hey lonely, you don’t need to be unless you wanna

hey lonely, you don’t need to be unless you wanna

Full Moon  August 19, 2024

call it the distance or the middle late summer blues or this lingering cold

there’s a melancholy to the fullness today thinking of you out there

in the garden taking notes moving through your landscapes & felines

into the den of your mind or your pillows and favored sheets, along the woods

roads into the foothills & then the saddle & into the thicker forest elevation

together alone, the story about the Buddha rolling on molly

the light in Magada reminds me of when we went on that first walk

above the garden road to the wood zen bench in gathering dusk

it must have been spring         or maybe not

& we were both lonely for something missing from our hearts it seemed

mine is still wandering, looking for reunion with an early absence

that might heal some fragile fractured thing, this part of the story

which has been given to me to repair in some way with my own life

which I accepted in some form of agreement in a realm before

this literal world so unprepared to guide us into these subtler places

how the ways we grasp & hold onto the things we’ve agreed to carry

are forgotten & their weight assumed to be a feature of this paradise

but sometimes it strikes me that there are means of writing the tale anew

that before it’s all over we perhaps may be able to discreetly release

the sorrow & shame of our lineage ancestors by way of opening a doorway

or maybe a portal in the sky or in the earth, that we are the fulcrum

for turning eons of fear into the simplicity of an open window

or perhaps a mirror hung at the top of a familiar mountain laid flat

in the pure water of a transparent creek

Poem by Qayyum Johnson.

Painting by Suiko McCall.