BodyPoems
By Seth Miller
1)
frozen music, the deep melody of the universe
structure and rhythms curving, stretching
link spirit to matter, frame to will
sponge of life, maker of the deed
all source and hidden sparkle
dance of untold aeons rippling through hollow core
carry me, step, pause, weight, flow, again
teach me articulation with the world
round my edges and curve into my spaces
asking nothing
sitting, standing, lying, running, falling
catch me gently and squeeze me into the earth
your home and garden
where deepest soils hold highest mysteries
where the waiting happens
2)
I am a drop of sea
blood rushing
dynamism the only stillness
Pour me into myself
like honey into a jar of bones
so that all my life is sweet
What keeps me from movement?
Can water do anything but flow onwards
into the swirling vortex of life?
Ultimately it is only the pulsing
the twisting, undulating vortices of yes and no
slurping and sliding into unknown futures
birthing them like stars
All solids precipitate from mother water
the salt of the earth from the blood of angels
Flow with me
the dance of life resumes
I am creation
3)
I am the moving of the world
the whispering of the subtle self
and I churn the darkened husks of the day
rolling them to infinity and back
like eavesdropping on a conversation between a mountain and the sky
I carry the seeds of the future
and sing the song of the hierarchies
See yourself coming to yourself!
In my sacrifice I meet the world for you,
And can only dissolve, dissolve, dissolve
while you insinuate the color of heaven into fire
What lies beneath?
What careful secretions slide into waiting periphery?
the calling of the depths, the sound of gods,
the gurgling belch of time
the reversing of all sweetness
the moment of impenetrable reckoning
this beckoning, this yearning to be free
4)
I am the fire of becoming
the membrane of worlds colliding
what is beyond my boundary is not
within it is all me
for I am Shiva, destroyer of universes
nothing is useful except through its dissolution in me
its meeting with the vast peripheries of self, an appointment with god
So sleep into the activity of the stars
let the planets rumble through your bones
their rhythm is your pattern, the seed of sense
all these involuted organs, time flowing backwards
some shady dream of other a persistent inner glow
sidles us up to our liminal gaze of self
the windows to our other inner being
a subtle yes whispered to reflecting skies
5)
my shadow is cast from the future
threads drop from some wandering asterism
my heart a puppet, but I the puppeteer
a slow path to wade from
“tell me of your homeworld”
I am the listening, the rhythm maker
beneath time, manifestation, intuition
Open me
give me Quality, I will transform
spring into summer
me into you
sense
flex
involute
manifest
how is this?
can this go on?
trust the movement
my Salt or Sulfur
is this real or fantasy?
I am the true logician
I lie beneath logic
surrender me to myself
the alter of fire is prepared
it is my intention
ready for death
the burning, so sweet
my only home, this dying
the source of life
6)
quaff the philosopher’s stone
the dark ambrosia of life
which expands into hushed destiny
amidst again collapsing clash of worlds
fear not for the fallen waters
but bring breath –
oh there into fading limbs of yesterday
there, into shadowy trails of thunderous thoughts
there, into rarefied vision of a morrow’s wakening
the whispered exchange of life and death
eighteen sighs within a moon’s small year
brings God into the small spaces
where with rounded breath and muted eyes
speaks the whole of creation in subtle alchemy:
the highest transformation is surrender
7)
somehow music is the key
the dance of perception playing across my strings
biting, twining, remembering
lifting and falling simultaneously
the way to the sun tumbles out of the earth
when I swallow the inverted dawn
and now it is I who am singing and laughing
tracing the folds of light as they sequester themselves in my veins
sending shards of the world into my eyes, into my third eye
where the play of destiny rocks in the cradle of thought and action
sources of time and becoming, a rain of fallen angels
lost amidst sullen curves and impassable fires
the will of wills, what lives only as a question, a quest
living as the subtle music spilling out of my ears
while my head becomes a mirror of the cosmos