Ecstasy (A Poem)

This is a love poem, but blogging it is also an elegy. The magazine it originally appeared in circa 2014 (print, no less), was the now-defunct From the Well House.

It’s a shame when any creative endeavour has to end, although I may have been part of the problem, being that I never knew until I was checking links and found this poem’s was broken. All that I could find was a Facebook page without anything updated in years. I wasn’t engaged, and engagement is how art lives & flourishes.

I had previously blogged about this poem’s release, and I always hoped it would be in a format that could be more shareable. Just a shame it has to be my own blog. Either way, with National Poetry Month underway, I thought this would be as good a time as any.

Is this a good poem? Am I doing National Poetry Month justice? Probably not. But I think poetry isn’t about doing well or poorly. It exists, and we, the reader/listener/receiver, use it as a tool or bear it as a burden or forget about it and move on. Basically, I’m trying to say that I’m not so crafty with poetry; more mystical than anything. That mysticism is certainly where this poem was born.

Please enjoy.

Ecstasy:
Adam Meets Eve, Again

I
Here in our holy sanctum
the circle is completed, shaped whole,
made one, omnipresent,
mortal forever.

In the place I spilled forth
I return to, wrapped in blood red drapes,
waiting for you until dawn,
or until all the caffeine pills are gone.

In thirteen hours my brain
will be a sponge freed from duty,
scrunched and plied
until it froths at the tear ducts.

Here I have found my dear rock,
my rocking horse, my mighty stone,
the pebble in your shoe,
the piss in your hot tub.

In your hands all the stillness lost from the cosmos
returned to the middle ground
between a man and a woman and
the shivering, slithering stares of the shadows.

In twenty-four hours my heart
will cry for love
but will only
manage a whimper.

 

II
I have known you for many lifetimes
and here we meet again.
Between birth and death
with a wish for it all to end.
We expand our heads
so we can carry that weight
of the world’s sadness, carry it
not away, but right to the centre,
not to fall upon us but
for us to fall unto.

We are lovers, as we always have been,
will always be, even after our faces
change, we will still recognize
the two true eyes.
Whether by anomaly or by norm
this life I leave without you,
though we remain utter
companions of the soul
through utter eternity
until we reach the other side
(the inside).

You and I go arm in arm
down the street
to our monument-less deaths
at our own pace.

If we are patient
we will get that quiet life,
idyllic and enchanted.
The kind of life we elude to
with strokes of each others’ hair
and poiesis en spontaneity.
All the time we have spent
out of bounds will be replayed
in our safe space, underneath
the scrawl of the galactic stain;
biotically two,
spiritually one.

 

III
Over bubbling water
(ooo our primordial ooze)
and faint up-shafts of
tone-shifting lights
I see the thousand million
faces you have worn,
and I know each one.
And I have loved each one.

 

IV
I am terrified
to be alone,
though you remind me
loneliness stands next to impossibility.

In the dark or the brightness
I catch fire off your spark,
it keeps me going approximately,
speed to match my mentality.
Shatter infinite fatalities,
drug store socialities,
with please and thank you and a fork
and a spoon if you invite me.

Yet just us, fire and fire,
and mirrors of fire burning fire,
singeing desire onto our foreheads
to make silences real awkward.

Let the body do the talking,
it is much more expressive.
So much said with a kiss,
with a moist palm or
smooth cheek to cheek—
let us speak the way we would speak
if speech was inconsequential.

With double the world
but half the potential;
all the ways out but
so many more to enter
in torrential flash floods
in the middle of December,
in the middle of the day
—fuck—
indescribable.

 

V
A freewheeling time for you and I.
So vibrant with all the elastic bands pulled tight
across cranial valleys—
the eyes scanning the room one hundred times a minute,
sourcing the damned, the holy,
the incomprehensible, the unknown,
the scapegoat, the inspirer.
Conspired and sweetly buried sous-terre
so that roots retain moisture and can feel the earth’s grunts;
tamely ravaged by truth,
urges of honesty, nostalgia, hormones,
fantasies and suspicious dreams.
No wheel is free unless it can get itself rolling.

 

VI
Who can say how many
semen tears I shed?
Unreal sensation,
uniting what is to be with what is.
Unproclaimed by prophets
for fear of normalization.
Taken advantage of
sometime after god had been buried.
All the apprehensions shattered
like our clothes’ mosaic on all surfaces.

How long until this wears off?
Until you have forgotten that it is there.

 

VII
Hail my Holy High Priestess,
All this is for her.

All for life?
Or all for vitality?
It does not matter because after All
I will collapse and become frail.
Live for Today or do not live at All.
All the ways to resuscitate
so forget your poor excuses,
indulge in your rich imagination
or do not indulge at All.

It is the only place where I am alive
at All.
The perfect place to learn how
to fall.

 

VIII
Your moments reach me.
You do not have to be near
for me to feel you.
We need no title, no social brand
to share our happiness.
All we have are ourselves,
yet all we need are each other.

 

IX
I come and go like the wind
yet I long for many things
steadier than I can be.
You are one—or at one—
I vie for atonement with you.

If you will be a shaky leaf,
or a migrating bird,
a lost scrap of newspaper,
a child’s beloved balloon,
I will be your wind.

 

X
If I collapse
will I fall into you?
Or will we both fall?
Or will you have long ago
let me go to the
carelessness of gravity?

When you are down, my dear,
feed off my Energy.
Feed and feed and leave a vacuum
with which I replace empty space
with Energy reciprocated.
Feed because you need it,
Take it because I offer,
Succeed because you can.

 

XI
I kneel to my Queen,
but I do the biding
of my Holy High Priestess.

I would resurface Atlantis if you needed land;
melt glaciers if you preferred the sea.
Fortunately for our space theatre
all you want is
love from me.
I can do that, I really can;
Why won’t you let me?

My High Priestess
wields a shell expelling rays.
Gifts it to me and
feeds me a Queen’s scent
to induce sudden amnesia.

 

XII
It is too bad we cannot
always reside in heaven.
It only visits.
At least we host it,
we allow it precedence,
we welcome it back,
we ultimately let it go.

Almost sounds like Time—
so maybe heaven is not
a destination, not our final product
but that which produces us.

 

XIII
So many contradictions
for a boy trying to unify himself
after experiencing cosmic oneness.
That must be why the Universe
appears to be growing to our earthbound eyes:
it constantly juxtaposes itself
in the wobbly mirrors of spit-flung images.

I must not get caught,
lost in the divided interests.

I am many, many things,
erupting from Nowhere
and going there too.

[ END ]