Stream of Consciousness

20 May 2012
Evening
Tel Aviv

I want to teach you with the words of my soul so we can remember how to be alive, and return to our place in the abode of things. Tell me how you dream. Do you weave fabrics across a twisted loom, or crochet directly with your fingers from God's cat's cradle? I want to speak again with leather tongues and bootstraps made from rawhide. I don't want to lose myself again in you, but stay entwined in my own breathing, blood coursing through my veins and the crevasse of my heart, to light my candle-burning eyes awake with the fear that this may be the last moment I live or the first moment I die.

Can we speak ourselves alive together? Can we stop radiating soul sparks in such lonely places and come together again to feel divine?  Where did I go when I was not with you…back into my cave, or deep inside a mole-darkened tunnel?  These adventures never let God know how small or amazed I feel to continue walking, trembling, upon this path.

I don't know music other than the blind kiss of this irresistible storm which blows the blankets of my emotions off like leaves before a thunderbolt.

Will the day come when I stop trying to measure my soul against the vagaries of others? How is it that one minute I am black and dull, the next afraid or listless, then seized by a fury, emptied out, and spewing poetry from my ears? The questions will never end, not until the stars empty themselves of light, or the fingers of our galaxy forget to stroke the sun one last time. Each word is a personal memory, a masterpiece waiting to be created no matter how awake or asleep we are. Every fragment of lost soul will come home, or we will find it in the end, just you watch.

Even I don't know what destiny is, but I sense it the way a cat smells the tracks of a mouse under the garden bushes at midnight. There is a turning point, a place of balance between fear and excitement, drowning and elation, life and no-life. It is the simple (or not-so-simple) choice between who we are and who we choose to be; between who we think we are, who our parents, relatives, friends, or society thinks we are, and who we feel we are—in our bones, stomach, and intestines, in the soles of our feet waltzing out the door at 2 am to remind us that we know how to improvise.

This is the fire that calls us home. This is the water that cleanses us, the earth we grow upon, the air we breathe and fly into. We have not forgotten how to chase our own shadows down; we have just forgotten how to look at ourselves in the light. Maybe our little waltz would birth lightning and storms, anger brewed in strong black tea, or milk squeezed from Satan's tit. The truth is that I don't know where this writing is going, just as little as you do. We're both strangers here on this blank page, staring out at each other after another long day lived inside the solitude of our own minds.

These memories keep turning themselves into sparks and then I forget what is happening, at least in medical terms. My soul opens up to receive pieces of low-hanging light, I am visited by angels, and deep-glowing eyes stand out amidst a haze of cloud. I wonder if certain readers have come to know me in a different way by hearing these lines taken from inside my cocoon. How do I know what my insides look like until they are spilled out on a mural to paint, murmur, and stare befuddled at the colors they make? These poems will never end, nor will this experience. I just keep plugging and unplugging the metaphors, trying to get the amplitude right.