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Woke Up this MorningWords by Brook Bhagat Image by Gretchen Gales @GGalesQuailBell QuailBellMagazine.com *Editor's Note: Previously published The Syzygy Poetry Journal. Older than words older than light every bit born in the bellies of stars I am the light behind my eyes that doesn’t show in pictures, only in the mirror. I saw for myself
that when everything is off I am the dirt from the Garden of Eden. If I dig I have seen it, I have been there which means I am there just forgetting it all the time, leaving it all on turning it up louder pushing up daisies and video games I am there except that I’m not. If the flower is contained within the seed and the seed within the flower, what’s the point in blossoming? There must be a side road some backwoods path through the long grass ‘cause if it’s all the same to you I could pass on the suffering in between Woke up this morning so far from home wildflowers in my eyes birds in my bones I am just a verb, a happening like lightning, like a laugh or a storm but capable of harboring life desperate to catch its own rainbows and lock them up for further study It’s too slippery you can’t catch me can’t step in the same river twice, can’t step in the same me. I am swollen with rain and I dried up in the drought, forever babbling and long since silent; I am lost in ten thousand eddies and I have already reached the ocean. I had the visions I know I think I had a vision I think I used to know I have magic x-ray glasses I swear I just forgot them somewhere Woke up this morning in the river alone guess I sank in the night drunk and blind as a stone How long will I be able to pull it off? like a cloud casting a shadow on a mountain I am mostly empty space pretending to be somebody. Even the mountain is a cloud. Maybe I don’t appreciate the mystery I don’t groove on gravity, just enough to keep us from flying off but that’s exactly where I’d rather be in zero G free of the pull of the soil the toil the tread the aching bread the bodies that tend to fall towards the center of the earth Woke up this morning with my head in the clouds the same blues as last night the same blues as the crowd Everything I do makes a mark I am changing the universe forever making snow angels on cosmic carbon paper a novel written on water but written all the same They say you can’t hear sound in space but our lovesongs float away intact, sail like radio waves, crossing paths with the billion-year-old past light we still think is real If matter is neither created nor destroyed only energy changing form what’s the difference? I am not eating my peas just moving them around I was the garden now I am the gardener next time I want to be the boots I can’t draw a line around my body I don’t know where I stop when I drink the tea, can’t touch the moment when it becomes me and when the cat purrs on my lap, when you purr on my lap I disappear Woke up this morning coming down from a dream I drowned in your eyes trying to swim upstream The war in love between somebodyness and bliss is the fight inside the tide I want to dissolve in the ocean like salt like a star winking out at dawn I want to evaporate I swear melt into the night of your arms without the fear of getting lost and when that tide goes out it’s my war versus yours, a dead sea scroll stretched between us, wound around itself at both ends Woke up this morning naked, broken and blue throat full of heartache head full of you Cool down! It’s a game Chill out woman! It’s a joke I get it it’s just not funny somebody was already awake and nobody is going to wait for me. How much time do I have to get ready? I cannot grasp eternity I am not clear on my place in the galaxy but I think it moves faster than light and gets nowhere like me Maybe those glasses weren’t magic, just some cheap crap from a cereal box. maybe the vision was just a dream, a memory of a movie twisted by my desire to be somebody, somebody who can see that space is not completely empty but baby really I can’t see a damn thing in this darkness Woke up this morning remembering this song cried myself to sleep and now the fear is gone Lightning cut the tree while I was sleeping, lightning cut open the belly of the sky; stars fell down with rain and I was shaken to the roots by blood and soil, wind knocked out of me knocked free from stolen crutches of words and light, eyes washed real with pain and only with the fall to earth was I able to see the way to awaken. CommentsComments are closed.
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