It is not yet time for another.
It is time to be alone,
time to wait for grace
to pull me up muddied and waterlogged
from the turbid lake I chose to dive into.
Time to sit here, watch the world go by,
let my youth be taken from me,
take notes now and then as I am given
these resplendent moments, when I realize
that nothing needs to be changed.
Poetry
“Abundance”
From the Latin, abundare: to overflow;
antonym: lack.
I have never lacked the capacity to feel,
but to feel abundance itself,
to feel filled, to welcome
and accept my own lack—
this is rare.
True abundance includes lack;
the abundant one feels fully her deficiencies.
In her fullness, she does not repress her emptiness.
In her wholeness, she invites the pain of her imperfection
to be partner to her joy.
Spirit of Abundance, show me the heart so true to you
that it embraces its own lack and limitation,
the soul so full that it loves its own emptiness.
Grant me vision, Spirit of Abundance,
allow me to see you
when my nature sees lack, and lack only.
Show me the one who loves with you in her;
I will love her in her loving.
If I cannot love the seeming lack of perfect love within myself,
let me love her, the abundant one,
knowing she too experiences
the same lack that I do.
Grant me hearing, Spirit of Abundance,
let me listen for your music, music that erupts
like a fountain out of the body, overflowing
from the abundance of song in the soul.
Let the mad river of my heart stream out in dance
when I am overwhelmed by you, in me,
a dance of my emptiness and your fullness,
a rhythmic embrace of the whole.
Never am I closer to your abundance
than when I dance in time with my emptiness.
To find you there, at the center of that deep hole.
Even there.
You can hear the Trumpet of Escape beckon you,
you can feel the Iceberg of Loneliness sink you,
you can suffer as the Whale of Dread swallows you whole.
You can still know abundance in the midst of it all.
Somehow.
Don’t ask me how. I’m no expert here.
But somehow.
Somehow, beauty weaves through it all,
and beauty, in truth, is always abundant.
Beauty is the tremendous weaver,
and abundance the hand with which she weaves.
“Where Are You In This Darkness”
Are you here in this darkness?
I don’t hear you.
You are silent, just like me,
but my silence knows no peace,
and in your silence, I hear,
I know, there is nothing else.
The peace of your silence
would shatter my nature.
Half-formed vestiges shatter;
I grow deaf in the silence after.
Shards are strewn on the ground,
my feet bleed from the glass.
I look down and see my nature
reflected in the fragments.
I do not see you there.
Where are you in this darkness?
I do not see you,
I do not hear you,
and I cannot touch you,
but I can speak you,
so soundlessly I murmur your name.
“Heart That Will Not Let Itself Belong”
Heart that will not let itself belong,
I speak from you, to you,
not to distract you away
from the ways you suffer,
but to redeem you in your suffering.
Be in it, since you must.
Let it be there, since it is.
I cannot help but be here, where you are,
but there are countless ways you can evade,
escape, exaggerate, distort, transport yourself
elsewhere. You’ve done it before,
you’ve done it today, this hour.
In this minute be with the pain
without naming it,
possess it by letting yourself belong
to it. Allow it, give it room to breathe,
as you sit in this room
and listen to the voice of your longing
grow louder.
Heart that will not let itself belong,
let your resistance persist,
allow yourself to feel
your struggle to allow yourself
to belong
here, or anywhere.
Anywhere else,
the heart sings in its refrain.
Anywhere but here.
Take me away,
give me the sharp fleeting pain
of parting,
take from me the dull continual suffering
of this settled state.
Restless heart, I speak to you,
and as always I speak from you.
Where can you go
where what you feel now
will not go with you?
Heart that will not let itself belong,
that longs without cease, listen
as the voice of your longing grows
deafening. It is a commanding voice.
Another voice speaks
in silence;
it does not command.
Listen: is this the voice
that will let you belong?
Drink in this silence as the earth
drinks in the summer rains.
“The Newborn Other in the Manger”
There is someone in me who wants me dead,
some sadistic King Herod looking to behead
the newborn Other in the manger inside me.
It is unbearable to this King Self to be subordinate
to anyone, even someone within, and yet the King
Self cannot help but see all others as superior.
Everyone has something to kill for.
That one is more attractive, that one more spontaneous;
That one is kinder, that one gentler.
All are greater. The King is the least
of God’s doomed children, a lone creature,
a pitiful beast, destined to wander
like some grotesque Frankenstein
over the dividing mountains
with his unearthly self.
Walking with intent purpose to destroy
himself, King Herod, yet unable to bring forth
the Other while on this path of destruction.
Only by allowing Herod to be, it seems,
can the unseen one
find space to grow within.
There is now a vast chasm between Herod
and the newborn Herod wants dead,
but as the infant looks curiously into this void,
the space itself, and the violence
the space has created, borne of separation,
lessens. There remains always
a space, a space forever
large or small enough to ensure
the newborn in the manger keeps being born.
“More Than This I Cannot Say”
I am not as I appear to be.
That something else I sense in you,
go towards that thing in me.
And if ever you wither in your solitude,
sense me there, withered with you.
I am never away, no matter your mood,
whether your heart sinks or your soul leaps.
Find strength in this.
And don’t worry, I will never reassure you
with: ‘you are not alone.’
I assure you I too am alone,
more alone than I can say.
I, with you,
am alone, except
when I am
with you.
And more than this I cannot say.
“What Am I But What Longs To Be”
Is it you, the one
whose name rises softly to my lips,
who I am longing for?
You who are absent, while I am here.
If you were here with me, would I find
someone else to long for?
Today rain falls on the ground,
and from within my heart this longing rises,
like a river surging over its banks,
like an eagle soaring above its nest,
like a stone rolling from infinity to infinity.
Rain falls, stones roll, time moves on,
and all but this longing in me is still.
Yet: what am I
but what longs
to be?
Your name is like the gentle rhythm of rain,
falling, and my voice keeps speaking it,
though to speak it brings me pain.
Who are you, you who are
absent, whose name rises softly to my lips?
Are you the one I am longing for?
The rain comes down harder now,
not so gentle as before.
It is a day to love or to love
from a distance, which is to long.
No distance is far enough, no closeness is close
enough. There is no safety or rest or comfort
in distance, there is only this longing, this aching
unrest of being apart from, separated by
the river you once crossed to meet her.
“Where Are You From?”
I can’t say.
Here, where I am now,
you see me, and I see you,
but no one sees
where I am from. I cannot see
myself here. I am not myself
here.
Who then, how then,
why, then, am I here?
Do you see the homeless man,
his hands shaking,
panhandling for change?
See him.
See that he and I
come from the same place.
Do you see the nameless wild-eyed cat
perched or trapped on the window sill,
certainly not in, and not quite out?
See her.
See that she and I
come from the same place.
I am not from here,
but I am here
to see
the man without a home,
to be
the cat without a name.
I come from the unknown
or from nowhere, or from somewhere
I’ll never know,
and I leave here as a great fool leaves,
I leave here like leaves of sage,
lit on fire to leave a circle
open, broken, only able to ache
its way whole.
I come from where I pass through
tomorrow,
where my lips pass from speech
to rapture.
Yesterday I walked like a camel.
Today my feet will not listen.
I have tried to walk in a straight line with them;
they can do nothing but whirl in circles.
I come from what I dance around,
what the wind and I create in our movement:
that’s what I’ve come to move into.
See how this creation creates the creator.
See, this body, it lives to leave,
so I’ve come here to move through here,
back to where I am from.
See me as I walk away,
moving forward, walking back.
See me as I pass the ones, so many,
who’ve forgotten where they come from,
that it is not here.
See each one.
See all these, and see me—
we come from the same place.
“After Death, The Great Silence”
“To use words but rarely
Is to be natural.”
—Tao Te Ching, Book 1: XXIII
Some say: ‘Silence is death.’
Let these talkers live a day as I do,
My soul dying from lack of their death,
And they will refute themselves.
Dead, bloodless words
Aim in vain to compel me
To go against my nature and spirit
In untold ways throughout the day.
My nature is a fire set ablaze by silence,
A storm bombarding a calm house,
A discordant note, restless as wind,
Wrestling harmony. Words fail.
To hear the storm, to feel the fire,
To endure the discordant note,
I must stay silent and listen.
If silence is death,
Let that death revive my soul,
So when Death itself comes to claim me,
I will know already how to love
The great silence that comes after.
“Like A Widowed Man Am I”
Like a recently widowed man
Remembering nights of unbearable passion,
Fighting the impulse to end it, unable to mend
The widening hole in his soul, so he goes out,
And the sight of couples in hand is a knife wound
The doctors can neither see nor heal,
For the doctors can heal only visible and outward wounds,
And thus the widowed man’s inward grief continues
On its gruesome path of self-destruction,
And as the fear takes told of him he takes a lover,
And as this new and unfaithful lover takes hold of her lover,
Her other lover, he shows up at her house,
Walks into her room, and sees her making love
With another man, and the pain of it commands him,
“Do something!” but he stands frozen
In the clutches of her infidelity, clutching
The carpeting floor and then gripping his own hair,
Ripping it out of his scalp, his suffering resistless,
His lover’s body and his dead wife’s body together consuming
His mind, in a fire to match his heart’s desperate fire
That will not die, and in agony he cries,
“Strike me down! Destroy me!” If only to go down
And out in tragic if futile glory, caught in the grip
Of forceful sorrow, imposing itself upon him
And tearing his fragile heart open
Like a lion tears open a gazelle—
Like a recently widowed man am I,
Though I am young and never married, and
There is no outward reason for me to feel such grief.
Like a widowed man am I.
Brian Leibold 