"Sometimes the Holy Spirit may work in a gentle way. It may give you just a nudge, a feeling of how to act, what to do, which dentist to go see--something right down to earth." - Harold Klemp

Blog,

I wrote to you this morning, and deleted all of it. Do you have a memory?

Blog,

I wrote to you yesterday, and deleted it all. And then I wrote to you again, to let you know.

Did you get the message?

Blog, when I get sick I think I have descended the underworld.

I organize a dream of my favorite poets.

They sit in a circle, listening to Buffalo Springfield, passing a joint around and talking about vibrations and their effects.

Neil Young gets up. Looks at me. Says, Let's Go. 

"All hope abandon, ye who enter in!"

Blog, I really was sick and all I did was watch a Crosby Stills Nash and Young rockumentary.

Blog, I wanted to let you know I am feeling better. I was thinking about you.

I only know how to reach you from earth.

"Our memory of dreams is a glimpse of the full spiritual life that each of us leads beyond the physical." -- Harold Klemp

Blog,

I am writing to tell you about falling asleep last night:

I fell asleep with a candle burning. I finished a page in my book and turned over. The power was out and I set up my laptop in bed for light--the candle was too faint.

I woke up during the night. Blew out the candle. Drank all of the water beside my bed. And thought I was going to throw up, as if to check my existence. I was so worried, blog. I looked at myself in the mirror until I was convinced I would fall asleep immediately, if I lied back down.

Perhaps I should have made some tea or toast with peanut butter, to comfort myself.

My body aches.

My body does not want to be moved from where it rests. It is an old animal laying in the sun.

Animal, what will you do when sun changes positions?

I ask because there is a new moon coming.

Whether or not the sun shifts locations,

cosmology does.

Blog, I have been trying to become celestial for a while.

My body wants to leave and it also wants to stay.

Blog, I do not want to say that things end,

because I carry them with me in my body.

Yes. These aches.

Blog, I will always love mornings at Hanes, as we called it.

I will always love making pots of coffee in Tom's room

and people passing through

on their way into the day,

and people waking up

from a night of dinner and wine

and even myself waking up in Grant or Tom's bed.

Yes, blog, I love everyone I have ever made myself vulnerable to.

Blog, I love you.

I love you how I even love bad dreams.

I love you more than a secret.

I love you like telling a secret.

"The point of any religion should be this: how to open your heart to love." -- Harold Klemp

Blog,

I said there was a lot to tell you. As you know, I am not good at writing large, spiritual things.

For the last year I have been trying to write a poem about standing off a beach on Long Island, with Lucas and Grant, our clothes on the largest rock.

I have been trying to write about seeing Connecticut on the other side of the water.

I have been trying to write about birds scattering across the beach.

I have been trying to write about becoming aware and loosing sense of myself at the same time.

I forgot to try writing about the radio playing, as Grant drove his mom's truck.

I forgot to write about playing scrabble--long after scattering all of my possessions across Penn station, looking for Jasper's keys; long after drinking a whole bottle of water and watching Lucas finally sleep on the train; long after reading a chapter of Salt Houses, which I spent the entire summer reading; long after trying Grant's new veggie burger recipe; and still long before falling asleep.

I forgot to write about the beach the next day, and frying all of my skin, burning myself from the inside out.

I even tried writing about the source of the Mississippi river--until, after a couple of drafts, I confessed in the poem that I never been to the source of the Mississippi river.

I tried writing about the sound of the river--which, blog, you know I have not heard--and I was proud of describing its gristle.

I really have been trying to write something that changes color each time it is read.

I have been trying to write something that burns up like a comet, touching earth's atmosphere.

I have been trying to write the salt that heals wounds.

I have been trying to write kinship that messes up edges.

Blog, I am confessing to you what I am not able to write.

Blog, a poem should be transparent about what it cannot say.

"Both the dream state and Soul Travel are doors to the same spiritual worlds." -- Harold Klemp

Blog,

I have a lot tell you about. I saw venus last night--in the sky above Chicago's shadow, from the shore of Indiana.

Blog, after the sun sets, the horizon is set aflame. Decay has never looked so beautiful, standing at the edge of the cosmos, with Lucas and Liz.

Blog, do you ever think about the fire at the center of the earth? I think in Indiana they are harvesting earth's core--the byproducts are celestial transmissions.

I think they produce stars in Indiana. The tides in the lake are as strong as the ocean.

"Life is trying to teach us one thing: to see the Eck, the Holy Spirit, in the eyes of all we meet." -- Harold Klemp

Blog,

I imagine who reads you. It is the same people that hear the thoughts I share aloud to myself, in the shower. Blog, I think about you like a garden. There is little interest in what is above the surface.

Blog, you know my thoughts meander, and sometimes there are too many thoughts, and it feels like there are no thoughts at all. I try to recreate them with you. But they are always something new, and I like that too.

Gabi, Lucas and I had dinner the other night. I had forgotten how it feels to ride my bike away from someone I love.

I think what I am trying to say is, I forgot how it feels to be let out from beneath a pair of wings and fall to a sea, saved again by a set of talons, kind and tender.

Maybe I am also trying to say, I forgot how it feels to step outside of myself and see how beautiful my friends have made me.

Or even, I am trying to say that I felt like a weightless halogen, blown around.

Or, arms can take many shapes, and I will never know the next form.

"The classic Soul Travel experience is leaving the human body in full awareness and having the Light and Sound of God flow directly into the Soul body" -- Harold Klemp

Blog,

I guess I am growing okay with the idea of arrival:

blog, as I texted to a friend, is it how we define place in placelessness?

I will tell everyone that I am a poet and that I am taking ten years off from writing poetry.

I will tell everyone that I am figuring it out, and I will write a novel about it.

I will have dreams, extravagant and banal:

last night I dreamed I was having a dream. In the dream, I was dreaming in order to be with someone I could not be with otherwise. I wish I had more than a few fragments, which I've spread out far enough for silence between them. I woke up before the sun, repeating I dreamed about dreaming until the rhythm beat into my body.

Now, all I have is this magical tool to invert myself.

Blog, how are you doing? I meant to ask--it has been a while.

I am keeping busy. Yesterday I got a flat tire while riding my bike. I called the two nearest bike shops, but they would not take me in. I walked to the train and it rode home. I have to admit, between you and me, blog, it was nutritious. When the bike store opens, I will go and fix my tire.

Blog, my desk is very clean. There are usually sticky notes and corners torn from sheets of paper spewed all over the place.

Blog, I've missed you. You are what leaks from me.

"God is always working to help Soul find its way back home" -- Harold Klmep

Blog,

it has been a while since I wrote to you last.

How are you doing?

Have you been getting out of the house?--my mom has been asking me.

I have been riding my bike a lot, and when I have a chance, washing my face in the lake. I have been remembering poetry can be simple. Though I do not know if this is poetry.

Blog, I want to share with you something I wrote a while ago, before Bridgeport feels like a ghostly edge of my material form.

Are you out there? This is for you:

Land does not forget the mouths that feed on it

            I take the Halsted bus almost every day. I walk through the empty lot on 31^st street. I do not know what occupied this space before I arrived to the neighborhood. The land itself is a sheet of concrete, slowly breaking as the earth shifts; plants have begun to sprout and it feels like gravel below your feet—an ancient, midcentury glazier. In the mornings it is full of life—pigeons seem to pilgrimage from all walks of the neighborhood. I know that spring has come again when a pigeon, gliding to land, feet prepared for below, caressed my head beneath its wing, like Jesus wrapped in blankets.

            There can be over a hundred birds in the lot, on a given morning. They come here to feed, amongst other things. The pigeons relationship to the space and architecture has formed through their diet—they are given left over Little Caesar’s pizzas, each morning. I was speechless the first morning I watched a man wheel a cart filled with pizza boxes to the lot. I sat and watched as he opened each cardboard container, and meticulously tore them into pieces small enough to fit in pigeons’ mouths, throwing them to the center of the empty lot, as more and more swirled in the sky above.

            I made myself comfortable, waving to the man to signify I had come for the communion. I took out my headphones, and leaned against the telephone pole; by afternoon there will be a line of birds sitting and looking down on the slow foot traffic passing through. The birds camouflage as the day progresses—sometimes you have to stare into the sun to see their contour, as they streak across the sky from one location to the next. But right now, we are all here together.

            There are a thousand voices that can be heard. Each its own discernable timbre. They must be talking to one another in a language I am not in the know about. I feel thankful to be welcomed into this space. They knew I was coming from a block away. No one scattered upon my arrival, and I feel as though my own breathing, the rise and fall of my chest, is a part of the ascending sound; this droning noise makes me rely on my body. I can feel the tensing tendrils of the pigeons, when I inch forward. I step back to the pole. This is how close they like me.

            The heard is beginning to disperse. Upward to roof of the Cricket wireless, to the electric line above the adjacent alley, some leave entirely. All the pizzas are gone; the empty boxes are stacked on top of one another, in the cart. There is no pizza left on the ground—it has all been eaten. The man turns to me and waves. He smiles, showing all of his teeth. Pushing the cart in front of himself, he disappears too.

            In the time since visited the lot, construction has begun on a Starbucks. The lot is fenced off. Behind the fence, with attached fabric obscuring visibility, there several large construction vehicles. I felt discouraged, depressed that the pigeons would not be eating their pizza in the lot anymore, and curious about their relationship to the architecture of the neighborhood will change.

            I walked to Henry C. Palmizano park—central to the neighborhood, it is the highest point accessible. Initially a quarry, converted into a dump, and later formed into a park, it is an uncanny reminder of the neighborhood’s evolutionary track.

I descended the hill to the man-made pond. I was pessimistic about seeing any pigeons—it was afternoon and I worried the urbanite birds would be turned off by the “natural” environment.

A mass of people were gathered at the edge of pond, on a metal overhang. As I moved closer to the group, I started to discern what they watching. 

A small patch of ice still existed, despite the early spring weather. On the ice, an open box of pizza lay in the center of a small group of pigeons and a couple of ducks. It looked like an altar. At first I was intrigued and equally relieved. The entanglement of the architecture and pigeons was deeper than I previously imagined. For today, I walked on, towards my home. I did not want to intrude; whereas I had been acknowledged by the pigeons in the lot, here I was not. At the pond, unlike the lot, the species ate their pizza without looking in my direction, making noise, or motioning me in anyway. As I walked off, everyone continued to eat.