unfurnished dust traveling through tumbleweed

“How you love another person might be a reflection of your relationship to God or the world itself, not to the other person, not to any other person, mother, father, sister, brother. Untrusting? Suspicious? Jealous? Indifferent? Abject? These feelings may be an indication of your larger existential position, hardly personal. And the heart is an organ of the soul, in such a case, not the reverse.”   –Fanny Howe
Reference this as a pilgrimage. Gather up leather knapsack but if such a contraption does not exist, prepare the turquoise one given to you by the one who exhales bits of sea glass. Fill it with spiritual remorse, muted sounds of love-making, womb of peace-offerings, reflection of space. Walk to nearest planet where library of crumbled books beg you to put them back together with spit and ink. If such a location does not exist, walk to nearest bodega and purchase a lemon, plastic bottle of honey, and tweezers to pick out the particles of sad hunting through your organs. How do you walk. With hands playing hide-n-go seek in pockets or do they sway like winter’s wind at your side. Do you hop or hunch. What leads you to look up. Write a haiku about the last time you loved:

similar to traf-

fic light, when one is color-

blind and cannot see

 

All these noises are a reminder of the first one. The first time. Or the third time. And all these feelings were gathered on that walk that lasted two or three decades and in your pockets, you picked up moss, mosquito bites, grey, techniques on how to kiss, several steno pads, half of a butterfly, two addictions, an allergy, almost-death, almost-marriage, exhaust fumes, a newspaper dated tomorrow, an over-priced cellular phone plan, champagne mangoes, a dog, a scar, paper, another scar, someone to eat dinner with, a ring which has since rusted, salt.

Before you got here, you were over there. And over there was (maybe) when you were at your happiest or hungriest. Where you need to be is where you are going. So go there.

where were you before you got here.

“A liar can reproduce the feeling that a wilderness does. In Sufism, ‘the pupil of the eye’ is the owner of each member of the body, even the heart, and each part becomes a tool under its lens. It is in and through and with the pupil of the eye that the catch locks between just-being and always-being. The less focused the gesture, the more true to the eye and the heart it is. You are progressing at one level and becoming more lost at another.”       –Fanny Howe.

Here, I move forward. From this distance between gender of collarbone and gender of calves, I am noticed. I notice.

Everywhere in this body, trees. And all the branches that curl around me attached to the others are not attached to me.

All this skin– that will soon be paper– drips of rain and afternoon excursions. Sap replaces blood. Grass is my footwear.

I am itchy, but wait for a darling poet to lean against me, and rub out my knots.

This quest for love has gotten me lost again. This map is torn at the corner and missing a slice of middle america.

I’ve used my passport enough times to understand how to present it.

I’ve been hired as a muse. I get paid to read poems and _________ .

How many clicks of heel or appointments of analysis or carvings of life into flesh to prove containment of love for myself.

I asked them to fall in love with me again but my letter got lost and they keep moving further and further into the wild. There is no internet access in the ocean.

Meditate ten minutes every mo(u)rning, then fall asleep from the germs housing a riot in your body. Awake eight days later to lunch of salt-water diet and handkerchiefs.

“For some persons, meditation, contemplation, prayer indicate that there is an emptiness already built into each body and it is that which (paradoxically) makes them feel at home in the cosmos.”     –Fanny Howe.

How not to get used to all this. Stop reading local newspaper and internet scroll-downs. Stop passing by handsome humans without asking them for coffee. Make the first move sometimes. Live inside present-tense, realizing the past can still guide you but does not have to define you. Where there is empty can be filled. Do not wait for another to fill it. Every breath is a possible movement toward self-kindness and forgiveness. This body does not have to be labeled. It can gather up a respective blur from each intentional push away from gender-normativity. And when love is found, they will appreciate the way your bones articulate their political movement. There is no such thing as stopping. Everything continues…..so continue on.