Posted on by EAT · 1 Comment

Sacrifice

I was delighted to discover in Gresham, right across the street from a coffee house I like, one of the largest California black oaks I have ever encountered. Here I like to lean against its dark gray trunk and practice my bansuri flutes, even in the cold as my fingers numb and my lip splits. I feel a connection with this particular tree, as I do with all black oaks, so I don’t mind the sacrifice.

Sacrifice

a cold spring breeze
   splits my lower lip
       quietly so as not to disturb
 the wind in the wood

this song is past memory
   it fills an asphalt space
       between tall cracked walls
 calling out the leaves

my body begins to tremble
   against the broad high trunk
       which holds up the night
 the wind falls hush

in the halogen light
   tiny oak leaves quiver
       and i notice now the blood
 smeared on the hollow reed

Posted on by EAT

sheer

One of the ways I’ve conceptualized coming, as in being born, is something like a dream in which there is no real self, but an egoless point of perception that shifts through abstract perceptions of unreality until at some point it is yanked from the ether and pinned to a fixed location—the new life that wails confused from the womb.

sheer

the dreamer falls
  crashing through patterns of ice
     submerged in crystal black waters

a flash of cold
  sears through the senses
     and life begins

And I’ve found myself conceptualizing going, as in dying, in much the same way. That point of perception becomes dislodged from the decaying self and returns to an egoless realm of dream and abstraction until the next time it is yanked into some fixed reality.