In his rock
Solid doubt
Thomas
Had herd rumors
Of unflailing love
Abuzz of hope so high
If only
To find himself
Quite
In the dark
Wear time stops
To the ever sow gentle
Beating
To a singular conundrum
As sound as it gets
In the artlessness of won’s
Perpetual searching
Where awe is aloud
And know license kneaded
Yet so long
Due
Over
Come
Warming to the extremity
In a hospitality of patients
Still
Not sure
What he thaw
He’s frozen code
Hesitatingly lust
Pulling out
Aplomb
The surest proof
Of assurance
Yet knot enough too
Drink the Kool-Aid™
Turning to whine
Taken in
Bred of skepticism
Only willing
To live on
Crumbs
That will
Surly re-seed
In annoys
Of the daze
The quest in
For gotten
How ever dumb dumb dumb dumb
This is another poem on a familiar theme of skepticism of skepticism. In this poem, skepticism is juxtaposed with a simple and profound reality at the center of each human life: your heartbeat. In fast-paced, postmodern society, we live in a precarious and constricted mental and spiritual territory. We are, well, maladapted to ask “What have you done for me lately” a-long-side routine strings of epic fails to live in the moment. In a triumph of evolution, we walk a mathematically constructed line that every mathematician knows doesn’t exist except as a mental construct. And then we complain about God’s ethereal nature — with a periodicity much less regular than a heartbeat, in between ignoring God’s good creation. I can’t help but note that the bulk head of such complaining seems more fitting on bar stools than in poem or song. Of course, I don’t recommend sobriety when it comes to being drunk on poetry. In the book, The Life of Pi, by Yann Martel, the main character tells two stories: one hauntingly mesmerizing and another as a police report. When asking another character which story they prefer, not surprisingly, they choose the captivating story; to which the main character replies, “and so it is with God.” I, for one, would much rather be captivated by a good story than limit my reading — and living — to police reports (though many good stories include police reports). I strongly suspect that God wants us to make epic stories of our lives, for our hearts to beat captivating rhythms, to grow bigger and fuller today than we were yesterday. For this to happen, at some point, we have to make stuff up as we go along. This process can be analogous to scientific discovery, proposing stuff that we are not quite sure are true and then testing them out with out lives. Not surprisingly, scientific-minded folks are greatly disturbed when religion hypothesizes great truths and then fails to adequately test them in the here and now. Not all shit is worth making up. Fortunately, most any shit can be used as fertilizer. Even cautionary tales are indispensable. Nonetheless, as Native Americans traditionally began their storytelling, “This may not have happened, but it is true.” Or, as I might put it: God is the coolest being I ever metaphor.
But back to the even more palpable. Your heartbeat serves as a metaphor, gentle reminder, and literal lifeline to, well, life. The heartbeat is both a shared human reality and intensely intimate and personal tether to life. In astounding irony, the common ground of a heartbeat at the center of each human life seems to be easily taken for granite, that is, common ground. There may be a fine lying between common ground and complicated dirt, but I suspect that the road less travailed makes awe the difference. Akin to breathing, our heartbeat is a great center for meditation, that is, simply centering our life (see my poems, Breathing and The World’s Shortest Meditation). I find the persistence, reliability, unobtrusiveness, and effectiveness of both breathing and our heartbeat as a wellspring of metaphors and insights into the deepest nature of life. Still, may your life take definition by those moments which take your breath away and that which makes your heart to skip a beat.
