Poem: “I Sing the Body Energetic” by David Fiske

I sing the body energetic

I sing the body energetic.

Most people don’t care. Not profoundly.
A care that eats at the Soul.
Gives lonely, sheet tossing, midnight wakings
Torments. Like a bad liver or wheezy breathing.
Ravages you,
or worse.
The banality of despair, the every day grind
Makes you limp, weighted on one side, with a lumpy bucket of troubles in one arm, seeking some balance, some ease.
These people just live. Their existence is need driven. Eat, sleep etc.
Then spirituality enters their awareness, the need for it and how to to get ‘there’.
They read books, self help, seek out gurus, go on weekend retreats.
Some also make progress.
They can see and feel the difference.
They talk about their journey.
Promote their path.
Maybe you are one of these.
Myriad ways to grow. Diets, exercises, therapy, meditation, chi kung.
You must know the list.
You also probably know how you might mix and match, abandon one teacher, find another.
Feel sometimes hopeless.
Feel sometimes encouraged.
Feel you are almost there.
Be deceived by that.
Hear talks that it is all an illusion. You are already there, just don’t know it.
Nothing to do or to be done.
For a while think that is, perhaps, true.
All the while life goes on and you deal with its problems.
Nothing new there: sex, money and power
or combinations and lacks of.
If life is a dream yours is a mixture of happy and bad, or blessed forgetfulness.
When you forget yourself for a brief while.
Probably any way. We each have our own sack on our backs.
Unsmiling we’ve packed up our troubles there.
You read how followers got cheated or abused or misled.
Maybe dabble in cynicism.
But that need remains.
The need to be at peace, find joy, live in serenity.
It won’t leave you alone.
You envy those who don’t have it at all
But not really. Not really.
Really you know they are just so asleep
And their journey into misery has yet to start.
For trying to evolve causes its own pain.
The blisters of the lonely, stoney path.
That never seems to end. You wonder if you have even begun.
It circles around and around
and returns always, always to you.
You know that all too well.
Join the club of hyenas and vultures. Scavenging truth where they can.
Ripping hungrily into others experiences.
You are not alone. Seekers unite.
Nothing new under the sun.
What crack of light comes from under those apparently never ending clouds?
Seeping in, colouring your world
Like a surprise.
It catches your breath with a sharp intake.
You discover
What you have been seeking is also eagerly seeking you.
With just as much passion and longing as yours.
No, in fact, much more.
And you thought it was your journey of self evolving.
Your special journey.
Surprised!
and then an energy draws you in,
reels you in, flapping like a helpless fish that longs for the leafed creel,
on the hip of the patient Fisherman
who has stalked you for so long.
You!
and for so long.
This energy, vibrantly alert to your every move.
Your breath becomes so fine in meditation you don’t notice it is not there,
till you give a sharp long in breath.
Where were you? In Lighted Bliss! For how long?
This is certainly a grand co-operative venture.
You are not alone.
Energy surrounds you in every moment. We,
I
live in a sea of energy.
It permeates me.
Love surrounds me.
Is me.
Like that elusive ‘self’ of Advaita, it always has.
It is just more joyous than I imagined.
It scoops me up on to life’s carousel
Speeding up,
Playing with me,
Reeling me in as I said.
They were right when they said there is nothing to do.
Well, not quite right.
Avoid evil,
Silly practices.
Avoid moralizing, judging.
This is not my function.
Not at all.
What’s that about the ‘everlasting arms’?
It certainly feels like such an embrace.
Those loving arms are an energy loop.
They feel so good,
So comforting.
They say you are Mine,
you always were.
Always will be.
Nothing you could do or not do can take that away.
Such a long loop away and then back.
The comfort of Home for weary travellers.
Teary travellers.
For joy brings tears too.
You’ve read articles on kundalini, on chakras.
Some right,
Some way off, fantasies,
Some just book knowledge.
Once in those arms, those energy arms
and you know.
Know it is physical
and beyond physical.
The energetic body is above all
Blissful.
Nothing to do.
Really.
Nothing!
Just surrender.
And sing your song.
Who knows who will hear it?
This doesn’t matter at all.
Like a bird in early dawn on a branch singing to the breeze
Just singing.
Joy, abandonment.
Why? You might ask.
I don’t know.
This is just the way it is.
Here, there and everywhere else.
Everywhere else!

Welcome to the discovery.
To the Song of the body energetic.

*The title is a riff on Walt Whitman’s line “I sing the body electric”.

for more poems,see link.

http://esotericarts.org/Essays.html#honour