other?

Who’s to say

our trains of thought

aren’t being

slowly wiped clean

by the gynecological-grade

overhead lighting

simultaneously

turning every window

into a looking glass

reflecting what we all know already.

What I’d give for a pair

of rose-colored glasses,

content to hurl

through the city’s bloodstream

via a parade of curated memories

of rosier times.

But who the hell

wants to live

in a pink world?

And yet why do I view

the car as chock-full

of a jury of my peers,

I sitting alone

in the witness box,

moving to strike

the trial altogether

on the grounds it might

incriminate me?

Better to see us all

crowded on the head of a pin

in some teeming eternity astride

the only moment that is.

"There but for the grace of God go I"

Someone’s sure to utter

but the words are little

more than a stale chestnut

in the mouth.

And then the most META

of things occurs.

I am thrown

from my body

and reshuffled back

into the deck of life.

I come to

splayed across several seats

like an upside-down turtle

with swollen feet;

is this my home…

on my back?

It’s the damnedest thing:

But it seems whatever I

BEHOLD, I BECOME.

The rail-thin red head

digging through her handbag

for nail polish,

is me.

The weary Asian tourist

slipping off his shoe

to relieve a stinging bunion,

is me.

I am the bedazzled drag queen

rocking a neon paisley skirt!

The antsy salesclerk eyeing his watch

as if timing a heist.

The fidgety ragamuffin

kicking his sister's seat

taunting:

"What you say is what you are!"

I’m the man in the wife-beater

devouring a sandwich freed from a Ziplock.

The actor going over his lines

happy to be making better use of the NOW.

The shifty pickpocket hoping to blend in.

The nurse dropping her cell

on the unforgiving floor of the C.

The lonely waif

drawing a heart on the window

in the fog of her breath.

The morose teen spotting

the girl of his dreams

as she exits forever on the L.

Hell, I’m the 7Up can

rolling from

starboard to stern

only to end up

at the feet

of the Buddhist monk

handing out cryptic sayings

on calligraphed business cards!

My nail polish.

My stinging bunion.

My neon skirt.

My watch.

MY cell.

My breath.

The girl of my dreams.

My business cards.

Consciousness widens ever outward

like a mandala absorbing all of existence.

We are LIFE ITSELF in all it’s

homo-sapien variation!

And at last…

we are one.

And so the trains roll on

taking no notice.

Approaching the platforms

like huffing bulls

only to pull away…agile serpents

winding through their darkened lairs.

Here in this labyrinthian underworld

we can choose which train we board

or dare to be carried away on

a rip current

born from the vigor

of a thousand psyches.

 

My Art is a Phoenix

And so it is that in the history of art,

the great work arises 

from the ashes

of loss, tragedy, and sorrow.

Art begins as an ache.

When was good art

ever made from happiness?

Who works when they’re happy?

So, this is our dilemma:

How to make art

and still know happiness?

To sit and contemplate

a leaf, a rock, a cloud,

it is possible to commune

with what is

without an intermediary.

Like pure cinema’s

return to its 

elemental origins,

such simplicity feels

nothing less

than avant-garde.

But this world is the history

of creativity.

Whether an artist or not,

all men and women

are entrusted with the task

of crafting their own life,

to make of it

 a work of art.

An artist is possessed

and completely diseased by

creativity and ideas.

For that, we are willing

to sacrifice everything.

There will be pain.

There must be.

Consider the grapes that need

crushing before producing wine.

The leaves that must endure frost

before generating their brightest colors.

How then, to live with pain

so it strengthens and informs

rather than

weakening and discouraging us.

Hurt brings awareness,

making us more present

to the beatitude

of the present moment.

Beauty is not

an object apart from us,

but a way of perceiving.

Is anything beautiful

if no one’s there to perceive it?

Is the sky at dawn spectacular

if we are fast asleep in our beds?

The world demands our attention

and beauty is spiritualizing.

That is how we take part in it.

It is connective.

Beauty is a calling

and can be 

a vocation;

Otherwise,

one risks becoming

a human Dickensian factory

run by a tyrant.

But the good news is:

nature is with us.

A bruise dissipates slowly,

like a spider un-building a web.

A cut closes up in a matter of days

without the slightest planning ahead.

Snip off the head of a flower, and

a new one explodes in its place.

A salamander grows back its tail,

unlike a nose despite one’s own face.

Rain evaporates back into clouds,

as an arrow’s origins are a quiver.

A liver can slowly regenerate itself

the way a finger pushes out a sliver.

Cells die every second or so

only to be promptly replaced.

A tree repeats its branches though

its roots down below go untraced.

Take note of the healing that happens

without effort, meddling, or intent.

The only vacuum that nature abhors

is the lack of faith in what to expect.

Therefore, my art is a phoenix.