counting up the shards of remain

“This poetry. I never know what I’m going to say. I don’t plan it. When I’m outside the saying of it,I get very quiet and rarely speak at all.” 
― Rumi, The Essential Rumi

Arithmetic is easy because when you forget what comes next, you can use your fingers to remind you how much you have.

As a child, I counted dots on the ceiling because I wanted to leave my body alone.

As a child, I noticed the skinny fabrics sewed into themselves to create something called trousers or shirt.

As a child, I didn’t realize my body would be following me for this long.

As a poet, I recognize the moment I have nothing left to say is when I’ve finally reached the path toward an answer.

 

silence the silence of silence.

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing
and rightdoing there is a field.
I’ll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass
the world is too full to talk about.”
― Rumi

Somewhere on the other side, there is chance. And it looks like the other side of a blink. And it smells like distilled cherry stems. And it sounds like tin.

Sometimes silence allows time to understand what all this is.

We have a staring contest: the earth and I. We hunt down each other’s language through the pattern of our exhales and discomfort of hollowed-out sound.

Sometimes there is so much to say that the noises of our question marks creates the instrumentation of stillness.

Find a day when the only place you need to be is here. Remain. Knock your tongue against teeth only when you are ready. Only when you are so desperate to utter that it leaks out of you from the sap of your blood.

You will become all of the things and people you have collected all these years.

You will realize that sometimes we just aren’t ready to notice. Until that moment when we stop, remove ourselves from activity and recognize the beauty of what has always been there. Simply following…….