Transcendence
the Poet's Corner: The Coffee Ceremony
My sunken eyes skip a beat as they miss(t) to see more than time has permitted them to. Mountain peaks they peer from – these eyes that start fires – like hearts; misty, rain fills this empty desert terrain. A sea my Red eyes see in the dancing gorge just inches away. These brows frown as my eyes jump perplexed at thoughts thought while sipping dangerously hot homemade coffee. The aroma of unsweetened incense enraptures the room. The scent whispers to me an ancient secret: that these unspoken truths (known) spoken – are sacred, secrets, secreted to you in the form of (liquefied) black gold in little white bowls. My heart veiled in mystery, wrapped in myth, holds secrets so ancient that like ghosts they haunt my bereft soul with drunken impunity. These secrets reveal themselves in dreams – meaning to say they are dreams. They speak to me, of a me that I know not of. Something in me must be older than I think I am - I am - just a recombination of things old and the recombined order that makes me me is the only new thing about me?
Still – the smoke from the roasting raw impure bean twirls up high, transcending from here to some other unseen sphere like the spirit disappearing from its body after its burial. All the while the beans pop and dance in the pot making the sound of the rattlesnake as the hands on my knees tremble with the tapping feet beneath – dancing the heaviest of my memories away: my Self. But isn’t the Self a secret bemused about in dreams? The freedom of the night time world is here. Tell me, who is that trying to speak to you at the bottom of your lonely coffee cup? Talking a dead language only the ancestors know. Giving answers to questions you have never asked. Anxiety inducing answers that etch up my spine every time like a snake wrapping itself around the trunk of an apple tree – gently squeezing the breath of life out of me.
Yet I digress; let me get out, over and under the heaviness of my Self and listen to the wisdom of the ages that swirls all around me like smoke - never to be grasped and only to be seen. And after the coffee bean roast kisses the cloudy frankincense & myrrh blackened ceiling, the purified dark water of life swims past our wanton lips and sits in the container containing our souls. I am still haunted by the idea that my life may be a dream deferred. A dream that so anxiously waited for a dreamer like me to dream it back into the now from the past - cunningly luring me back from the future, to then, to now - forcing me to re-enact the dramas of a time before now. Could I be an eternal reoccurrence? One that has finally found itself out – lingering at the bottom of a little white bowl in my palm. I guess. And the black gold lining the container containing my soul is the freeing potion that has broke realities illusory hold on the wings nestled at the side of my shoulder blades. Where do I want to go though? A place I dream or rather a place that dreams me?
Copyright by Aharon Joseph 2022