Day: May 7, 2017

Transitions (11)

TRANSITIONS

Lay down expectations like boards

Build you a bridge to inspiration

Hammer these down with nails of patience

Paint them in colors of inevitability and change.

Stand in doorways where the transition

Of forward & back will balance your brain.

Find my hand in the total darkness of eclipse

Pull me into that pregnant moment of emerging light

Frail is it may be

Enlivening all that ever was.

IN WINTER

I find a west window of sunlight

Sit down, facing my back to it

As my neck warms and my hands,

I write poems

A tiny flag of incense curls

In the light

Music knits an afghan of sound

For a simply singular afternoon.

All I “should” be doing goes undone

In favor of these words flowing from this pen.

RIDING THE RAILS

May get me places,

But all journeys

Are made of expectations

Foregoing familiarity.

When only the scenery changes

Is change enough?

My life seems a layby off the tracks.

(Twinned steel cutting the horizon, glistening.)


UNEXPECTED PRESENTS

The habit of gifting

Is one to cultivate

I have been on the balance beam

Of gifting & receiving

While meditating on insufficiency’s

Pyramidal center…

I have pierced these veils

Of unknown power sources

Skirting the edges of vortex

Many other times.

RSVP

I have invited crucifixion

By my own emotions

And intransigence of purpose.

If all these beginnings

Lead to similar endings

Why even ask the questions?

I am the hapless beggar

In the Promised Land,

The starveling at the World Feast.

I have wandered the Lost & Found of life long enough…

Even when no Path appears,

I shoulder my pack,

I move on.

SECOND STORY

I am in Soul Rehab

Stripping walls of flocked paper strips

Snapping bowed valances to sweep velvet shreds

Of conscience

I tear at curling floorboards

A stale, sour smell of old wood

Rising from the sawdust cloud

I have no idea how to rebuild this!

I have only the belief I can.

The house groans, settles,

Creaks; obligingly dismantling itself

As windowsills tilt & slide

Down separating walls

I pull nails bare-fingered.

Standing, I push support beams

With strengthened shoulders,

Digging in my heels.

For all this determination,

There is no center to demolish.

Only a guess at what will bring

This structure down;

Only a hope it will not take me along.

CALENDAR YEARS

In all this time of walking forever forward

Of wearing out shoes in differing directions

The compass whispers me to north & west

South & east

I do not heed these siren songs

I am a turtle with a rock upon its back

Thrusting forward my head, neck & finny legs.

Swimming stillness.

MORPHOGENESIS

Off to a rough start:

The bloodletting of loneliness

Collapsing my fluid body

To knots & gnarls

Tanned to roughened leather

A wrinkling purpose

Overlaid a pristine map.

“But,” I argue with the mirror,

“did I ever know? It was given to me:

‘Travel, stop, begin again’ over & over.”

These I did: a trio of begettings.

Would you have me make a list of my sins?

There are few enough to recall to my forgetting mind

I do remember toting buckets of them to

The confessional incinerator

Where sparks burst & flew

Into heaven.

FACING MORTALITY

Dying is one of the best things I will do.

I don’t know how I know this…

Perhaps informed by intimate experience?

I am content to blossom as a rose,

Exploded of scent, explored for color

Curled & peeling petals taking

Flight for faraway –

Plucked to die, dreaming,

On a kitchen table,

Beheld with love each glance.

Not knowing how it knows this…

The chance to return

As a miracle on the Tree of Life.

But I say this not being in line for

Predestination

Not really believing in death, per se

Remaining the nonbeliever, tho afloat in

A sea of total incrimination of

Evidence & experience

Responding to more of what I would not do:

I would not regret or mourn

I would be as fierce in death

As in death-defying life!

Cherished as the moment of breath

Breathed out after the intimacy

Of circling the heart

Form into formlessness

An eternity of time

To dip into life once again.

 

JUXTAPOSITIONS

Momentary fulfillment &

Long-term lack

The land that once rolled toward me

Traveling up & out-away

Impulse decentralized

Purpose diffused

Once measured in steadying mileage

I am disengaged from movement

Bereft of directional impulse

Uneasily content to be part

Of a landscape

In favor of making landfall.

AGAIN, MORTALITY

I would be bold before the Throne,

Demanding face-time with God,

A hug from Jesus,

A fig from Buddha’s Bodhi Tree

A tear from Guanyin

A knighthood with the sword of St. Germain

A high-five from Michael Archangel.

I would sleep for a thousand-thousand years

Each dream the petal of the rose

I would return in.

 

When A Mother Dies

We Strip the Careworn Dead Their Mortal Coil

We lave their toiled hands,

Their knobby feet,

Their centers and extremes.

We lay them flat

In underground and secret passageways

to Heaven’s scroll-worked gates.

We bless and praise them in our tears.

We brush the wood encasement with

Messages posting to God above

Even as

We bury them below

(a convoluted path to Him indeed.)

 

Our last dance one single step again

(We dreamed this all before

And will once more.)

~ Carol Borsello 2/23/17 (6:43 a.m.)

Meditation of the April Fool

What is it I want to be, want to do? Where do I wish to live my life & why? When will it happen?

I want to use more of my brain. Be more capable, more endearing, more endeavoring. How do I do this? I wish to move forward because the open arms of God await me. I crawled to God, toddled, walked, ran & now I once again walk a paced cadence, stepping lightly into Light.

So come & move me, God. Come breathe on me like the wind that you are, that wind of change & surety bringing me safely into port from the seas of self where I sailed so long. Come, God, I am headed up the path from the sea to the Garden. Will You not join me in the cooling afternoon? I can loan you my cloak if you are chilled by the descending night. I am warm in the space of Your smile, basted in your most Gracious Presence & I wait here at the end of all that is for the beginning of all that is to come. Please take a moment to show me the achievements which draw me closer into Your embrace. I promise now, my God, I promise my life to You, if You will take the strand of divine DNA I represent & work me into the Plan wherever I fit.

I feel as though I never knew You before as I do now. And, to a point, this is true. I also feel I knew you beyond eternity, before beginnings & I love the thought that before I was even born You knew me well, you knew my name. I have been a nightlight in the darkness but I’m headed now into lumens & luminosity as have been never before been seen in my corner of Your world. I am poised to step forward into limitlessness. This is where Your garden grows best, no?

So, You are my prayer now. I shed all doubt, set aside all fear, call angels into my train as I bow my head but only to see the path more clearly. I await Your finger under my chin to lift my face as we behold Each Other. Press me into service, God, express Your Self through me, sing in my soul as the birds build a nest & sing to their eggs. I am the potential of all You would have me accomplish; I am the cause & because of You, also the accomplishment.

Re-create me, Lord, for Your image is all I encounter in every moment. Show me all that I can do for You; the world would have it so. Enlighten me to what comes after Love for it is merging with the Godhead as I reach out to include those around me in Your ineffable joy of recognition.

Thank You for blessing me so!

Love,

Carol

Some Days

The hourglass spins on gimbals, tapped into motion by Youniverse. The sand spills through the wasp-waisted opening, which doubles as a Stargate.

Then we wait for an event, a move, a collaboration of time & effort to morph into change. Time is like a cat: purring one moment, snarling to slash the next. We can neither account for it nor accommodate it, yet we must do both. And for a lifetime!

“Time can be a false, flawed notion,” gurus tell us uninformed folks just living through it. Us folks living with clocks in every room, deadlines in every doorway, ticking on our wrists, floating on our phones, glowing from walls, towers, signs, devices, always.

I just read The Time Keeper by Mitch Albom. It is quite the study of time & its [possible] inventor. It won’t take long to read it, if you catch it at your local library. Once time was invented & people caught onto it, Time launched into an egotistical, demanding tyrant, the imperious ruler of mirrors where, incredibly, it allows no pause to reflect upon it.

Time swallows everything you can throw at it – relationships, possessions, childhoods – without a belch or a bubble. Next to Love, it is the most spoken of, talked around, sung of topic.

When Time dissolves in the salt of our fears, we will be polished to the bone & ready to move forward free from its hungry grasp. We will drop all the numbers, turn up our faces & fly.

 

Tuesdays

There was a beginning & there will be an ending, but I always seem to be in the story’s middle. The part where the beginning is so far back it’s not even a dim memory. The part where the future disappears into a great cloud of unknowing.

The sages tell me I’m responsible for my consciousness in all three zones while the pundits tell me get to the point! (Is there a point of “know returns?”)

Meanwhile, all I am aware of is the dailiness of Now; whatever changes occurs in this moment, uninformed or wise. But change takes place so slowly until, suddenly, it does not. Change accelerates & decelerates of its own will. Change dissembles, seeming to be one thing & then – blink – another! Both theatre & dance, stillness & movement, fractal & whole. A Trinity of Time: past/present/future.

No wonder we take drugs which alter time. No wonder we believe in unbelief as belief can take so long to manifest. Unbelief is simpler somehow, if less fulfilling.

The future is contained in a kaleidoscope where each incremental change brings exchange in time-space. Or is it space-time? How will we ever know?

I do things for the simple sake of doing. We all do, no? we spend money not yet earned. We exact wishes rubbing on an imaginary magic lamp. We expect the Youniverse to respond to our heart when sometimes our hearts aren’t even on the same wavelength.

Each day of my life, my life disappears; small bites nibbled from the timespan. I seem to be caught in its alimentary tract, inanimate until digested. I make a smooth contact, like a receptor into a brain cell,  then into light-life I spring.

The Winter Home

Farewell daylight savings time

Long-lasted hours of darkness

Cloaked invisibly about me.

Goodbye the sweetly dreamed

Brought on by heavy covers pressing me into sleep,

With only my nose exposed to brightcold air.

 

I shall miss the sly-bold pride

Of rising hours before the world’s light

Far ahead of the Sleepers…

Now the days no longer round their way to bed

But perceive it as an interception to the light’s

Sharper edge, murmuring

“Stay awake!” “There’s more!” “Don’t go!”