No escape from curse, no escape from welcome— it comes and goes, like the pain of a wound that will not heal... its name is word.
In each face a different form of love, and then of hatred too— formless, yet pursued.
Words strike, then mislead us from our destination, I wander then like a blind animal sniffing, sniffing the scent.
In desire's color, in deception's mask words advance, humans retreat.
Human flesh is slave to words—flesh rots, words do not.
The world strains darkness to bring forth the color of letters, daylight grows pale in the ink of words. What time does word have left for love?
Piercing the breast of motion, in the effort to find, in the laboratory where manuscripts are made, in heaps of old dust do not seek the fresh emotion of utterance. Do not even by mistake open the envelope of false fortune caught between word's lips.
Yet you will see, in the current of dual fear between effort and expression old patterns and new desires float along. Stand still then, even more still, and burn. Let your two hands hang on either side of your body instead of the market's empty bags, do not mend the torn places in the bag—the whole bag will tear then.
Silence is the finest speech. When you enter into speaking, notice— what needs to be said does not come to the mouth in time. Knots keep forming in thought's tangle, shells pile up outside the shell, and the sky sits heavy with silence's stain.
Some walk fearlessly— when word's lamp goes out they do not despair, seeing flowers fall they know exactly those flowers are not lost.
Day's riddling light can take their eyes, so they do not lose themselves in word's current. On their eyelids, layer by layer, words settle, words shift.
Whom do people draw close? Whom do they give shelter and indulgence? And whom do they drive away with harsh scolding? When does no one complain? Who walks alone? Who is never born again?
Words have no answers to these. The answers remain frozen in the cave of the past; in such a mind that has no home or hearth. The mind then hurls guesses trying to pierce truth.
To write one line, must one see many cities? many settlements? many people? many many things? I rather see that for one line one must die many times, be born in many births, dig through many hells, rise to many heavens.
From the dot itself word is born—where nowhere is there sound.
Whatever we do, we are all essentially farmers, potters, masons, craftsmen of words— we string words into garlands, irrigate with words to grow crops, dance wearing word's anklets, paint pictures in word's colors, hang word's tapestries on walls, drive away thought's burden with words.
The murderer murders as many humans as there are, words even more. Yet from here and there— from alleys, from homes, from markets, from cities, from villages, from forests words come one by one and crowd together.
When word meets word poetry will be born, otherwise silence will hang as poetry's corpse from the ceiling, in stillborn flesh.
Poetry's corpse, whether of children or full youth, trampling everything, beyond a thousand pages words live and die.
The word that is fugitive thinks... whose light is like the sun's? Who is darker than lightless destruction? Not knowing, it too tells husking empty chatter's grain.
Does the deepest synonym become its opposite, absorbed when sound and soundlessness move at equal pace? Who still sharpens thought's edge, tell me? Why then is it in incoherence that all coherence is found? In the mortal the immortal's seed— is planted in the folds of deathless words.
Words come piercing flesh, piercing earth; I sow seeds in the body's field, dig up the soil as I please, pour water, mix mud, weave in sunlight and matter's consciousness; one day the earth too speaks.
I harvest a thousand sheaves, honey drips from word's ear of grain, I fill the granary with word's weight.
Was there thought in the beginning too? What was it then? The sky perhaps? Does everything come from there? Did word's stream fall flowing from the sky itself? Where was wisdom imprisoned? In distant caves? When did it spread to my mouth, your mouth? When words descended from heaven to earth, some entered the underworld in fishes' bellies too.
Words know how to accept even the opposite, humans do not. In day's eye the pupil's deep darkness merges in night's eye with day's simple image.
Forever cursed craved despised embodied-disembodied welcomed word... it is a great bird with spread wings, wings outstretched on both sides it floats away, sings away from mouth to mouth, breast to breast, eye to eye.
When I send word's call to earth, air, water, flesh, I think, I say, come close, be as a tree; keep below the roots of wordlessness, let there be sound's branches above, in duality's body bloom the light of non-duality.
Word, come again— in divine body, divine mind.