I Am Yours

Darling – You have me.
Even now you breathe in the atoms
Of the air I too have breathed.
And is not your body,
Somewhere therefore partly mine –
A body we share?
So are not you and I
Part of the same dance?

I was raised in such a small world,
Taught to posses, to own, to control,
And to believe in my separation from you.
Yet now, walls fall away,
Old roofs crumble,
Revealing sky and stars –
Always there but hidden beyond layers
Of beliefs and thinking.
But what do I own
Now the walls have fallen and the roof gone?
This body, with its trillions
Of particles and atoms –
Do I own them,
And the stars and cosmic creation they arose from?
Do I own the food I eat,
The water I drink –
For money is a strange hallucination
People dream of ownership in –
And do I really own or control any of it?
For if I did, surely I would carry
What I owned beyond the grave.
And as this bomb of realisation exploded
And my old dwellings blew away,
I stand with such laughter
At what I believed myself to be;
Such joy at being dispossessed.
For I own no body or mind.
I possess nothing of the world
That I can ultimately control –
Except perhaps as children control toys
In imaginary worlds of play.
But I see the question in your eyes.
No, not even my mind.
I did not conjure out of my being
These wonderful words I use.
Syntax nor concepts grew from
My own efforts.
The whole glorious expanse of ideas
Are really ours – not mine.
Even an original idea
Only emerges from our collective awareness,
Our shared language,
Our given communications,
Creating webs of thought we weave together.

Yet in the midst of all this we have existence.
Owning nothing,
Controlling nothing except toys,
Having nothing except existence
And each other,
Dancing together
Amidst this swirling paradox.
So yes my darling partner in dance,
You have me,
As I have you;
As close and as personal
As my own breath,
And as unpossessed as the air.

Copyright ©2008 Tony Crisp