AVANT SOUL

When I'm in anguish, I write poetry.  It isn't a cure for the common cold,
or the uncommon flailings of the world.  Were I to brew it, and distill
it as a cup of tea, perhaps within its essence I'd be warmed and wise.

For now, the words spill out my eyes, my fingers, entering back in,
streams of sound to hit the silent page and be reactivated again.

After I pass, like a tin of tea sitting upon some two-dimensional website,
or bound within an old-fashioned book, I'll be hydrated by liquid thought.
Pour me streaming and naked into a stranger's eyes, my heart to briefly
be known by another before being cast aside.

And so it is, like a giant tree in my garden.  It towers above three stories;
you shall never see it, for it's already rare indeed that you venture outside
to languish silently in your own garden, how unusual and rare would it be
for you to visit mine.

Yet here it is winter on the Earth.  Even in the brightest rays of summer
a chill is cast across electronic skies.  More than a winter of discontent,
or need, or want, it's a winter of scrambling, mad dashes, and forward marches.

Dreams are dashed to some impervious, bad-hair, rock-and-roll Furies and Fates.

Truly it *is* winter in my garden.  I watch the great leaves fall from
this towering tree, spinning in the air, landing in piles where millipedes
and pillbugs and the hidden majesty of soft, wet slugs are soon to find their
rent-controlled homes, covered from the morning chill, royally cloaked in the
decomposing fibers of decay, the high fashion fur of cellulose and compost.

I take a deep breath.  The air is cold but is warmed inside.

As the leaves fall the thick trunk and branches remain: naked, mottled with
various grays and browns of peeling barks, a bit mossy in shades, and moving
yet not breaking to this chilly winter wind. 

Evil is brisk now; it spins and blows from numinous PR agencies.

So it is with my friends, colleagues, and associates. They spin and tumble,
they clutch at empty air, they toss like clothes that can never be dry because
they have not arrived. 

They're whirling on their way to Somewhere without ever being Here. 

I wish they would come join me for a winter's walk, or come out and play,
but they are far too busy with important things, with the dread and seriousness
of melted snow, and how can I tell them that all too soon they will be joining this
immeasurable ocean, when this whirlwind, this snowstorm of activity, continues
to blind their transfixed eyes?

How hard (and rare) it is to connect with those we love.  Yes, this busyness is
like an affliction, like a virus, whose only cure -- solitude and breathing --
take one back to oneself, and the source.

Everyone's purchased an "E-ticket" on the "roller coaster merry-go-round,"
and there are too many folks fighting for too few seats, remembering,
if anyone can remember, to take this simple breath.

This breath breaks the falling of the leaves, the shedding of daily skins and
the frantic rush to succeed.  This breath occurs outside of our needs / and wants /
and schedules / and all we think must be happening, when in fact right now is all
that we have, in-and-out, just aware of the small, still, etheric breeze which
blesses us.

You forget the inner wind blowing from the place where you came, but I have
not forgotten.

Feeling like the world is whirling around me, and knowing that as I sit in this
place of blue majesty, that the magic and wizards and shamans and rare friends
will appear, without my wanting nor asking.

In the meantime, I watch the frantic -- frenetic -- grasping whirlings,
and twirlings of my colleagues around me, and for some reason it makes
me wistful.  The tree is bending again from the fierce winter winds.

I sip a tiny tea cup of wisdom. 

My friends are here, but most of the time are on the other side.  The people
who imagine that they are real, in their needs and their rushings all about,
are only fragments, less substantive than the spirits of the dead who have passed
and find peace, whose whispers are still heard.

I hear the whispers of the dead in my winter garden of the falling leaves.