There is no breath that's like a breath
that's taken three miles high.
And never so deep was a sleep
after days of light in eye.
And water is the most beloved
when burning thirst is slaked.
To starving souls no gourmet meal
e'er bested bread, fresh baked.
Climbing a mountain, I feel like I've escaped Plato's cave. My senses reel as though they're a crew of newly freed slaves. The sky is bluer, rivers green, each grit granule is clear. And even at the very edge, there's ease in feeling fear. By "ease" I mean not frozen stiff, but like a friend so dear that one can take one's grand peril, a gift received with cheer. Take me to the mountains, I say, where it's serene and real, and I can open up my sight to a world that's ideal.
I've seen in ordinary eyes a special twinkling glow. In rough and sinewy muscle I've seen a grace in throe. From rotund torsos, I have seen a lithesome prance or strut. I've seen a thing called character, in schnozzes that kink or jut. If beauty below the surface, it finds you splendor-blind. Then defect 's not in the object but in the viewer's mind.
The flawless deep green melon rind
houses a pink, bland flesh.
The rind - pitted, yellowed, lumpy -
hides fruit: red, sweet, & fresh.
I stand upon the cobbled walk as scooters whiz on by, and think this world 's too fast for me, and tilt my face to sky. But there's a contrail gash up there made by a hurtling sky-tube that jets its way to who knows where - while I'm the slack-jawed rube. To match the world to my breath's pace, and watch the blur lines form, and hear each note of music played... We'd sync to my waveform.
I pause in woods one winter day when leaves stick to the ground, and twigs and trunks stand stiff & straight - a breeze the only sound. It's a world without walls or bounds, but one can't see a mile. One's sightline is obscured by trees -- their trunks not single file. A world, at once, open & shut to eyes and ears and mind. But I've never felt so at home, for i'm no lonesome pine.
Around the corner, down the street who knows just what you'll find. I often head on down that way when I wish to unwind. A vendor might set up a cart, selling divine munchies, or philosophers might hold court: wannabe Socrates. Or there are those days of muggers, or when painted girls flirt, or when the somnambulist roams in sleep, sans a nightshirt. The city never lacks chaos: always something to see. Sometimes it pulls one forward; sometimes it makes one flee.
Sitting naked beside the road, stripped of all I'd once owned. I see a flower stare at me, and recall being stoned. The painful thumps upon my flesh, the cracks internal heard, the racing breath, the anxious feel as my sight slowly blurred. What crime is madness, I wonder? What is it to be free? A slap to faces of all those tied to the old birch tree?
Our lives are blobs that melt away. You may not sense the drips. It happens slowly; you may never hear burbled blips. You may not feel that it's lighter, or that it's lost some girth. Because you've shed it gently each and every day since birth. And when you feel the withering, will you take it as loss? A good loss like becoming lean -- a skimming of the dross? Or like a vicious theft of the best parts of one's being: like time has grabbed the valuables and taken to fleeing? The melt will continue onward until there is no more. So, think yourself experience rich though you are time poor.
There is an angry beast inside who shakes at me sometimes. It gives me mean and violent thoughts. It draws no moral lines. It'd kill them all in vicious ways without heartfelt remorse. This fever of being must be, until it's run its course. Then I can be civil again, and my blood can cool. And I can play my normal role: -n- be done playing the fool.
the !n(tro)verted yogi 