“A sack of sugar must be sliced open that the sweetness may spill forth.”At times I feel as though the very fabric of space were tearing open, and all the stellar energy of the cosmos rushing through my body, my thoughts, my existence, my being. It is a fierce, frenetic, agonizing sensation, one of tremendous bliss, agony and tenderness spun together like the colors of a dancer’s dress, violently blending into one as she whirls. I imagine myself a whirling dervish, only still, more still than “the still point of the turning world” that T.S. Eliot described.

My tumult in inner; my body trembles but remains firmly rooted to the ground, while my heart sounds like the stomping feet of a Flamenco dancer, the piercing beat of a drum.The causes of such emotions are as numerous as the sights and sounds that inspire poetry and mythology.  Tonight, for instance, I am severely wounded by the absence of my best friend, someone so dear to me as to have captured my heart and rendered me vulnerable as a child.  I am also profoundly mesmerized by the possibility of my projects, ideas, goals and plans.  At the same time that I feel the world unfurling before me in an almost seductive manner, the way the sea spray bares itself to the cold, oceanic winds, my veins are filled with the sweet despair of melancholy.  I cannot help but reflect on the very nature of existence itself and the fact that I am alive and breathing and free.  Death enters my mind, not in the form of a shudder of fear, but in the guise of a beautiful woman come to caress every cell of my skin.  She awakens every strand of life, from my earliest memories of childhood, to my most ardent hopes, dreams, fears and beliefs.I feel an overwhelming need to express myself.  The feeling comes and knocks at my heart and mind with a maniacal, rabid power.  I want the entire world to know how much I love life.  How deeply I feel for things.  How beautiful it is to cry, to curl into a ball, to make love, to doubt, to fear, to wonder, to hope.  There is a tremendous tenderness in the eyes of animals, in the tears of people, in the limp of the elderly, in the ego of the young.  I stare that tenderness in the eye as though looking at a bright, bright star through a telescope, and let its meaning fill my entire being to the brim.  I am overcome, not with a single emotion, but perhaps with the entire kaleidoscope of human sentiment.  I want to be a lover to the innumerable objects, physical and mental, that comprise the universe.  I want to dip my mind in the vast torrent of inspiration and give my entire life to that which first brought language, fire and myth to the planet.I cannot possibly fully describe what I see in my mind’s eye, and that is both immensely distressing and oddly tantalizing.  It brings me the bliss of possessing a secret that is all my own, and the loneliness one feels when one realizes that we die alone, to be buried and return to the heart of the soil.  Every waking minute begs me to experience it at the level of life and death, the line between cognition and annihilation, and I accept the invitation.  As a result, there takes places inside me a constant literary struggle.  Not just the struggle of creating poetry, but also the dance of archetypes, the narratives of myths, and the entire arc of history (and my place in it).This molten steel of my existence, forever on the verge of hardening into a new form, a new idea, only to be re-melted in the crucible of philosophy, stabs at me, wounds me, strengthens me, inspires me, depresses me.  Tonight, the bare branches of the trees shudder in the breeze.  They are shadows, crawling like spiders across the landscape of dreams.  Here, anything is possible.  Here, good and evil, life and death, love and hate, right and wrong do not exist.  Here, nothing exists but existence: the rush of blood, the dash of eyes, and the entire cosmos wound up like a ball of yarn between my hands.