Rejection

The rejections pile up,
First The boy,
Then the emails
And now rejections, in the form
Of sealed papers,
Arrive at my doorstep.
Like I need,
A physical reminder to
“I don’t want- you, yours”.

“It’s not you, it’s me”
He said.
“Your work is great, just
Not for us”
They said.
Neither of them having
The courtesy,
The guts,
To speak the truth we both know:
“The problem is with me”.

But that’s fine.
Really, that’s okay.
I’ve done the calculation:
6 months of rejected writing,
Requires 1 week of grieving.
5 rejections,
ergo 5 weeks.
Then its back to pen and paper.

The world has told me
Too many Nos,
It has rejected me,
Too many times,
For me to reject myself.
Me myself and I,
We gon’ keep at it,
We gon’ be alright.

Here today. Gone tomorrow.

Death is both certain and uncertain. We know it will happen, but we don’t know when. EVERYONE DIES, and you are not an exception.

Great endings make us remember a movie forever. In our lives, we avoid writing that last episode. We celebrate life. But death feels dark and sad.

One powerful way to begin understanding death is to consciously reflect on it. Just sit quietly and think about death for a minute. It's not easy! Having denied it for so long, we can't help but find it difficult to imagine death at all. What does death look like?

One important and obvious realization that can come to light when thinking about death is that death is inevitable. The time death will come is uncertain, but that it will arrive is irrefutable. Everything and everyone now alive will one day be dead. This recognition -- that death cannot be overcome -- strikes a fatal blow to the myth of certainty. Contemplating the prospect of death brings immediacy to the present moment, and suddenly a very different reality can unfold.

Through the process of further reflection, a greater awareness of death occurs and eventually a calm presence in the face of death can be developed. Many dying people quite spontaneously and naturally turn their focus away from worldly problems and become concerned instead with questions about the meaning and purpose of life -- an investigation that can be inspirational as well as enlivening. 

Death is both painful to acknowledge and difficult to accept, but it is also the natural and normal outcome of life. Death is the universally shared destiny of everything that lives and is the most powerful teacher of the uncertainty of life and the omnipresence of impermanence.

If we can courageously open ourselves to these truths, we can eventually develop a lasting sense of peace -- and, most importantly, we can be of real assistance to others.

Interestingly enough, when someone dies, even the most religious folks feel sad. We hold onto life as a material property, thus blinding our spiritual beliefs.

Let go of living; it’s not a possession. You can’t control how long you live. But you manage how. Come to terms with death. Being afraid of dying won’t let you make the most of your life.

We take time for granted. But when the end is around the corner we regret our assumptions. Some folks feel guilty for what they haven’t done (e.g., not saying “I love you” or “sorry” more often). Some people get anxious about finishing (or starting) their most valuable project. Everyone agrees that they want to spend their last 10 minutes with their close family.

I look forward to death. I've always imagined it like another door that leads to a higher form of being and consciousness. I'm not completely sure. I've never existed in that realm before. But soon enough, and not a moment too soon, I will know (or possibly not know) what does or doesn't await me.

Love in the Dark Country

Tomorrow for twenty-four hours
I’ll be in the same country as you.

The sky will be constantly shifting,
the morning will be green, a single morning
for my single bed. And in the night

as the dark country goes to sleep
a church bell will measure
the jet-lag of my heart.

I’ll open my suitcase and unfold my life
like a blanket. In the dark country I will lie
all night and wonder how this came to be:

the one light left in the world
is your window, somewhere in the land

of thin rain and expensive trains.
And instead of maps, I have an onward ticket.

Fountain flower

Nothing is comparable to your hands and nothing is equal to the green-gold of your eyes. My body fills itself with you for days and days. You are the mirror of night. The violent light of lightning.
The perfect flame of you.
Smell of oak essence, memo-
ries of walnut, green breath
of ash tree. Horizon and land-
spaces I traced them with a kiss.
Oblivion of words will form
the exact language for
understanding the glances of
our closed eyes.
==You are intangible
and you are all the universe which
I shape into the space of my
room. Your absence springs
trembling in the ticking of the
clock, in the pulse of the light;
you breathe through the mirror. From
you to my hands, I caress
your entire body, and I am with
you for a minute and I am with
myself for a moment. And my
blood is the miracle which
runs in the vessels of the air
from my heart to yours.

A blonde and a lawyer are seated next to each other.

A blonde and a lawyer are seated next to each other on a flight from LA to NY.

The lawyer asks if she would like to play a fun game? The blonde, tired, just wants to take a nap, politely declines and rolls over to the window to catch a few winks.
The lawyer persists and explains that the game is easy and a lot of fun.

He explains, “I ask you a question, and if you don’t know the answer, you pay me $5.00, and vice versa.”

Again, she declines and tries to get some sleep. The lawyer, now agitated, says, “Okay, if you don’t know the answer you pay me $5.00, and if I don’t know the answer, I will pay you $500.00.”

This catches the blonde’s attention and, figuring there will be no end to this torment unless she plays, agrees to the game. The lawyer asks the first question. “What’s the distance from the earth to the moon?”

The blonde doesn’t say a word, reaches into her purse, pulls out a $5.00 bill and hands it to the lawyer. “Okay” says the lawyer, “your turn.”

She asks the lawyer, “What goes up a hill with three legs and comes down with four legs?” The lawyer, puzzled, takes out his laptop computer and searches all his references, no answer. He taps into the air phone with his modem and searches the net and the library of congress, no answer. Frustrated, he sends e-mails to all his friends and coworkers, to no avail.

After an hour, he wakes the blonde, and hands her $500.00. The blonde says, “Thank you,” and turns back to get some more sleep. The lawyer, who is more than a little miffed, wakes the blonde and asks, “Well, what’s the answer?” Without a word, the blonde reaches into her purse, hands the lawyer $5.00, and goes back to sleep.

ONE ART

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant 
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.


–Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied.  It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

How to Touch Her

Technically, and with a love of
technicalities mixed with childlike
wonder, and also a little shame
at the long history of the ignorance
of men. Touch her the way
you would touch whatever’s behind
glass and a Do Not Touch sign
if the glass were suddenly removed
and the sign were given you
to fold it into a beautiful paper crane
to give to her. Touch her that way
every time as though it were
the first time. And when you consider
your cells and her cells are dying
and being born all the time, technically, it is.