LIFE IN A PARADOX

I'm in a paradox

This is a poem I wrote many years ago.  it's coming back to haunt me.

I AM ALONE 

I am alone,
an orphan.
I wander, shabby,
in a cave or on a street...
in a car...or at 7-11.

I wander alone in the nightclub
listening to the barkers' call
beckoning me out of my aloneness
with their vacant voices

into open doors that reveal nothing
that I haven't already known...
titillations,
like pain,
to make me feel alive.

when actually...

I am alone.
My movements are linear,
along forgotten railroad tracks
and empty streets
that pass a long way from oasis
or automobile stops
with hamburgers and cheap gas.

I am alone,
a wanderer in time,
isolated,
a little ball...

no orbit,
just spinning out in space,
no nucleus to hold me,
no gravity stops.

I sit on bar stools, desk chairs, and factory trucks
turning over soil with no minerals in it...
delusions of real manure....

I am alone.

It's curious to me that while I don't feel all those feelings now, I do feel quite alone--which becomes especially paradoxical since I aspire to end duality.  It's a quandary "devoutly to be resolved."

I have lived in 8 different places since moving out of our townhouse in Fairfax in early May.  I have lived in a house version of a junk pile,  a small bed on a boat, in a tent, on the floor behind a couch, at a Motel 6, a room in Ashland, OR--friend's house, and until next Tuesday at an apartment in Terra Linda (San Rafael). After that, who knows?

Now, here's another poem that I wrote years ago, that makes an interesting compliment to the first one, but which enhances the intensity of the paradox I live in.

"On a walk
or pacing,
when I really want to focus in,
to perceive Him
I stare down into grass, dirt, or concrete,
for in that focus, mesmerized,
the sweet inner stare of the unknown Father filters up to me
and I gaze, 
as into nothing,
the ground within,
to walk in the experience of realizing
I am accompanied."

So, I am left with this poem as a possible way to resolve the dichotomy:

A FACE

a face flows by me

            on the window sill

                        against drops of dew

a good morning face,

            feeling its own pulse

                        over the concrete

                        ...cobbled

lying back into itself

            beginning to wrinkle

                        but unwilling to make

                        ...contact

say 'hello', face

            and know

                        your

            ......self

 Think on't

Andy Rumi