Let and Let and Let

 

It is just you. And a pulse. And breath.

 

-Jung said to be alone

to find what supports you

when you can no longer

support yourself

can give you an

indestructible foundation.-

 

Love doesn’t exist

when it cannot get in or out-

this much I know.

There are degrees of loss and a kind of

bottoming out

when you give too much

take from yourself too much

let too much

cowering from yet hovering over

your gutted pearl–your silence

a shell in the ocean

you try to fill.

 

Taking:

You try to fill with someone else’s love,

borrowing and draining them

to pull your own noise into notes

or maybe

you put love in a box—decoupaged, replicated,

a paint-by-number and absolute

so absolute

you can’t fit inside it, loose in all that room.

 

 

Giving:

Others wanting pieces of you

you couldn’t part with-so few left-

you think you have to do something to have it,

to feel it, to give it back, borrow it,

swallow it whole until

it finishes and leaves.

 

You, too small for what you thought love was,

wandering and wandering around with “love me”

on your lips with a hunger, not sadness.

Not desperation.

You can’t despair what you do not know.

The hunger is in your fist in your stomach,

and it clenches love notes and grenades.

You burn and burn from emptiness.

You squeeze your fist so hard

so you can keep it, hold it, harness it and own it,

the fire in your gut “here, here I am”

opening and closing around the pain

you believe is you.

 

The hunger is to be seen.

Witnessed.

Too long hiding in your own skin

chasing oceans for your pearl

to put out the fuse

until you tire to

a body, just a pulse, and breath.

Bottomed out to your final denominator,

the fear so big you can’t fight it,

so you

let

and

let

 

Let. Of all that you were and are,

violent and beautiful in existential space.

You have no choice but to be your first witness,

or disintegrate.

Let go.

Feel yourself move. Be just a body,

beating and bleeding and exhaling and in and

“here, here I am” and your fist is empty

and it is terrible and beautiful-

this death and awakening.

 

You gravitate back towards your center, your gut–

the fear and loss extinguished the fuse,

and a new hunger buds that doesn’t starve

but sustains you.

Time. It takes so much time.

 

And one morning you will find yourself,

pant legs rolled up, knee-deep in the sea,

plucking treasures from the ocean’s floor

and plunking stones and shells into buckets,

the pearl beneath the surface

slipping unnoticed between your grasping

hands, your fists of sand

dusting back over and burying the

round perfection.

You collect and choose your treasures,

you never would have sought the stillness

of water without having known its loss.

You stand and stretch your back,

and feel the world move.

 

 

 

(art from Pinterest, not mine)