Winter's End (A Koan)

Winter’s End

I wear his face
and use his voice,
but don’t be fooled;
He’s all but gone.

What can I say?
Met on the street
like a pale imitation;
I wonder who was
imitating who and why.

I wait for someone
who might console me
with just a look,
not knowing what to do
with my memories.

What I have to ask is:
how much longer
will I be in mourning?
His story having slipped
through my fingers
like a life put down
without a fight.

Turning a corner

I'm confronted with

a sudden truth.

All that's left

is pure reflection.

Now my face with
it’s two vying eyes
and a sad mouth,
gives me away
on one of the last
cold days.

Peter Valentyne
3/3/11

The Separate Self

The
Separate Self

I mourn him
because he
can’t live anywhere
but in the past.

As beautiful
as he was
and is
I can’t stay
there.

He liked to
choose his
pleasures
as if they
were comforts.

His joys
make me sad
and his pains
seem the only
way forward.

From now on
I will write
the story
of his life
without him.

Peter Valentyne
February 3, 2011

I Lost My World

I lost my world, I lost the whole of my environment, my fame, my mind, I lost everything that I thought I knew, everything, because the sun appeared, the Divine Light came up, the Master appeared in Shams, and I knew that I knew nothing, and all the shadows in me, all the illusions ran away. I ran after them, but even as I ran after them, the sun shown on me, so I vanished as I ran.
~Rumi

Tawhid
Station

For you, whose reality
is safe from my imagination,
I attempt this poem.

I see now that I mistook the world,
disguised as it was as many things,
but it was really you all the time.
I have been walking around inside you
thinking I was feeding myself
when I am the fruitful one
growing on your tree.
Let me taste sweet.
Pick me now
and digest me.
Let me be gone.
Let me leave no trace.

This world is full of your qualities
which attract and repel
according to one’s wakefulness or sleep.
There is simply nothing but you.
Starting with the breath we breathe,
distinctions are illusory, if not absurd.
Choices and opinions and judgments:
a waste of time. I was that waste.

I can barely write this
as I am so quickly disappearing;
a shadow in failing light.
My whole life I was mistaken
and caught up with temporal things
that held no significance or weight.
Even the way I breathed was wrong.
All was vanity and selfishness
and my FEAR, it’s own pollution.

We are all of us impostures!
To ourselves more than others.
We all can be seen through.
By you. Which means anyone.
Glass was made for light.
Let me be like glass.
No. I am glass.
Shine through me.

I created myself out of fictions,
choosing what I loved like flavors.
I wanted to taste like honey,
so I drank honey
and put on honey-colored garb.
Now I’m afraid to go out
for fear (not fear really)
that people will mistake me for me.

For you, whose reality
is safe from my imagination,
I attempted this poem.


Peter Valentyne
January 16th 2011

And So I Trust You to Kill Me

And So I Trust
You to Kill Me

Cornered, I beg you
to let me go on my way,
but this is not to be.
There will be no
coming back from this.

My heart wriggles
like a worm on your hook.
It takes everything
in me not to cry out.

Is this how you
question my sincerity
as you go through my things
one by one? I with
no chance to explain.

First, my fears
are realized.
You steal away
photos of my loved ones
even as you
ignore my abject sobs.

I think to put what I prize
out of my mind
but you see through me,
wresting away my friends
as if you’re yanking out weeds.

You drag me by the hair
demanding more;
better, I think, to relinquish
what I can myself.
But there is no time.

You slice open my pockets
and shake my money out,
then steal my shoes
and burn the soles of my feet
with a candle
or is it your fiery breath?

Now with even my livelihood gone
you leave me writhing
in this dark room,
ruined and lonely;
a purloined pauper.

You pry a stick
in my mouth and make me
bite down as you cavalierly
try to empty my mind
of all I cherish.

I stagger to a chair
attempting to hoist myself up
but you tackle me
and pull me back down.

I reach for a rose
but instead am bled
by a stem full of thorns
you’ve wound around
my throat
like a barbed wire.

And then you skin me,
peeling back my hide
until I am bloody
& gross; rubbing acid
in my wounds,
even when you can see
I am still conscious.

Finally, you nail me to
a board in the sun
and watch as
3 speckled black birds
peck at my entrails.

Now you lift my face
so scarred by sorrow,
my brow with the harrow’s mark
a sign for all to see
and you say,
“This I do because I love you.”

And so I trust you to kill me.

Peter Valentyne
January 15th 2011

My Heart Hurts And So I Look To You

My Heart Hurts
And So I Look to You

I will never succeed.
That’s a given.
I stop and sit
With the taste of your
Wrath in my mouth
And I dare to say thank you.

Even that’s not the point,
Because a devil would do the same.
It’s not enough to be
Grateful for being condemned.
But it’s a start.

This is how I keep
You in my heart.
This is how I have
To feel your presence;
Through pain, through grief.

Otherwise, my attention
Would be elsewhere.
My feet hurt and so
I contemplate them.
Same principle.

My heart hurts
And so I look to you.

Peter Valentyne
January 10, 2011

Diary of a Darvish