missing the pinhole

I've been missing the
pinhole girl
where echoings rise
feet deep
one soft light puncture
pen-tip shadow through
cave tunnel and the allegory
bats closed an eyelet
revolving illusions meet, sunset
blink there it goes
away    long stretched
night returns as does
one fine golden strand   flickers
in waiting
follow the listening
for what comes
keeps still

to l.s.m.

The purpose of life is not to get you out of the moment you're in. It's not to unboulder that rock that has plunged from the sky and landed smack in the middle of your one lane highway out of this place. No, the task is to sweat beady drippings of salt water this very instant, gruesome tired and desperate for air as you are. The muscles in your face you have forgotten clench and ease. Clench. and ease. Your jaws of steel memories - let them be. You must let them go. They have little beauty in the raw wilderness of this your one wild and precious life because the beauty is in the living. You saved that little girl's life, not as storage for a future time but because you were meant to do it. She will never intersect your healing hands again.

This rock will never fall this way again.

You see the rock. Yes go to it. Lean upon its weight instead of fighting against its burden. Go, yes, and lean. Fully into it, your strength gone and its strength - unmovable. The task of the moment, this rock, is exactly what you feel: frustration, humiliation, confusion, suffering, loneliness. Its necessity is demanding everything from you - come back alive to the present, leave your wayward dreaming of phantoms so that you may know each of these parts of you so deeply that you call them by their name. They cut you open upon its rough face and you bleed out exactly what you must. It is flesh against rock. The rock has won and you surrender to it, the moment, like a wailing breath into the sky and it happens - the instant has passed and you feel the weight shift like a different hour of your life has come. Or gone. The confusion is in not really knowing.

The purpose of this moment is not to get you to the next. Chances are, it will, and that's why we take these moments for granted - we expect them to pass before they happen or desire for them to not happen and pass. Pass along moments, go away time. I want to live another way, inside another interval better than this one now. But life will not happen that way. It happens only the way it happens, and in that order. 

Lean upon the rock because it will hold you up long enough to let you rest, to close your eyes, to slow your breathing, to feel its gritty layers against your calm surface. The rock has a story to tell that will change your life forever if you will rest your heart upon it and listen.