“Spontaneous Understanding.” Poetry by Rocket Caleshu

SPONTANEOUS UNDERSTANDING

I’m smiling and laughing enthusiastically,
which never feels so abject as it does here.
Besides revealing a miserable nationality,
the imposition to tone down the facets of my being
that seem not to mesh feels distinctly phonic.
At least it’s my own humiliation, and no one catches it
as the sound of me praying for the unattainable
coldness of a someone less fragrant.

To make these arrangements tenable,
think of a difference between a known trajectory and
its opposite. Something once picked up will be again.
Blow into the ash for heat’s durational surprise.
The ascetic comes in for a hot bucket bath, returns to the shoal.
My hands and feet stay put, a hermitage. I’m just taming
my mind here, hbu?

You agree, it’s about stripping all the way down,
but you aren’t sure why. His only public words
in seventeen months: please continue. For most, a final,
incinerating check on the list of inscrutability. How I read it
is that we all live downstream from my soon to be decomposing
body, so I keep it free of tragedy and toxins for your benefits.
It’s an assload of things to worry about, but not if
you don’t do much else.

I’ve tried to situate myself away from the popular correlation
between cerebral worthiness and being menaced
by consciousness, and the outcome is not wholly
unlike if a tree falls in the forest. She has been nothing
but language, her awareness ripe to the empires
she knows we will try to build. So there is a reason.
For one, I remember things I wasn’t there for and
I know things I was never taught. You, shaving
your legs slowly at the Y, cross the fourth wall
of my unconscious to wink at me, of course you do.

In a very daredevil at the top of the mountain way, I like
to do things the same way expecting a different outcome.
Each day I’m gone I play back in slow rewind, waiting
for the sun to go down so I can sleep until it’s time to
wake up in the middle of the night and get off
the so-called mountainside. Far to go to collect such simple
information, but I appreciate the ephemera that spills off this one.

---

Rocket Caleshu is a writer and ashtanga yoga practitioner based in Los Angeles.