Unpublished: Kenosis

I am tired of myself.
And not, let me say,
in any morbid, psychopathological sense.
(And why do we so quickly go there?
I've become impatient with the mental health frame and worry.
How everything is shadowed
by diagnoses and the fear
of being mentally ill.
Because really,
who among us is healthy?
Let me be sick for a moment.
If that is what this is.
Which it isn't.)
As I said. I'm tired. Of myself.
Not sad. Not depressed. Not suicidal. Not dark.
Just tired.
Tired of being an ego. Having an ego.
I'm tired of filtering everything through myself.
What I like. What I agree with.
What I don't like. What I don't agree with.
Who put me in charge of sifting the world?
Myself.
Which goes to my point.
Why is it my unthought assumption that everything is about me?
Like a reflex of mind,
a twitch of the soul.
And this isn't the expression of a desire
to escape into some other person or life.
This isn't envy.
The grass isn't all that greener
on your side of the fence.
This is a weariness
of being at the center of my thoughts and concerns. Weary
that everything, good and bad,
is about this self at the center of it all.
I want to forget myself.
To not see myself reflected
in every thought or flicker of feeling.
I want to see clearly.
The sky,
a bird on the wing.
And you, standing there.
As it seems to me
that this would be freedom
and salvation
and rest.

--an unpublished poem

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8 thoughts on “Unpublished: Kenosis”

  1. I love this poem!! For years I've been looking for the words to tell myself to get out of the way. Thank you!

  2. I love it too and feel this way most of the time. I agree with it, I like it, I have filtered it through myself. And now I'll watch a bird.

  3. I saw a Marsh Harrier, circling over Five Mile road, while I was thinking about markets and powers and work and people, and coming home. And she glided effortlessly on the airstream, scanning the dunes below. And so she will tomorow and the day I'm not there to see her.

    Enjoy the rest.

  4. Beautiful (I learned a new word today: kenosis). This made me smile: "Who put me in charge of sifting the world?"


    Your poem is a tangible expression of one's longing to leave the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and partake in the Tree of Life. You have a way with words that speaks to me. Thank you.

  5. A connotation of infinity
    sharpens the temporal splendor of this night

    when souls which have forgot frivolity
    in lowliness, noting the fatal flight
    of worlds whereto this earth’s a hurled dream

    down eager avenues of lifelessness

    consider for how much themselves shall
    gleam, in the poised radiance of perpetualness.
    When what’s in velvet beyond doomed thought

    is like a woman amorous to be known;
    and man, whose here is always worse than
    naught, feels the tremendous yonder for his own—

    on such a night the sea through her blind
    miles of crumbling silence seriously smiles

    E. E. Cummings
    (1894 - 1962)
    “A Connotation Of Infinity”

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