Filed under: Written Word and Spoken Notions
Some Things are Moving So Rapidly On Our Senses We Can’t Rely
Darkness becomes me.
I’m sitting in this darkness
waiting for a word
when a stick cracks in the distance
resonating across the forest.
They say you can’t wait passively or quiescently
Waiting for an Advent call.
So I listen a little more.
All by myself in the dark
without a night light,
hearing the attic giants playing in dirt above the bedroom.
I await a message.
The message comes in full sunlight,
at the Riverside Park one day,
as the dogs outrun their masters
with willful and joyous barks, I listen and hear
decibels above common hearing
I feel the word coming in my heart.
My senses run my life just like dogs
chasing the newest friend or a heaved Frisbee
the word cleaves, cuts open marrow out of my bones.
I see how attached to my senses
I really am.
So fallible. So asleep at times.
But it is my senses, so wanting to own me,
that shared the message in the park,
in its subliminal form. Come follow us.
Now I’m awake because I’ve heard the Advent call
as I’m waiting for the coming of sanity and revelation
inside my own breathing skin
I wait like a dog bowing on its front legs
before she runs for the cat or the squirrel
for the thrill of the high of chase and catch.
Today in the sun and dirt where the dogs shit,
the smell so strong that it assaults my nose,
running up to my brain shaking my dream state loose
and out of the dream I come.
Many gods the senses show.
She knows I follow their flow
and attach to them like bees to pollen
or a chrysalis to its sticky sleep shack.
But I, a true lover, devote myself to
allowing the senses to run unattached, free like the dogs;
for restraint of the senses (the more I squeeze the more
active they swell),
shoots the arrows of suffering in all directions, some call it hell.
Our relationship with fullness of life
is forever ours and She/He
will always serve us in the best
way possible—simmering our senses
in this devoted soup of friendship.
There is a sweet taste in this
dyadic dance,
the teacher and student,
Atman lives in each being—transcendental pleasure, the true self,
in the senses of each being in love,
and loved sensuously with the true self, something different
than the coarse matter of human life.
I hear the word, I embrace the lesson.
Sweet honey does come from the
darkest crevice of the rock
and those who will taste life
will drink honey from the rock.
© Christopher Bear Beam, MA 12/06/08
