Betting It All

What I want from you is your attention. It’s been so long since I’ve felt any kind of fire for you. Where’s the plunging passion? I want to sing Holy, Holy, Holy, inside those flames again. I know I can’t live in that heat, but I need another shimmering moment — a splash of sun on my stone wall, a burst of apricot on my parched tongue — just to remind me of what it was I saw in you. Remind me how I loved you, and might love you still. I’m no pilgrim supplicant, no discalced Carmelite, no wandering mystic with a God-shaped gap in my soul. I’m a blue-collar poet, retired mission worker, grain buyer, weed inspector, I’m someone’s partner, I’m a dad for god’s sake, asking for some help here. Please, see if you can find a coal lying about on the pitted bricks of my heart, blow on it, make it smoking-red, right up to the point I can hardly stop myself from grabbing the next passerby to give them a hug of a lifetime. Stand on a street corner, blissed and drunk on devotion, high with longing and sinking into the non-duality at the bottom of this world; dead to the part of my ego that says I’m separate from everything. Instead, awake, and betting it all on Love. Losing myself in love, in the face of another, in the eyes of another, in the tears of another, in the arms of another; finding myself alive, alive and received, and finding what was lost, but for losing, was never lost; found by Love, before having loved, and having loved, found alive, received, arisen, as though death were past; and knowing there is nothing, no time, no want, no tenet, that love will not undo, no airy sanctuary, no earnest alter, no open minaret that love will not complete, no mawkish hope, no gilded creed, that love cannot defeat; love: the distiller, the distillation, the distillate; and you, yes, you, you who’ve come this far, I don’t know who you are, but I know you’re freaking amazing!