Tom Savage
Your elbow is leaning.
Genuine but untouchable,
Available to all but inaccessible.
What goes on just continues
Justly and unjustly.
The line forms nowhere.
In the back is the front.
Inexplicably, you take your pick.
We may choose these essences freely or not.
A big piece of a human life
Sits before you
And shrinks or enlarges
Depending upon your perspective
Retroactively arrived at.
So what arrives
Until something goes home
To here, not there.
Anywhere else would require different air,
Different eyes to be looked at,
Total slavery to the moment
Disguised as freedom.
No scaffolding is supplied for this structure.
You must supply your own.
Lend me some context
And let the text write itself
As it always does anyway.
Let someone steal your ego
Only if you know it was never there.
Medieval religious practices
Don’t apply here.
Your instincts go wherever you go.
Zero gravity resides elsewhere.
Here is rootedness in nothing.
Buddhists ask other things
But may arrive at the same answers.
Relationships that don`t hurt
Are rarely, if ever, real.
Art is easy. Living is hard.
Can the two intersect/intervene
In such a way
That equanimity is arrived at
With or without shepherds
Who may need baths.
After we’re done.
To be needed and to be loved
Are rarely the same thing.
Presence is a present you always give.
Form follows function.
You, too, can be holy for a little while.
Written while watching Marina Abramowicz: The Artist Is Present
