I Am That I Am
The architecture of the flesh
may fail,
The skin unstitched, a frayed
and fragile veil,
Where silver staples close the
crimson seam,
And hold the borders of a
fractured dream.
We sit within the sterile, quiet
room,
Where shadows stretch and
heavy doubts loom,
Measuring life in sips of clear-lit
glass,
Waiting for the wilderness to
pass.
Yet in this crucible of ache and
bone,
A sovereign sanctuary is made
known.
I am the anchor in the shifting
deep,
The vigil kept while weary
angels sleep.
I am the breath that steadies
through the dark,
The sudden, iridescent, blinding
spark,
That turns a ruin to a holy space,
And paints a window on a
broken face.
No longer tethered to the grief
we hold,
Nor to the phantom weight of
old despair,
I am the vastness where the
storm dissolves,
The axis where the wheeling
world revolves.
Unmade by time, untouched by
mortal scar,
I am the light, the lantern, and
the star-
The timeless current flowing
deep within,
Where endings fade, and all true
things begin.
You steal pieces of me and yet make me whole:
First, you remove the eyes
Every time you walk into the room
Then the ears
With the melodies of your voice, and your infectious laughter
Next you take the brain
With all the thoughts, dreams, and memories of you
Then the skin
That longs for the warmth of your touch
And the feet
That want to follow every step you take
And finally
My heart
That will only and always belong to you
One tipple too far,
barely enough to notice
made the first tile sound—
morning lost its clean edges
as choices became fuzzy.
The path did not break,
it merely curved a little
toward softer ground—
resolve missed a few heartbeats
dominoes fell step by step.
By dusk the tale unfolded,
not a great calamity—
a trail of slip-ups
from loose threads left ungathered
that slowly unstitched the day.
The monk did not arrive with thunder,
only the cedar-smell of rain on wool,
a brass bowl ringing softly at his side
like a small moon struck loose from sleep.
I asked him how dust learns to carry God,
how bone and bruise and breath become a lantern.
He pressed one palm against the earth.
"Listen," he said.
So I listened
to sap climbing the dark ladders of trees,
to river stones knocking their blunt prayers together,
to my own blood beating its red-winged bird
inside the cage of my ribs.
All my life I had mistaken motion for meaning.
I ran after bright doors,
gold noise, city smoke, applause sharp as pins.
Meanwhile, the soul sat patient as an ember
under the tongue of silence.
The monk spoke again, low and slow:
"Light does not enter you.
It remembers"
Then something loosened.
The night air tasted of iron and wet leaves.
A stray dog slept beside the shrine steps, dreaming.
Far off, a train unstitched the valley with its thin blue cry.
And there
not in heaven, not beyond the mountains,
but here, in this trembling heap of living dust
a small flame turned toward itself
and knew its own name.
At first, the rope was thick as a trunk~
I could balance on it sleeping.
Then years pared it down to a clothesline,
then a thread, trembling with my breath.
Grocery bags became sandbags.
Stairs grew teeth.
My shadow pooled at my feet
like a dropped coat.
One morning, I unstitched the hem
of my own skin.
Thread by thread,
I learned the grammar of hunger~
not the sharp want of before,
but the slow, voweled enough.
Now the rope’s a filament,
a hair of light.
I tread softly.
High in the Eyrie, stone cold and stark,
Where stars peer in and walls leave a mark,
The sky is a floor and the wind is a blade,
And the edge is a whisper where brave men fade.
The stone is slanted, the door left wide,
So night may beckon and pride may slide.
Here justice hangs by a falcon’s cry,
In a cell where the floor meets the open sky.
But gaze too long at the void below,
Where clouds swirl soft and shadows grow,
And Nietzsche’s warning starts to sear—
The abyss above begins to leer.
It sees you crumble, stripped and bare,
A soul unstitched by frost and air.
What stares from down may dwell within,
And pull you out with quiet sin.
So watch your thoughts and hold your breath—
For the sky may sentence more than death.
In silence vast and justice thin,
The fall begins not out—but in.
The man in front of me is a broken one,
and my fingers are drowning in dripping glue,
in cement,
in something meant to hold things
To hold him
To hold myself and others together.
Yet he binds himself
with puppet strings, scotch tape,
and the wet breath of drugs.
Batting at my outstretched
Hands
Dodging the warmth of a true touch,
He flinches.
He bleeds- visibly
and he screams from a
starlight-lost, daydream-blinded face
that I am wrong.
He shoves daggers into my seams,
prying at my wounds.
Burning red and pulsing in purple bruise
Image of a warrior
turned blue.
while leaking he bursts open.
Pain seeping into my sobbing mouth
From his unstitched scars
So easy to tear.
He rips with his own hands
At the both of us
When he does not cover his ears and turn his back
To cradle in a seething silence
Clutching with razor blade hands
the child,
The pained,
Chained, caged pet he swallows with every breath as if I cannot
See the lump in his throat
Or feel the kicking in his chest.
But I am a mountain,
capped in the blood of a hundred storms,
and I will not cave.
One first flight, Columbia’s name.
Seven souls aboard, bound for fame.
Six days, then ten, experiments thrive,
Eighty hearts of science, dreams alive.
Sixteen days, the Earth they skim,
Reentry calls—light fades dim.
Tick-tick, hiss-hiss, crack-crack—a sound,
A breach unseen, the heat unwound.
1.67 pounds, a foam unseen,
Pierced the wing, unstitched the dream.
40 miles high, the flames collide,
Mach eighteen, as heat did stride.
Mach fifteen—a fiery scream,
The air ignites, the fragile seams.
Seven names, carved deep in space,
Their sacrifice, a lasting grace.
At 9:00 a.m., a nation cried,
29 months, the fleet must bide.
Tick-tick, sigh-sigh, hush-hush—we wait.
Columbia’s legacy will navigate.
Eighty dreams and the minds they fed,
We honor the fallen, their voices not dead.
thin moon hangs in the blurring light
when the red tape of work ends
day's end
before darkness darts onto idling pillows
a too slight shine to navigate the strain of living
wounds unstitched
like a heart unhealing from over-crowded transgressions
a feel that's too familiar
nestled in the treads of tired
where we can't always control the skidding
crescent moon
dangling, unsettled in the sky
shrunk in a sparseness of graying
pinched edges from a light threadbare
unable to lift toil from labor's bones
haggling for some salvation
Tik tok goes the clock
With each set of time
Her energetic vibrant being
turns frail
She who i'll never call by her name
In retrospect,she raged
Against this decadent diabolical world
She raged to give her bairns the best of life,
The tenderness of her infinite love
In equal measure we give our allegiance
Albeit in absence of economic strength
We never went to sleep with growling tummies
Neither did we walked bare and unstitched
And the coldest of the nights went by unperceived
Even in her recurrent nostalgia phase
I still see her
The sailor who weathered the storms for me
The soldier who fought my unseen battles
The angel that brougt tranquility within in the dead of the night
In all eternal divine
Through her brisk and lethargic life
I hold her in my warm embrace
My fourth god
My begetter.
I am a pick pocket
Unstitched pocket empty house
Plan to go for a date
Rain is high crash umbrella
Stale food is not in My life
I suvre with love to her
I have two pockets one is empty
Another I found my self that demands of her High like rocket booster a smile I hide My tooth in My pocket and called pick pocket.
With love all
Jagdish bajantri
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLCHXfkGOIw
Perhaps if we were to take apart grief as we unravel life
one single moment unstitched pulled out of time
we'd begin to see that death is only a silent passage
and we need not bear the loss alone,
The memories of our coverlet years of love
will drive us home *
Perchance, mayhap, we can take it by the hand like a seer,
"we were born to exist and disappear" said the Mysticeer
and I for one believe that death is the encoding of life;
The silver threads of Mercy are weaved inside God's blanket
big enough to warm each widow, grieving parent, and child
As long as we love well, while we are still here,
death cannot take away our loved ones, nor their time on earth.
In Love And Light, Your Mystic Rose
My Poem still an open wound,
unstitched by edits snare
Running free on a endless page
—new blood for all to share
(James River Writers Conference: October, 2016)
Poor in stock yet rich in spirit,
my clock does bow and sway
In rags and tatters all unstitched,
with joy do I still pray
My flesh is weak, my home now burnt
just embers to remind
Within this trouble and burning ash,
on the hour
—my heart still chimes
(Villanova Pennsylvania: April, 2015)
‘From The Book Of Prayers’
Your name comes to my lips
when I kiss and reach bliss
yet you have naught to do with it
This unconscious rememberance is recognition of how
I hold on tight while letting go
like a snake
hanging head dangling down from the bough
bearing it all
bending from the weight of the fruit
I gave too much
like the branch
I break
like a piggy bank smashed
with a hammer made of kisses
the hiss
All that mattered was how much you could get
So tough
it was
to wake up
The light
dawning through seams sewn so carefully together
and so easily unstitched when stretched
It's not a glitch
I come unhinged
More of you falls out each time
I leave
more of you behind
Letting in that light in his eyes
shining into mine
I learned to face my lies
Your name
comes to my lips like a proof of life
We live and died once, or twice
Pay the endless price
to try again with a hand that holds
the needle and pulls
the thread
requires me to remember how I bled
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