Self-Portrait In Shoulder Stand

Old bag of bones upside down, what are you searching for in poetry, in meditation? The mother you never had? The child in you that you did not conceive? Death? Ease from fear of death? Revelation? Dwelling in the house of clouds where you imagine you once lived? 'Born alone, we depart alone.' Someone said that during meditation & I nearly wept. Oh melancholy lady behind your clown face, behind your wisecracks- how heady it is to let the ideas rush to your brain! But even upside down, you are sad. Even upside down, you think of your death. Even upside down, you curse the emptiness. Meditating on the immobile lotus, your mind takes flight like a butterfly & dabbles in bloodred poppies & purple heather. Defying gravity, defying death, what makes you think the body's riddle is better solved upside down? Blood rushes to your head like images that come too fast to write. After a life held in the double grips of gravity & time, after a headfirst birth out of your mother's bowels & into the earth, you practice for the next. You make your body light so that in time, feet first, you will be born into the sky.