Most of all, poetry is how I find my way back to the inner voice of my heart. I have mental health issues that make it difficult to connect with others, so I also see in writing my poetry the desire of a lonely man to share himself and connect with others. Perhaps I share too much, as what the inner silence speaks to the outer person is really a private intimacy. I also see the love of God and the desire to celebrate the beauty of divinity and the spiritual dimensions of existence. Perhaps some spiritual escapism and disassociation too, as sometimes it’s hard for me to find gratitude for this human lifetime.
For a long time, I was disassociated due to childhood trauma and experienced ungrounded expanded and psychic consciousness as a result. I lived a very mental life, spiritually bypassing inner pain, unable to connect with myself or others. Integrating those experiences, healing my psyche, and coming to live a simple, lovingly embodied human life, in connection with myself and all, has been the work of this lifetime. I think poetry helps settle my mind back into my heart and see what is really there, accept it, transmute it and let it go.
Days turn to months and months into years. Unconscious life is a blur, speeding through a mind projected continuum of self, time, and space. Moments of spiritual connection, fleeting yet profound, are medicine. Like little pauses of rest from being dashed about by the momentum of unconscious mind stream. I take them with me as little poems. The dear wish of every flower stem isn’t to march forever forward into infinity skies, but to halt; peel open the walls of its tunneled continuum into a blossom of openness to this one unmoving moment.