Waking Up Meant Digging Graves

Bruises. Blank pages. It's like bringing order to what is formless, like how happy you can be seeing sunlight on the lake or in a prism.

And begin.

Consciousness is non-dual, you say? Smoking stolen cigars in the mall parking lot, a year or so before the troubles began in earnest. Quarry jumping to impress a girl, story of my life until very recently.

Calves dying in the basement, all I knew falling asleep was that waking up meant digging graves.

I remember nothing now but the absence of any explanation, which left me to find my own way out of the matrix of language and grief which, for better or worse, I never did. Cold rice and peas for lunch, washing it down with day-old tea, what else is new. There is a way to not play this game, would you like me to show you?

Repetition. Refusing rituals and all experiences, even those masquerading as enlightenment. At a late juncture discovering stillness, settling into it, may my body be carried by my chickadee wives home.

Between wind gusts, horses crying out for love.

Alarming lies. How happy I was in those days, that corner in the library, that little apartment on Church Street, that spiritual oasis before I cast myself into a desert which I only recently stumbled out of, unwise and nearly ruined. The Queen has abdicated, leaving me with ten thousand poems and a sense that something is even wronger than I can know.

I mean a juncture where metaphors stop working. Moonlight on snow, something blue and fine grinding all the cursed miles between us into dust.