I am the Emptiness Between My Atoms

My life rustles.
Doubt strengthens my faith.

The knife that wounds me
strikes mostly nothing.

My glass is full of hunger.
And the eruption of distant stars.

It is easy to think wind blown trees
swat the sky with their leaves.

I discovered this old slowness.
I embraced my obsessions like a prophet.

Cultural torpedoes
sunk my ship of state in heavy waters.

There I am on turbulent seas
afloat in the lifeboat of forgiveness.

Void and expanse are not good names
for what exists between stars.

My molecules are interested in being me
for only so long, then they go.

Beside Myself With Grief

Grief is a landlord
who evicts me
as past trauma
ebbs and flows with the present.

It holds possession
of my body
while I watch displaced
from oblique angles.

Of course you cannot imagine
what it is like
to be separated from that
for which you were born to inhabit.

Maybe vast Grief
gave rise to the notion
of the soul
being separate

from the body
and sins the body suffers
at the hands of others.
Or worse—self.

Grief does not ground me
but flies me like a kite
while it acts as a place holder
inside myself.

The only thing to do
is use the tether
to communicate with my tongue
or my fingers to type

so my Grief enters
the ears of others—
who hearing my story
help me carry this brutal survival.

Now it is possible to evict Grief
from my body
and return the flesh
back to its rightful resident.

When I die
mine me for precious metals.

Not just my teeth
but my whole body molecule by molecule.

As you make separate stacks
do not worry

that my soul
may be in jeopardy.

I assure you
it rises on the song you hum.

One from our younger days
when we hoisted a pint together

and sang out loud
joyously.

My happiness abandoned vengeance
as its place of residence.

Temporarily it slummed in my eyes
and untitled the sky I gazed upon.

One by one, my happiness tried out each of my limbs
and felt the exhilaration of motion.

My happiness grew with each
expansion and contraction of muscles in action.

In time my happiness realized to reside
in all of my body at once, it must live in my blood.

So, it set up home in my heart
but regularly traveled to my furthest extremities.

Now that my happiness was in my blood
it learned to love all of me.

In learning to love myself, my happiness
began to experience joy when it joined activities with others.

Joyously my happiness learned the words
friends and community.

My happiness began to explore the ether
so it might fill that essence we call soul.

My happiness found many individual souls
and a few communal souls.

My happiness stands at the edge of a leap of faith
to discover the universal soul.