On the Edge
The Heart
The heart is a strange organ. Small, with many rooms.
Did you know that blood circulates without a heart, right in the beginning of everything new?
That is how strong love is, before it gets its different names.
Sea of love. Yes. Does it branch out? Yes. Does it have many rooms? Yes.
Love is never weak.
Simplicity is love. Complexity is tasty. Swallow it whole.
I collapse with mirth and laughter, I am helpless, I give in.
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In the beginning, before and after
This is like the lush moss on the stone.
It is like the stone.
This is like the fresh wheat shoot on the field.
It is like the field.
This is like the ephemeral fragrance in the flacon.
It is like the flacon.
This is like the hurling time.
It is eternity.
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Calla Lily
Carefully walking, on the outermost ridge of the spathe,
circumambulating
this thought and that thought,
this feeling and that feeling,
gliding to the centre.
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Skunk on the Path
in the night after work
stringing together letters and
emancipating soul
I am going home
under midnight blue wrap
lavished with luminaries
along the whitish path
meeting the little albino skunk
undisturbed:
he remains on the path
and I circumambulate
through the dewy grass
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Doorknob
to my surprise I came upon
a German doorknob in America,
New York, to be precise
customary cold and silvery slick
in the bare restroom of the embassy
unctuously turning well
designed to lock the door
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Elimination
I overheard the man in the pub:
“I knew a soldiers, stationed in Afghanistan.
He got killed.”
You are not a hero or heroin by association.
This man, who died, this soldier, died for this country.
For sure. Do we know if he loved his Asian neighbour
and was kind to his environs and the elderly?
Maybe he was brave, in that one moment, as some are,
just before his death, in ways you and I can not fathom –
kidney juices surge, heart beats fast,
soul and sense vibrates on the surface of the skin –
creates a vacuum for possible greatness.
On the global playing field, some person’s hero or heroine is another person’s nutter.
Can we speak of the unspeakable sacrifice of ending your own
or other lives in that act of madness and murder?
We can and should not.
But maybe that man or woman at their own edge of grief and blindness,
just before their death, in ways you and I can not fathom –
kidney juices surge, heart beats fast,
soul and senses vibrates on the surface of the skin –
creates a vacuum for possible greatness.
Aren’t heroes and heroines victorious standard bearers of our ideas?
Some simply speak up or catch the boat before it reaches the whale,
live for decades imprisoned in their own home or jail,
Some just want to spend some time with their children, meditate in caves,
expose themselves in the Big Brother House or fight in their own ways.
Some heroes gives gossamer care to the wounded
and some heroines walk on water.
Maybe they are living their whole life for causes greater than them,
and in that act of giving, in ways you and I can not fathom –
kidney juices surge, heart beats fast,
soul and sense vibrates on the surface of the skin –
they are creating a vacuum for possible greatness.
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Astrid Johnson 
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