KUNDALINI POETRY
SURVIVAL GUIDE
(for Dan)
by El Collie
You get through the ravages of Kundalini awakening
the same way people from time immemorial
survived all appointments with destiny
(birth, irreparable loss, old age, death).
You learn to tough it out.
You learn to accept.
You learn to surrender.
You learn to lean into the arms of grace
both unseen, from the realms above,
and extended through a human hand.
You get through tattered and torn around the edges.
You get through wondering how you've managed
to make it through this far.
You get through hanging on for dear life.
You get through shaken and shuddering
and sheared of everything
but your quivering mind and quaking heart,
and the distant echo of a memory
that this was why you came here.
Though you think there has been some colossal mistake,
inscrutably, incredibly, something in you knows
that this is precisely what you came here
so valiantly to endure:
this merciless nakedness
of heart and soul.
WIND STORM
by El Collie
You hear it and you think
it's safely Out There,
some drunken gust of midnight motion
rattling windows and thrashing walls;
some strange change of sudden weather
you think you can close down
behind locked doors, small talk, numb mind.
You crawl to bed and close your eyes.
You still hear it.
You say it's just the wind,
just the wind,
until it breathes down your shivering back,
seizes your spine,
storms your cowering brain
and bends the branches of time.
Then you hear it, all right!
You hear it
when it grabs you dead center
and sucks you through your skin.
You hear the incredible when it happens,
when it hoists you out of yourself
and you go sailing through pyrotechnic space.
You go spinning; you go soaring;
you go right through the ceiling
and find yourself howling
like some preternatural newborn thing.
Oh, you hear it, loud and clear.
You hear it
like you never heard anything before.
© El Collie 2000