Gifted

1/8/18

Love and a dog and woman gone

For the time being, awakened, right before the alarms

When the body is ready and the mind revived

Without worry, with love for the woman and dog

With separation comes thought and realization

Of need to be held, to be coddled, to be accepted

To be angry when people don’t listen and behave my way

To see a couple stumbling down Lesseps Street

Five in the morning and praise grace for the days I have made

To forget the second person and how another person

Can push you to anger, for he threatens the very bedrock

The foundation upon which your life has been built

Feigning sobriety and tarnishing the name of what represents you.

How to separate anger and ego and acceptance and love:

The short answer is to pray, and to talk to the elders

To ask, to see what it is that they want,

And maybe to move on, to make a change:

This is where source takes you this morning, to a place

Where others do not determine who you are or how you act

To love with detachment, to let go

And love more when coming back together,

To think of her, sleep in her eyes, a porcupine

Or a turtle or a dinosaur egg at four in the morning

Asking you not to sweat, her sweet voice

Under the down, hiding her breath, smiling already

Together you wake and you kneel and pray and join her after the second

And then you say that where there is doubt

And she struggles to find the answer always

And sometimes she plays, and sometimes she answers right away:

Faith. You have been given this great blessing

This woman that does not let you complain

That says you cannot talk shit about another man

For one week. So you try, you separate the talking shit

And the addressing of how to better serve, and there are phone calls to be made,

Talks to have, an address to be looked at and examined and always growing

Let not the threat of ego drive you into temptation

Meaning that the need to change or stop him becomes rage filled.

For this is easy to hold onto,

Like the covers, like the hitting of the snooze, like a life

Without discipline. The first steps in combating and beating down the ego

The two parts of the mind: serpent and dove

The intellect and love together must overcome, must believe

Must run the course and lift up all of those of us that are

Those of us that believe, and under the skin and within neighborhoods

This is everyone, even the couple stumbling at five in the morning

Even the one needing attention and pretending to be sober

Even those that get under your skin, for these petty tyrants

Are lessons. These people that also know not are your best teachers

So find a space on your front porch and let not

The roosters crowing in the cypress tree across the street disturb you

Remember yesterday, walking beneath the trees in your yard,

A woodpecker and the desire for him to take down the entire

China Ball Tree. A flitting little finch, a male cardinal, and the bird with

The long tail feather. Beyond all of this: Chickens on Lesseps

Eating pretzels shaped like goldfish, from yesterday, cafeteria worker

Throwing a box of apples in a dumpster. Fret not for when

One does not know the value of what is returned to earth

There is opportunity. In her being away, your heart pulls, your heart wishes

You want to give her joy, hope, and most important: faith

That you love being around her, not because of codependence

Not because of a need for warm shelter

Take this thought into the cold morning shower of the way she yawns

The way she sits without needing you, the excitement of her journey

Of what she encounters and cannot wait to share

Of her realizations, of her making you a better man

Take not offense to a woman that does not constantly want you around

This is a sign of health, not an error of touch, not an error of need

In the trees you will find your answer

In the dance of the morning wind. In the discipline of words

And silence on the front porch, the smell of Tibetan cedar

Burning and wrapped and hands that did this tens of thousands of

Miles away, everything is perfect

Here, everything is perfect

Inside your body, the tingling is more than coffee

The false nerves, the self-induced fear

This is only the ego seeking charge

Let go and ask questions while knowing certainty is never caught

Knowing that the beauty of life is questions never answered

The beauty of life is loving without knowing why

The beauty of life exists inside each one of us

As soon as we can separate from the hamster wheel spinning of worry and guilt.

After meditation:

The written word delivers awareness

Without which thought revolves and spins

Thought gets mixed in with all counters, words, people,

And experiences do little to change what is within.

Emptying is the name of the game:

Emptying the body of toxins

Emptying the mind of thought

Emptying the heart of everything but love

So that what comes in the silence: the swimming

The desire to sit for twenty minutes in a sauna each morning

This is what god sends in the chill of the front porch

This is what god sends in the incessant crowing of roosters

In the sounds you differentiate: traffic on a bridge compared to

Traffic on Claiborne, compared to a rooster across the street

And a rooster blocks away; in this you are taught the value of silence

In these opposites you see the need to quiet the mind

To find that all is a backdrop to the perfect knowing and unfolding

To the sleeping shortly after the sun sets and waking before it has risen

To take time to find the discipline, to realize that all is connected

And your purpose is to find this deeper connection, to love

To question, to get more involved, to write at night, to share, to reach out

To listen, to take one thing: reading comprehension for youth

To concentrate on this, to know that this is where you have struggled yourself

To pay attention to the words, to understand, to not have to go back and read again,

But you do, and maybe this is the reason for the hundreds of books

Maybe this is the reason for new bookshelves

Maybe this cold on your skin, this chill of arm hairs and freckles

This changing of the sky as time turns almost into six-thirty

This way that we have constructed days, made with the

Advent of agriculture. What if we all walked through these blocks

Past these birds, past these butterflies

And what if we all knew the names and the reasons

Behind why the loquat is called a misbelieve

Still a reason has not been given

Like the devil beating his wife, how everybody just says this

Like how a hotel has not a thirteenth floor

Yet nobody mentions that the fourteenth floor is still the thirteenth.

These myths that we all believe in order to coexist.

Which of them must be questioned, and which give the best eclipse

Of distance between us. A force field, a structure, a bird waking from above

The first hint of sunlight, the ripples of white within

Gray clouds moving, a gift for what wants to grow

A relatively warm January morning, a poem made by ee cummings

All of what you get to do if you choose, to not run yourself ragged

To not feel responsible for other’s lives, to realize the value of realizing

Your codependence may be masked sometimes as a desire to help

As a desire to love, as a desire to control the ones around you

For what if their affection leaves and you are left all alone

In the words you are delivered this: Presence, God, Connection, Source

All words for what can be felt but not explained

All words that take into account that all is flowing

That you are only a stick in a river

But the stick of an oak

A former intention of an acorn

As an intention of your own soul

As an intention of a zygote

Or a y chromosome

Or the way words you have not used in years can be recalled

When you force yourself to sit, you align spirit with body and mind

Moreso, you realize that they have always been aligned

You ask ego to move. You

Be the energy that spreads and touches and lifts other energy,

That washes away the negative, that lets voice not drift

Into talk that attacks; let talk contain multitudes

Let talk contain solutions and ways to lift everybody that walks

Even Tamera passing a second time, talking to herself before sunrise

As you talk to yourself, as we all talk to each other

In conversations never spoken

Inside daily minds, millions of conversations each day

In a city as small as New Orleans and as wide as Burundi.

In a village of sorts are there less internal conversations?

Is it better when the monkey yells to let other monkeys know:

There is a lion! or There is danger in the tree!

Is better even something that can be measured?

Is what you can find to eat what can be grown outside the school?

The gift of arugula that keeps on giving, the gift of gynura procumbens

The gift of mirlitons and the need for a fence

The gift of letting others take charge

The gift of a car horn at six thirty in the morning

The gift of seeing that all you encounter

Is a gift.