In All Of My Travels

Through a world

In which our tongues possess

Only root metaphors

I have gone around a thousand hectic corners in my journeys

And cut them all, and they too me,

In search of understanding without language

For concepts are metaphors, I learned

That do not correspond to reality, that language

Is ultimately all conjecture about the nature of reality

Down a thousand foreign streets

I’ve been grounded and rounded down
Into the ground and figure of speech

That I couldn’t speak and which I simply didn’t understand
As I walked along, alienated

Passing the poor knife sharpeners of China squatting on the street

And the taxi drivers playing cards in a gutter of Shenyang,
Beneath utterly polluted rust colored air

Each step  shaving and rounding off fractions of distance
And making it more honed, always on foot
Walking through foreign cities, influent,
Always rounding off fractions, step by step

The sweat of walking in a fractured world (with a fractured mind)

Making time, by the second, more acute, as sweat dripped

And I the tenor of metaphor wandered past vehicles of metaphor

In which I could discount this world of metaphors with a shrug.

In the bazaars of every language

Rounding a busy corner and walking past the pots, pans, utensils

And vessels of language,  the crockery, cutlery
And bright edges of sounds of words

I didn’t understand in the street markets of Arabia

Those words to fill a kitchen and to cook a world with meaning

My travels showed me that we abstract language from reality,
The way a man wears a hat

But our abstractions do not completely represent reality-

Thus I moved in a world lost in translation.

And I learned

Through a world in which all language, sign and signified,

Is ultimately only a metaphorical relationship

Three words that echo

Across seas and continents

Three words, but they carry

And if you travel

You must learn these three

For they will answer all the demands

Of a fourth word too you must learn, the most essential of all:

I

And of the fourth you will spend a lifetime

To learn the meaning of,

But only as you master the first three

Or languish

Answering the very basics of the soul

Want, Need, and Have.

If you move, and beyond

Their meanings have legs:

Through a world in which we only have a small window of reality

I have found in every language and place

One thing that carries everywhere

These three verbs have legs:

I want…, need… and do you have.

If you travel abroad

You must learn these words.

If you move, and beyond

I have.

Paper and pen don't even begin to describe.

Countless space could be given to the countless space

Demarcating the space that metaphors travel,
From sphere to sphere.

So much time could be surrendered

To just these four words

You take your poor soul about the world to learn again

That everything

Is The Poem.

Will , desire and emptiness write the song.

As you enter speechlessness

At each encounter,

You find that traveling

Without a tongue

Is like the act of writing poetry.

Constantly you find no language for things,

Constantly you can't explain yourself amidst them,

Repeatedly you can't explain what you really need

Or mean

To anyone.

And they all laugh, or blush when you try

To speak.

Like a baby you move through the world.

Just a baby. A baby that grows

Stranger every day.
Only a vision wanders upon that strange tongue.

Don't go anywhere.

If you are a true poet, you don't need to.
Though you may want to, you don't have to.

But you probably will anyway.

Yet I tell you

A leaf is a ticket.

Stay where you are

Lest you desire to endlessly negotiate

Your wants and desires amidst alienation

With what little

Everyone has to give for your money

And find that it was all a waste of breath

To begin with. There is much suffering
Involved with a wanderer’s suitcase.

It is better to go No-where.

Everyday. Travel here. It costs No-thing.

Otherwise...

There is only the swift transformation that strangeness and Otherness brings...

Life inside a metaphor upon an empty tongue,
The same everywhere

No matter how far you travel