The Art of Being

There is a nature to the art of asking

I do not know who to ask

Or what to ask for

What is there to need or want

Beyond these basic biological functions

Of the digestive, the sustainable habitat

The rudimentary survival equations

Functioning in the permeations of still here

What if one is asking, what is not here

The infinite space of possibility and mustering

The energy to attempt selecting a course of perception

To examine that question depletes one into a sphere

Density encompassed that is attempted to be released

Through yoga or writing or art or comedy or music or these pensive

Analytical conversations where one hopes to be present

With another individual for a threshold of time

Without exploding or appearing insane of the stutter shake

Type glaze of the mad boarded-out by sex or perpetuation of the species

Or the comfort of human contact, touch, a peace in the oceanic sway

That the idea of choosing is terrifying

Election begets subscription to forms of worship

Tiny festering viral addictions bubbling in the notions

Of specificity floating on ponds of the arbitrary

Fallow and frigid visualizing that iced-over solidity

Is the inevitable body in the trunk of the car for an American god

To burry in the seasonal absolute graveyard of the seers beyond this

The ask for help in the sideways quagmires of human connection

Of who really wants to stare into another human’s eyes for that grayish blackness

Folding inbent and cornerless with nothing to grip but the realization

Of oneness absolute cascading pall over the illusion of time, life, death, and the batch

So that the cyclical and the quotidian circus merge into this mesh of love and fear

Attempting becomes practicing yanking at chorded continents fissuring fault lines

Deep way down deep in the threads that connect the self, the eternal, and every being

In this inescapable spherical nest just jostling for comprehension in a world

Where all comfort is a blanketed form of distraction except for love

Just basic love in another being bearing empathy to be present

That look, that into the eyes witnessing look, and therein lies the dilemma   

How does one connect with another being after peeling that much off?

How does one find the clothing to be that bit less naked

To even know how to talk in the common-tongue or have any of the old foods

Nourish the palate; to believe in football or cosmetics or pop-candy floss

Or synchronization when the perniciousness of the underlying functional obedience

In greed or religion or politics or social policy or crime or hate or the multiplicity of fears

Converge in a marching riot up into the breath of one’s nose swarming fog

Attempting to convulse the guts to oblige another body

But you know; you know the game, the rank-trick pony bucking to lure another pill-taker

And you look around and feel the madness

The chicanery and the comfort and you no longer want to be comfortable

You want to rejoice in solitude and call out, ask for help in moments and then you realize

The only ones you want to talk to; what would you talk about; what would you do

Where would you go, but love

Love is all there is

The forms of love in friendship and kindness, sex, and embrace, the union, the yoke

The being witnessed and witnessing that kernel of mutual identity in the deepness

How does one cultivate that; how does one find people to share that with

After the scars of unlocking that understanding

How does one dance and dodge and navigate the world to have a convergence

Where the parties both see and are not terrified or dangling on the edge of obliteration

To know how to be in that moment together and know where to go next

To do anything, to go anywhere, to live, the weight of that

Maybe that is why David Foster Wallace did it; he found it and sucked him in

Like the gravity beyond the event horizon

I am so afraid I will stare into that; where this is taking me

The reading, the books, the writing, the person after person touching

But not touching in the intensity like magnetized polarity that can only approach

But never achieve tangency and the calculus is obvious

That in this form the only possibility of maximal proximity but never actually touching

Is love, just blatant unapologetic witnessed love burrowing and blazing

And not the over-simplified web of sex or monogamy, but  

The hunger of asking, for paths, for knowing there is not one but the so-many

Is maddening to the world the daunting impossibility that the answer to the god damn universe

Is right there, surrounding each of us in every face and being we encounter

The potential for all we seek and hunger and pine for is right there in forms

Maybe not ideal or convenient to decode or unlock or crack the nut shells,

But there it is, there in the bodies and spirits and water-liquid capsules of the gods

Staring at us in glances and daring and forbidding us simultaneously

How we can lose hope and faith and know their irrelevance compared to choice

It is all a choice in the how we approach, over and over

Until we see the true beauty is knowing the awareness, the fullness

The sheer magnificent enormity of what it means to love the entire universe

Cannot be done through a single person or static demand; that sort of malleable love requires

Isolation, solitude, and the freedom to move in the well of listening and contemplation

Of coming close and intimate and sparking conversation after conversation

With a rodeo of beings day after day of breaking the bark of the human condition

Until the trunk of the oak is naked with roots that grip the entire galaxy of planets

Drinking the nutrients of the so-many being’s tears and laughs and heartbreaks and romances

To fill one's cup in this mathematics of exponential sharing that to give makes more for both parties

To acknowledge the power of empathy and love and knowing the lover

Will never be comfortable, the pain of knowing one can never truly be touched

There will always be that space, that vibrating microcosm of distance between one and everything

Is filled by the ego, the self, the very idea that I am me; that I exist

And one realizes the great illusion, the self is a lie,

Pretty and need and want and comfortable

And fulfilled and satiated are lies; that vibrate in that space

To create the painting of physical existence in atoms and quarks playing theater

That what I am is actually intention, the choice

I am not bones, flesh, or even the quantum scale shake connect-the-dots

I am steered volition working in mathematical puzzle sculpting beauty

Out of the idea that one does not have to, but does, one chooses

It is a sterile abode in that consciousness, the toy chest is abandoned

The olly-olly-oxen free rollcall is the asking for help,

To say I know; do you know too? 

Will you play these theatrics with me; help me forget that I (we) know?

That is human love; the illusion of what we are creating the fuel of being

So many do so in the quietude of ignorance placating a god, a book, and idolatry of ego

Easier probably, but this ocean of black holes I am asking for help

For whomever you are out there, to try to help me be

To try to help us be with this gravity, yanking stretching time’s dilation

Lips over heart; asking to spend moments that blaze

I will try to repay you where I can

I cannot and was not meant to do this alone; neither were you

Let us greet each other, breathe, peer into the illusion of eyes

And be