the poet sits in the bathtub thinking

I am bathing in a eucalyptus bath
covered in the rose petals
I picked for my workshop
on Sunday, dried and fragrant.

The page is wet where my hand
has made contact with
the papyrus, bark, stone, song
for writing occurs on many
instruments, surfaces, talismans and

at the core of it all I am reminded
as the sweat from my breast and brow
dampens upon my ability to impress
for the wet page cannot hold my words
i am reminded once more of impermanence
a wabi sabi melancholy haiku

I feel wet with inspiration
horny from the sound of
pen across paper
hungry for my birth while
I wait encased in amniotic fluid
and still attached to the womb of
creation, mother, maker

I am not in a process
but in fact
I am the process
the unbecoming, the
impeccable lightness of being
the hum of civility just because
it is authenticity raw relating

I am present
where my legs part
and where someone says
”I see this for you” and
I am water
wet with shadow, the
initiation of the fluff
that must be pushed out
by fire and solid matter

There is safety in dirt
there is no safety in swamp
there is authenticity in
touching the edges,
the bigness of embodiment
not in docility,
the remnant of a lineage of
gripping and contorting power

And in the bath, in the dark
flickering by candlelight I feel it
the thing that is “it”
I cannot speak it or write it but
it is written in the water
and my naked body is “it”, is in “it”
The “it” is the impermanent everything-ness
of the natural world and me
and the “it” is the forgetting of that too.