Your Burning Bush: The sweetness of the fruit

This past Friday, I had the incredible honor of seeing and meeting poets Saul Williams and Aja Monet (with a performance from jazz musician Daniel Carter afterwards) at The Velvet Lounge in East Setauket, NY, official home of The Muse Exchange. It was one of the most reassuring events I have witnessed in a long while. Not only did I get to revel in the beauty of some of the greatest poetry and spoken word in the world, but it reaffirmed my commitment to the art of writing, of spoken word, and the goals I foresee fulfilled in this silly life of mine.

Your art is your gift to the world. Your gift to yourself. It has been given to you for a reason. Its yours. You made it. You packaged it. You delivered it. It isn’t something otherworldly, it is very real, and divine. It is your own divinity, a piece of God birthed within you. Your Holy Ghost. Your burning bush. Don’t snuff it - embrace it. Listen to it speak to you and carry its message to reality. 

There are moments of certainty in this life when we feel something, sense something, know something with certainty, and we exist in that moment for a fleeting eternity. Some call it inspiration, but it is your divine craft speaking to you, the echo of its whispers. It is only afterwards that we begin to question it. Don’t question it! Accept it into your heart and mind, and fulfill the prophecy of its realization. Be confident in your ability. If the want is great enough, it will carry you to achievement.

I experienced something divine on Friday and I felt it as we became one. One in a realm of words. My challenge to you is to listen to the voice of your gifts and accept the divinity of your craft. No matter what that gift is - love it, nurture it, cradle it in your arms, and bequeath it to the rest of the world. 

The sweetness of the fruit

vindicates the rind,

while self lies at the root

and love germinates the vine.

Fight For Your Passion: Omasum

Don't second guess yourself. 

If you feel it, if you taste it, if you can't escape it, embrace it. 

Everyone has a passion. Some of us are consumers, indulging in things or experiences. Some of us are producers, people who have a drive to create things. Some of us are both, but nearly all of us has a passion. All of us has something we are passionate about. 

Is there something you can't live without? Is there something that motivates you against your will? There are good addictions and there are bad addictions. Bad addictions destroy you. Good addictions sustain you. They can be hobbies, they can be interests, they are things that make you happy and help you reconnect with yourself. Often, it is when we are enraptured in our passions that we feel most alive.

In the hustle and bustle of contemporary reality, it is sometimes hard to find the energy and the time to feed those passions. We feel the drive, we feel the desires, but we convince ourselves there are more worth-while things to be done. That is you denying yourself. That is your heart telling you what you need. It's a hunger - feed it!

This life is a gift. That means it has been given to you and you own it, so you do whatever you wish with it. Would you rather pursue your passions and fail or never pursue them and never unlock your full potential? Don't be afraid to stop EVERYTHING and GO!!! 

Book signing for DBAM at Stony Brook University

Omasum

The iridescent taffeta that covers my stain glass bones

Builds a wickiup of plasma that smolders and corrodes

And this algid patina that covers my radiant face

Keeps from the world the smile that it scolds.

In the black and white albedo of a lunatic sphere

That bleeds a curious complexion, both brutal and queer,

Its prism projects molten opal upon the cardboard race,

Who communicate with buttoned lips and listen with biased ears.

While they fold in their lackadaisical limbs,

Taking off their hats, splitting their lips upon the brims,

I cast my crystal cobwebs across their noses in disgrace,

Listening as gravity crinkles my thorny heart like tin.

I can hear its asperous teeth dig into it like pi

As that morose masquerading marionette in the sky

Continues to encircle me, soldering my carcass in place,

As the golems peregrinate around the apocryphal sty.  

Listening to the masticating music as it unfolds,

Transcending the bitter warmth and sweltering cold

Until a dynamic paralysis trickles into the case

Of alligator skin that covets this once human mold.

And what I knew of longing seems to gangrene into fear.

That gentle glow has turned to tarp, through which I’m forced to peer

Upon a smithereen of what was once my cosmic base, 

Which I snatch up starvingly like a begrudged souvenir     

Until that nimbus vulture that emblazons my chagrin,

Hovering like a noxious conversation that’s been drawn too thin,

Bursts like an aneurism, cascading naked shards of space

That land upon my gasoline tongue, quite saccharine. 

And I taste the aureola, combusted before my elytroid eyes;

And I collapse onto a padded pedestal, whose pain is amplified; 

And as my heart gallops off, its bent-in bruises throttle its pace,

Until it too is smeared across the flippant canvas and dies. 

There I fall like argyle rain

In the foyer of consequential refrain,

Collecting like autumn leaves

In puddles of psychedelic disdain.

I cachinnate at all the almighty delusions I sought to free,

Yet I still pursue the jaundiced cud that trundles out of me.

Shout Out

I met a guy through the grapevine who has his own poetry blog and is trying to get people excited about his writing, especially his new book. His name is Plot 121 and his work spans a large swathe of themes. Check out his blog and support your local artists. Much love.