i imagine we have one collective heart. where is the center of people who love each other? after all we are particularly dispersed. or do we take turns with this heart?

in the body, the vitality of breath travels circuitously to our parts. riding on one blood on its way from the center red and vital with air, on its way back delivered of its freight and blue. then away again robust. lifeblood. then back, depleted. the rhythmic lapping of vigor.

the heart is not breath. if breath is a message. it is an impetus of delivery, appropriately a beat, carried away to far parts - here is breathing, here is breathing. and back, where is breathing?

sometimes i fear for our heart. days that we need a lot of breath, or that we are just very far. and it is frayed with fibrillation.

some days the distances are bisected with elation.

or somebody will take up the heart and say come closer everyone. and easier, our heart beats a steady rhythm.

i am tracing the crease under your eye with one finger. the skin is light and thin, the touch gaze light for tenderness. i did not see this while it was happening. the accumulation of days and nights and moments hollowed out the contours of your cheeks, creased in the lines. it is easier to come this close and feel your skin from this inch away. i cannot yet look into your eyes.

if you let my hands proceed with their inquiry. twenty seven bones in the hand, enough to bend and take around any of your parts and name them shapes. this curving slope a large curl in my hands my thumbs in a furrow, was this a hard day? the fan of a shoulderblade the muscle lines splayed fingers running from your arm what have they held together?

if you let, may i continue to ask your body questions? there are things i don't know how to ask with words. like where does it hurt? if time and people and events are a place. and what is happening with you?

can you tell i want to touch you? everything about you is so distant having to say words makes you even farther.

on nights like this you receive gifts you ask for. storm the heavens with your deepest smallness, put it into the most irrevocable unabashed words. dig deep and jump off the high road. it is not a time to embrace loftiness.

feel small and cry. be brazenly bereft, ask what about me. remember.

i named my disrepair. i looked out the window, down to the night street. watched the pattern of movement in the fuzzy yellow light. i am pissed, i said and angry. i tendered my resignation. as the song goes i quit i give up nothing's good enough for anybody else it seems. on nights like this you receive gifts you ask for.

someone held me close tonight.

what is that like? a warm palm smoothing out the fist that is my heart. i breathe a prayer to the god that watches over me for the gentling of this storm i thank you. for the laugh that ridiculed this quandary with love i thank you. i thank you for the loss that made me ask to be remembered. i thank you for another's memory of me that calls me back to myself.

how small the workmanship that puts us back together. the way a needle is small. the way the hairline cracks are small. the way grandness is too big to do any good. i name my fissures. inconsequential. confused. forgotten. misguided. meaningless. the fine etchings of my heart's capillaries. everyday the heartbeat countdown continues, but tonight,

tonight i asked can i tell you something? can i tell you i feel like crap? okay you said that's tough. and you're not zen. and the line gets choppy everytime i say something true, or more than one sentence. you're so pissed you should go to the bathroom. my heart begins to mend and i tell you what pissed me off. beginning today and working backward. i am not zen.

and i am not imagining things. and that is alright.

newly established as of this may day. sunday is steak day. everyone who came for this lunch is de facto invited. no confirmations necessary, just come with an appetite.

i like get togethers that seem to get magically spun like cotton candy. the sugar whisps floating out into the cylinder, caught up sweeping on a paper stick. wow, the thin threads gathered into a big fluffy ball you don't know how but somehow.

there are just those kinds of get togethers. the easy drift of conversations the loose schedule of arrivals the unexpectant tone. anything can happen but not in the fantastical improbable way. anything can happen in the sideroads off the highway kind of way.

from here one notices the conch pattern bench and the trestle table. the stillness of the air thickened with birdsong. long pass around the phone calls. something to say for everyone. these spun-together afternoons.

sunday is steak day, no confirmations necessary.

someone told me
i was deeply in debt and barely covering the interest charges
and i prayed to god to help me out of this problem
because it was eating up the income of my entire family
every child would alternate paying the debt off and paying family expenses
from their salary
netting nothing
and having less than needed
so i prayed to god to deliver us

and you asked me to do something for you
this was probably an oblique answer
the way god perhaps answers
in my mind i already told myself to say it would cost you this much
and i had been rehearsing it from the house to our meeting
when you asked though
the correct answer came out
my mouth didn't say what was in my head
the way god perhaps answers

it would have been so easy

on the way home i told my son what i'd nearly done

and now i'm telling you

is something for you?

what does it mean that something is for you? do you subscribe to the belief that there is some evolving path that is particularly yours? aside: this question popped into my mind. are you necessary? if you don't think so, what are you doing that makes you feel that way? or what are you not doing? which begs the question- are there things you should be doing that you are not?

there is this thing called perspective. in another modality called attention. in another modality called limitation. joe and harry have a more descriptive framework called a window http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johari_window

on the x axis the knowns and the unknowns applicable to the self knowing the self. on the y axis the knowns and the unknowns applicable of others knowing you. it describes lines of sight and blind sides. an interesting 360 degrees.

imagine yourself standing looking at a horizon spread out before you. and then recalling that there is everything behind you that you can't even see through your peripheral vision. you can assume it's there but you have no real objective idea what it looks like. it is behind your head after all.

the johari window forms a matrix of perspectives and that which is knowable. while assuming that perspectives are limited and the knowable is incomplete. there is a built in that which we, you looking at me, and i, cannot know.

interesting. in classifications there are: what only i know, what others and i know, what only others know, and what neither others nor i know. a startling blind spot.

in the intersections of all that we, neither you or i know, is something for you?

there is this ritual that we have come gift-receiving time. you hold three dimensions of something in your hand, all wrapped up and you say thank you it's just what i've always wanted.

prophesy or faith?

do you know just what you've always wanted? i have an image of certainty, the sum total of a currently lived life carving out want shaped holes. are those wrapped things just the right shape lengthwidthheight to fill them? such precision of desire. or is it trial and error - do we cram these packages with prods and fluffings til they somewhat fit, an odd ear poking out, a corner not quite filled?

what is the shape of your want? open the package is it a book or a little glass horse or a cake? or a fingernail, a pond, a piece of paper? actually it's nothing you ever wanted. not in a bad way, just that you never really thought it. thank you it's just what i've always wanted quandary. what provokes a gift?

we are always receiving. a blue sky, a life altering event, a person, a grudge, a talent, an ambition, a place, a taste. i am curious about the alchemy that fulfills gifts into what we've always wanted.

aside:

Alchemy (Arabic: الخيمياء al-khimia) - "the art of transformation" is both a philosophy and a practice with an aim of achieving ultimate wisdom as well as immortality, involving the improvement of the alchemist as well as the making of several substances described as possessing unusual properties. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alchemy

ultimate wisdom, immortality, improvement of the alchemist, and making several substances possessing unusual qualities is achievable four basic changes of state brought about by 12 core processes

1. Decomposition

Decomposition through Calcination
Decomposition through Digestion
Decomposition through Fermentation/Putrefaction


2. Modification

Modification through Congelation/Coagulation
Modification through Fixation
Modification through Ceration

3. Separation

Separation through Distillation
Separation through Sublimation
Separation through Filtration

4. Union

Union through Solution
Union through Multiplication
Union through Projection

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alchemical_symbol#12_Core_Alchemical_processes

yesterday by the roadside was a man cupping a nest in his hand.
11:30 in the morning having just come down from a jeepney. held his left hand pinky parallel to heart, thumb perpendicular to the road, a gentle table on which the nest perched.

i guess just because one day it'll occur to you with no reservations. or the situation will present itself. and you'll find yourself with a nest resting in your palm. or maybe you planned it.

it's kind of desperate the way i am reaching for something to say. much like fishing for small beans in a pot of water. the last few of the boiling. the ones you decide are not there only yes they are, as you'll later discover.

so, i feel this nagging last few beans feeling of wanting to say something. encompassing.

some wisdoms must have accrued somewhere. oysters are irritated into spouting pearls. if that may happen perhaps it is not so much to ask.

if you say a word often enough for long enough it becomes alien and wonderful, alterations hinged on a single word. i only say this because my landscape is repetitious and i am looking for its meditation. i shall begin to note it with care.

today i begin as cartographer of the ordinary.