Beating Breath

Still working on it -added IV:

I

Language of the heart.

An inner maelstrom,
rushing into the future.

Your distant pounding.
Can my heart be your heart?

What tightens or beats
too strongly or dissolves
into pain or
bliss?

A vocabulary of love,
our bodies.

Expansively warm &
beautiful. Knowingness
of the heart. Where
we breath.

II

The burning heart.

The Sufi Master,
Hazrat Inayat Khan: "in pain
the heart becomes living
and without pain man seems to be
living on the surface."^*

Pain brings the heart alive, and
when purified of bitterness,
shines,
then joy flows
from the "source of all goodness"
and acts of kindness
are easy.

III

Unknot the tangled heart

Slowly, carefully.

A delicate operation, hurts
furies, angers, losses.
Scar tissue, where nerves
have had to find
their own way
through.

Bypassing ourselves.

In Tibetan Tantric Buddhism
the Anahata, or heart centre,
requires copious hours of
purifying sounds of mantras,
visualizations of yantras,
untangling the knots
then energy flows
unimpeded.

Kundalini rises,
surging electric current
and multi-petalled
rainbows of love
flower in
us.

IV

We opened passageways, subtle vessels.
Until we hit the dead zone. Scar tissue,
and how many times were our hearts broken?
Where the nerves had gone dead;
where there was almost no feeling.
We liked it that way.
The soft, beating core hidden,
where blood thunders
in its cave of life,
red tides
rush.

I lay the whole day alone,
unable to move, or think,
as if I held the weight
of both of our
hearts.

When we came to each other,
nerves beating in our hearts
where they hadn't for years.