Love Yourself As Your Neighbor

What if I yanked you out of bed tomorrow morning and dragged you over to the mirror just so I could tell you, You're ugly? What if the next thing I did was bully you through your morning routine, all the while forcibly holding your head down so that you would not notice the glory of the newborn day? What if when you tried to object to this torture, I essentially laughed in your face and told you to shut up?

You would probably refuse to tolerate such treatment... with only one exception. Suppose you yourself were the perpetrator, as well as the victim. Changes everything, doesn't it? Suddenly, all these different species of harassment are acceptable. Suddenly, it's okay to be an abusive jerk.

But it's not okay. Let me make this clear. There is a person walking around in your world with a broken heart, a battered body, and a mind that has been manipulated into empty subservience. You have to help that person. Passing by on the other side of the road is not an option. This is your sacred duty. You must love yourself. I'm not talking about an infatuation that sizzles while you can get something from it and fizzles when the spark is gone. I'm talking about something deep, something all-seeing and all-knowing. Something that exists because you exist. A love that enfolds you like air, simply because you are there. You must love the person that has been entrusted to your keeping, the one whose body, mind and heart are so vulnerable to your will. Love yourself, because until you master this fragile art, the eyes that are yours to blink will not truly see.

Now

I cannot write today. There is no time. The world is whirring past my window in white. In the core of my throat I feel that tightening of the trachea, telling me that my life has gotten too small for me. It's a warning that I recognize immediately. I will not wait.

Accidental Resurrection

My love, unchosen, chooses me
when in my level-headed hate
I leave you to your fate; and then
my uninvited love walks in,

unconscious of my conscious glares,
emphatic sighs, and other clues.
My love takes off its shoes and stays -
some times for hours, some times for days,

disrupting my routine affairs,
re-organizing secret drawers,
unhinging hidden doors, until,
despite myself, against my will,

I feel it. Buried in my ribs,
my heart, thought dead for ages, lives.
And as its beating gives you breath,
I lose my life, my faith in death.

Watching versus Seeing

For months now I've been vaguely noticing the presence of another human being. Not a friend, not a foe, her face appears every now and again on the periphery of my tight concentric vision, disrupting for a moment the illusion of autonomy that shields me from the truth. Her countenance is memorable among the thousands that accost me day to day because of its fierceness. In her eyes there is no giving or receiving. Her jaw is set like steel, and from her throat a synthetic voice arises, run through mechanical filters to keep the life from leaking through.

I watch this angry woman. I watch her and without meaning to, I hate her. We have never spoken. She has never done a thing to harm me personally. And yet her mere presence breathes a toxic fume into the atmosphere; so I lock my face into a gas mask and stare at her through goggled eyes. Once she disappears, I fling my plastic exo-skull to the floor and wheeze in lungfuls of healthy oxygen, rejoicing.

But today I watch her coming and for the first time, I see her. I force myself to see her. My lungs stir, rasping, demanding protection, but I keep inhaling her exhalations, asking myself who this person is, where she has been, what she wants. In the silence I can hear her labored breathing. We cross paths and she yanks her face to the left.

Could Have Been a Tree

I could have been a tree. You do realize that, don't you? This morning, rather than sitting here writing this blog, I could have been out in a field somewhere getting landed in and rained on. Conceded, we're using our first person pronouns pretty loosely here. I myself, insofar as I am human and my humanity more or less defines who I am, could not actually have been a tree and still have been me, in the proper sense of the term. I'm just saying, when we've got a mass of atoms right here, another mass of atoms over there, and tons and tons of atoms in between... well, just, you know, we're all atoms, and it kind of makes you nervous, doesn't it? Who's to say all of us are going to end up becoming the particular configuration of atoms that we call human? I mean, somebody has to be a tree. Somebody has to be a digestive enzyme. Just thank God it wasn't me, or chances are this blog would never have been written, and that would have been a shame.

Storm Drain

Treading the tar at the edge of the curb, I'm surprised by the sound of a melted snowstorm. There by my boots, a cage spreads its rusty grin, revealing a river entombed.

Today the storm drain is alive. If I stare, I can see the rotted guts of autumn stirring lethargically deep in the bed of a babbling brook; lifting, drifting, shifting in the direction of an unexpected spring. The water is insistent: come on, it whispers busily, we've got somewhere to go, and don't pretend you don't know what I'm talking about.

I place my bulky bundled feet on strings of warping steel above the chasm. Amazing. Underneath my daily walk, I've found another world. For a while I listen to the river's voiceless voice, half-wishing I spoke the language. Whatever's being said sounds like conspiracy to me, but then again, what would I know?

At last, conceding ignorance, I step back onto solid ground and start to walk away. My boot soles make a soft cold rubber rhythm on the street. Something strange happens. My senses relocate. Suddenly I am experiencing this moment from the perspective of the world inside that drain. I'm hearing footsteps overhead, not underfoot. Bubbling dankly, I listen until the sound is swallowed up in subterranean stillness. Through the crooked bars... the sky breathes. A decade passes.