Death Becomes You
Thought for the day:
An old middle school friend’s father died yesterday morning.
So he called.
We’d been talking about the passing of his parent for a few weeks now…a drawn out disease where death has grown comfortable in the waiting room is no slow cruise. It is interminable waiting. It is placing your life on hold while the greater forces of life and death intervene in your routine.
This is death up close and centered. He’s in the waiting room sifting through the magazines. Death never entered the room. He’s always been there. Patient with our ignorance of his presence. He doesn’t care if we ignore or write poems to him. He does what he does, which is to attend and to await to present the final gift, the present life brings each one of us,
Wrapped in delicate personal memories; tied with a silver bow of faint regret.
I listen to my friend.
I listen to the scene he recounts in my head of an over eager hospice nurse, of a fatal dose of morphine.
He doesn’t want to sue, he wants me to write something,
to tell people what happened to his father.
Perhaps there is a story there to be heard but there’s the story that my friend is ignoring. The passing, the death of his beloved father, his parent, the man who held and protected him when he was helpless. Who first guided his clumsy thinking, his testing of the world. The source of advice, the font of all wisdom:
Pater meus a patre. Vos estis qui de caelo cadit, sicut pluviam et omnem animam in maius et luminare minus idem. Qui dedit nobis sitim extinguere pluvia rationem in radicibus excoquendi in sole.
Those of us who have lost a parent, both parents feel the shadow of our mortality move closer to us. It is not a selfish observation but a crucial one.
A glimpse into the truth of our own existence: short, meagre and thin.
The death of a loved one is tragedy but a necessary one. It is necessary to be reminded of the life we are living and the world that we are actually in. To wake up from the amnesia of wishes we have been distracting ourselves with, is to literally smell-the-coffee.
It’s bitter, it’s scalding and it’s blunt metal real.
Urgently real.
There is no solace for loss, just the empty space left behind by the one who is no longer there. Which is where you are, holding that space in your mind for them as someday, your loved ones will hold a similar space for you.
Maybe that’s where heaven is: the space your loved ones hold for you in their minds long after your body has left with death, the waiting room.
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Fear, Loathing & Trembling in America: Election 2020
Beginning on Friday, October 30th until the afternoon of November 4th, 2020, I will be reporting on the US Presidential, California State and San Diego local elections from inside a Super Poll Station at the Luther Banks School in Logan, San Diego.
Working this year as a paid bilingual Poll Station Technical Inspector, I will be assisting voters operate electronic devices, checking registration rolls, managing lines and helping get out the vote.
12 hour days so I will be reporting on each day here as to what I’ve observed from the inside looking out.
See you here on Friday!
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Riding Johnny’s Train
I’m on your train,
Riding through the lower melodies like
Cars crashing through steel
Leaving twisted steel in our wake.
It’s momentum builds mass.
The faster we think the thicker we get,
The heavier gravity’s pull.
Can we escape our bodies?
Why can’t we just take our bodies with us?
Eternity surly has enough room
Our bodies are vinyl cartwheels spinning after us,
The tails of burning meteors.
We burn atmospheres so fast and hot
We don’t even know we’ve arrived
Until after we’re long gone.
And now that we’ve arrived, we’re much too early
For supper.
For the show to begin.
Unless of course, it’s already ended and we missed it again.
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Pandemic: The Cure for Panic in the Face of Uncertainty
What if we thought of this uncertainty
as the Jews consider our Sabbath—
As a sacred space in time?
Stop travelling
Stop buying and selling.
Stop working.
Give up for now,
trying to make the world
better than it is.
Instead, Sing. Dance. Pray.
Write songs and read poetry.
Paint the pictures from your eyes.
Walk amongst the leaves and the stars.
Touch only those to whom you have commited your life.
Sit down.
And when your mind and body have become still,
reach out with your heart.
Know that we are connected in ways that are both terrifying and beautiful.
No one can deny that now.
Do not reach out with your hands.
Reach out with your heart.
Reach out with your words.
Reach out with all the curled tendrils
of compassion that connect us invisibly,
where we cannot touch each other.
Promise this world your love
for better or for worse,
in sickness and in health,
For as long as we all shall live
In this time of mass uncertainty.
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Poetry Therapy
Everyone wants to be free.
ven from the things that once gave us comfort.
We are like children who swap our blankets
For softer ground.
So why do you wait to be free
When the keys to your cage
Are hanging right outside your front door?
Reach through the bars with your hand
Stretch your fingers far and bend your will around the bars.
Your mind is your best friend, your best teacher, your best doctor,
Whether you believe it or not.
In spite of everything you’ve done to yourself,
Your mind really does care about you and often thinks of you, quite fondly.
Just let your mind mend itself
Heal yourself with a few choice words.
Your own words.
When you say:
The truth is not a cold tombstone
The truth is not a judgement
The truth is a flowering realisation inside your own living mind.
Pulling you outwards, & forwards, enraptured by Time.
When my breath and
My will are as one,
The universe swallows me
Whole.
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The Stars
There are few shreds of dignity left
When you drown face down in your own back street gutter.
You can cry out as loud as an archangel’s horn, if you like.
It won’t do you any good, or any harm either.
You still can’t silence the wind or turn back the tide.
Fate is nothing personal.
It’s just the universe catching up and then passing you by.
Your dream of yourself evaporates,
Forming clouds that obscure the night’s sky.
The stars are leaving you now, blinking out one by one.
This is the last moment of your own
self-awareness.
Your last chance to figure out what the fuck’s been going on.
It’s very much like the moment you first awoke
Although your mother’s smile is nowhere to be found
All that remains of her unlimited love is your fast fading memory
The sound of her voice calling out to you to come home now,
In the far distance,
From where the stars have gone to mourn your passing.
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Our Lady
You are our lady
And now your dress
Is flames.
The beauty of your sunken dome from a drone
Is a poem in itself.
Written by us and
Destroyed by chaos.
This is what we do that rivals the stature of the gods:
To astound ourselves and each other,
With the wonder of
Pure enduring creation.
The sacrifice we all make to our better selves
Who gave buildings wings and
Lay the foundation stones of
Our own perfecting.
Epiphany is not found in the act of worship
It is found in the insight gained by a gratitude for the world.
Exactly the way we built it.
Exactly the way we know it to be.
Whispered prayers are but poetry
That none other than you will listen to.
It is good to talk to yourself,
To sing in harmony with all the selves who are listening,
Wearing
Not false, but true masks
Revealing the kind of truth that can only be told with a lie.
The subtler architecture that carves heavens into the spaces on this earth.
Reconstructing what can be seen behind your faces,
Behind all the saints who guard you,
Behind the divine grace of your stature.
The sensuousness of your catastrophe is breathtaking.
© Igor Goldkind 2019
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Confetti
There’s an emptiness at the heart of any space:
The air that escapes a room; an unanswered echo, a vacant womb.
There’s an emptiness in my heart
That reminds me
All of my ideas are empty.
Floating leaves from a fumbled folder.
Coloured streams falling from the sky.
This emptiness reminds me
How slight my desires really are
How gently they fall from the sky
A confetti of mercy and discarded emotions,
They are in the end,
Compared to nothing,
Merely the litter from an emptied mind.
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5 Submissions of My Latest Work
Life is Always Replaceable
Being is Becoming Still
Existence is a limitless screen of emptiness,
Insomniac Awareness
The Last Halo of Hope.
Pebbles
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The Halo of a Hope
Hope is mortal, not eternal.
Though it may feel like eternity
Sitting in a chair by the window.
Gazing up and down the path that leads
Up the hill and down to the canyon on your doorstep.
Every morning, every evening, every day.
Waiting for an answer to your prayer for hope to be restored.
Resilience rewarded
Patience still burning brightly
Under your old photograph on the wall where you live now.
I’m not sad.
No, sadness is just passing rain to irrigate the eyes.
Instead, I’m a new planet
Ringed by the last halo of hope
The one wrapped tightly around my head.
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Being is Becoming Still
Existence is a limitless screen of emptiness,
Jubilant celebration
And gratitude for the joyous exhaustion in the rolling of a boulder up a steep hill.
Tripping over our thoughts like loosened cobblestones,
The truth is a truce we struck with uncertainty ages ago.
After losing our desperate struggle…
To cling to some kind of hope buried deep at the root of our own awareness
I am fearful of fully failing myself.
But I love myself best when I am alone with eternity.
Secure and supported by this very clarity.
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Your Soul
So who is this Soul that you sing of?
This silent witness
Who counts the leaves off of trees
Instead of gathering them?
And raking them into a funerary pile,
Into the giant pile that your better self will set afire and then fall from,
Or jump into.
Up to your eyeballs,
Up to your own personal crown of thorns.
igorgoldkind
Coming Soon!
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January 9, 2021 | Categories: art, book launch, books, comments about poetry, digital insurgency, Existentialism, Faith, Healing, literature, Meaning of Existence, Meditations, mental health, Mindfulness, new poetry, Paper Bag, physics, poetry, Poetry as therapy, Poetry Therapy, politics, Self-Therapy, spoken word, story-telling, Suicide, Therapy, Zen | Tags: Democracy, Donald Trump, philosophy, poetry, Poetry Therapy, Therapy | Leave a comment