The flame lights only itself.
Everything else is reflection.
So here I am, poured plain:
good and bad, ugly and sad,
and beautiful too, and gracious,
remembering familiar faces,
a poet gone to sea
and sailing, on an ordinary day,
a long way out and a long way home.
We are still struggling, all of us,
struggling with tradition,
with our good intentions,
with the small and televised sensations,
with the ego we keep painting on the dark,
struggling with the will
to stay at the center
where the still small music plays.
But the healing is not clever.
It is part pain, part luck,
part the humility of an open hand,
and all, all of it, love.
Words are the tools we reach for:
delicious as love on the run,
dangerous as fruit in the sun;
a few are lies, and many are only fences,
and the true ones fall
where they fall, when they fall,
out of the chaotic corners of the mind
and into the light that was always ours.
And who am I, anyway,
to tell you who to be,
or what to do with your one wild flame?
Go directly to the center.
Do not wait for permission.
Do not collect the little prize
the world keeps promising and keeps.
Say what you want, friend:
say the good and the bad and the beautiful of it,
but know this, and carry it —
we all win
when we say what’s true.
Rob Chavez tuned from early work, c. 1991