How To Be A Dervish.

[Guest guest]

You can never try to be Sufi.

You must know how to say this name

so that it cracks open the heart

while your lips are sealed.

It is a journey for strangers

that are too strange to be

anything but always alone,

and so he never is.

The dervish walks his life

as if he had a Love-knife

piercing each eye.

He is a thought on the breath

until he is the breath of love only.

Sufi’s are not crazy to be seen,

and so are visible only to lovers.

They know how to disappear

in front of the merely curious.

They work silently

pulling their belief mountains down

stone by stone,

to feed hungry ghosts with that dust,

until they eat themselves to be new earth

in which to grow fresh flowers.

A Sufi gives away his very breath

to be loves pick ax,

and makes a ruin of his house,

until only a roof remains,

a canopy of sky

where his love songs can be heard

by the wind of this worlds soul.

He has a hundred names for God,

but listens, to be a silent conversation

that is Loves language of remembrance.

He seems to woo God in every form,

but secretly destroys every shape

in the fire of his passion.

He prays to be the kindling of longing,

so that the slow smolder of his self,

can be a light for his own pyre.

Yet he denies not his bodies desire,

but takes the hand of duality

and dances at his own wedding.

His death is always imminent

for he dies each moment to live,

and so he is the light of life itself.

A life he does not claim,

and so he is free to be the gleam

of the eye of God.

He is change,

he cannot be pinned down by any hat.

He is a hare twitching for the trace

of the hawk of transition.

His nature is to be a lion also,

yet he will only hunt that self

that is fearful of being consumed.

His work is to be empty

in order to be occupied

with a wild Beauty.

He swims his soul

as if that craft were real

but he knows how to drown

when the ocean finds him.

Oh yes, he is the very paradox of his love.

The Beloved is his mystery,

and he lives to be Her love bed.

There is no complication in him,

he is his own simple birthing

and accepts without question

that God is continually making love

to be the answer of this ecstasy.

He begs at his own court,

that he may never wear any crown,

but the one forged in his own alchemy,

and he throws that away to be Loves slave again

at the slightest scent of the Beloved’s presence.

There are no robes noble enough to clothe him,

and so he travels incognito

covering his naked flame with any garments

to conceal the ash of his burning self.

But do not think he is a religion or any gender,

or saint, or sinner,

or any form of being that you know.

He is neither good nor bad,

nor compassed by any morality, but Love.

He is the fulcrum of polarity,

and abides as the pole star of any direction,

and so he is always the perfect balance.

He is his own way yet utterly pathless.

An expression arriving as an original song

that holds within it a singer born from the unseen.

He has become the dance and the dancer,

and he lives a life

as if he had never been.

love

eric

________________

[Guest guest]

--Zenbob