For Endurance Sake: I Die

p.127

This is how a human being can change:

There's a worm addicted to eating
grape leaves.
    Suddenly, he wakes up,
call it Grace, whatever, something
wakes him, and he's no longer
a worm.
    He's the entire vineyard,
and the orchard too, the fruit and the trunks,
a growing wisdom and joy
that doesn't need
to devour.

(Mathanawi, 2537-2539)

Jelaluddin Rumi

~

I'm no Rumi but along the same lines in a A Taxi Romance these verses ended chapter five with: I Poemed a Dream:

Woe to you, humankind. You have lost your
aspirations and thus your wings.
Now psyche plucked and feather-bare with
no legs to compensate where glory flew
above the tedium of earth-bound
mediocrity, you crawl like a worm.
Exactly like a worm: devouring the putrid
waste and wasting what is not…
Genius is dead and mourned: you've become a
democracy of worms; wingless, legless,
writhing twisted masses, mired inside of
computer banks and throttled by tentacles
of credit cards in fields of robot
mothers serving up their baby's toxic
memory of a castrated deadbeat father.

Be not afraid. Poor genius is not dead
And still owns wings.
A worm is no worm.
It owns a set of wings… tattered or not:
Withs and withouts; doubts; fears; love; and hopes.
"O, Christ! The Devil is Old," says the
Sage; "Grow old and know him!"
Wingless and full of woe, charging
Headlong on rubber legs… iron willed…
Like molten lava! Upon this wobbly rock
I've found my principle, if only for the
Sake of endurance… I die.

When I wrote this piece I had no idea how true it was: the paradox of "for the sake of endurance… I die." I'd scribbled it down during a drunken rage only to see in it a gem of truth… an inspiration of sorts to keep moving… to lift myself on tattered wings to no avail… until I died to myself and opened up with wings anew September 15, 1998.

    For this I celebrate: Merry Christmas.

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