How Do I Love Me?

How do I love me? Let me list the ways.
I love me not in looking at the mirror
And seeing all the imperfections gaze
Accusing back my ugliness much clearer.
I love me not in losing days in idle
Leisure and vagary, vacant and lazy.
I love me not freely, as one unbridled.
I love me not purely, with pleasure crazy.
I love me not in passionate pursuit
Of egotistic care or pious trope.
Since I’m not eating grass yet by the root
I love me thus: for me, there’s always hope
   For me. Christ, grant me grace likewise to labor:
   As one unfinished let me love my neighbor.

Awe Mumbles

A starless night, abysmal lightlessness,
A sailing sea of sunless, seamless nothing,
A shoreless, strandless space of nothingness,
Astounding, sole, and silent. Still of nothing
Something comes: sound! From dark, oneiric gloom
Thrums on and on the deep resounding hum
Pronouncing forth from the eternal womb
One syllable profound, prolonging: Om!
Flashes of light, red, green, and blue, the word
Blooms into Buddha. Being heard the message,
His eyes, the first, the second, and the third
Open. I’m falling in th’omphalic passage
   Into my pate. Silence. Still through all things
   The rebound of the womb on mumly sings.

The Whip

As a wild beast that roams about with no
Direction, there and here roving on instinct
Gendered in genes so genitors ago,
Akin to all the members of its kin, linked
Each as to act the species, master zagging
And zigging at its paws, master thus made
Mastered by beast−just so the tongue, words wagging
Presumed freely, as in wild escapade,
Constrained, thoughts mastered, spontaneity
The speech of species’ tongue, is wiled and willed
About by form of informality.
   Taming the tongue with words your thoughts to name
   Frees thought from to the common tongue being tame.