Social Media

As New Rivers school Old Oceans

As New Rivers school Old Oceans

I’m in the waiting room
Called life
Between one world
And the next
It’s empty here
And quiet right down

To my bones, they are light
My mind is water
My breath is an appointment
With time, my body
Is a fragrance of the forest
All around me

These walls are not life
The cities do not grow
The skies blink with airplanes
Those birds haven’t left
In what direction
Is the waiting room?

From here to there
From outside to inside?
Babies too shy to stop
Clinging to a breast
They haven’t yet studied
Faces, but that’s soon

I’m in the waiting room
Called life
I don’t plan to stay forever
I won’t be called upon
The metaphor of surprise
Is nearly old to me

I might have been embarrassed
If I wasn’t the only one here
We are symbols to ourselves
And non-existent to reality
I’m in the waiting room
Between something and nothing

A dual mirror or voice
The echo of sanity or madness
Catching a thread in the
Silence, to remember that
I can be separate from
The fabric of the universe

If required, when ego is necessary
Like for movement or work or mating
It doesn’t seem important
I’m in the waiting room
For a lifetime of
Observation, studious observation.

Alone with Everybody

I’ve been Alone with Everybody
For so long, I can hardly remember
What anything else felt like –
Sometimes a soul feels like its life

Is only but the shadow
Of a vase against a wall
There where flesh covers the bone
I meet a woman whose heart had been broken
She is not the first, our hearts

Are all trapped by a singular fate
Like the cruelty of the species
Or the fact that separation is the default
I’ve been alone with everybody

Better than you, with hardly anyone
To tell me that I was but
Trapped in my own reality
But now I know, it’s not true
That nobody finds ‘the one’

I’ve been United with the One
For only a few days now, and it’s like
That’s all I can remember anymore.

Photography Credits: Calvin Wu, illustrator: https://www.facebook.com/CalvinWu.Illustration