46
The Forbidden Teaching
Rumi`s father
Bahauddin confessed,
in The Drowned Book, that he practiced
the forbidden
teaching of blissful union
with God through
pleasure and desire—
“When I deeply know
my senses, I feel
in them the way
to God and the purpose
of living”—as did I
in medieval Persia,
my past-life
incarnation as Salaam the
Sufi who was pulled
apart by the two
stallions of my
life—my love for God
and sex; and in the
twenty-third year of
my confused and
lonely life I awakened
the kundalini by chance one night as I
meditated on a maple
leaf in the Alpine
city of Annecy, and
the serpent fire nearly
drove me mad again
like it did in ancient
Persia, until I
mastered the sacred art
of dying before
dying.
47
The Poet and His English Teacher
“My story is not for
the faint of heart,”
wrote the ageing poet to his English teacher
fifty years after
handing in his strange poem
“Noman” that exploded from his
unconscious
like a volcanic eruption,
the molten words
singeing the untried soul of his tender-green
educator; but the archetypal
pattern of the poem
had burned itself into the
impressionable mind
of the newborn poet,
and by chance someone
answered his request on Social Media for
his
old English teacher’s
address, and surprised that
he was still alive sent him a copy of his
memoir
that fulfilled his prophetic
poem’s imperative
to find his lost soul; but his old high
school
English teacher, who
had to be in his nineties,
did not respond to the poet’s letter because
his story was even
more shocking than his daemonic
poem, “Noman” who had been summoned
to God for a
reckoning of his cursed soul.
48
Time
Traveler
“There
is no other place
to find
yourself. Now is your only context,”
said the bearded man in the miracle portrait
with the lamb in his arm and a lion cloud
in the pale blue sky—reincarnation doesn’t matter,
nor does the hollow science that when the body
dies the self is no more; the only resolution
is the moment, forever the fertile womb
of the infinite universe.
He came from the future, the bearded man
in the miracle portrait, to open the strait gate to
a timeline of resolution; and for centuries the narrow
way of the living waters of destined purpose was
heeded; but the worm in the apple spoiled the
barrel, and the man from the future had
to come back again.
“There
is no other place
to find
yourself. Now is your only context,” he
repeated, and expounded upon the sacred mystery
of self-redemption, and the timeline of resolution
was re-affirmed upon the divine premise of accountable
effort; and when his portrait was completed, the bearded
man with the lamb in his arm returned to the future
and waits for the world to catch up to him.
49
Every
Poet Is a Joyce
Every poet is a Joyce,
digging for the treasure in the field
with their spade of words;
and whether they find the treasure
depends upon the field
they’re digging in.
50
Doors
Every door we open leads
to another world, but
we don’t
have enough life in
us to open
every door; and if
we did, what
good would it do us?
Unless we know the
answer
to this question, every
door remains
a mystery; but we
open every door
to satisfy the longing
in our soul.
I opened a door long
ago
that led to a world of
possibilities,
and I could have
become affluent;
but it did not
satisfy the longing
in my soul, and
another door
opened up to me.
The world behind
this door
was strangely familiar
and exotic,
and I explored every
corner to satisfy
the longing in my
soul; and when I
left this strange world,
I closed
the door behind me.
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