2/25/05

Do you teach, paint, weave, travel, or preach?
Or teach privately, or weave stories while you paint,
Or do you travel, weaving yarns based on your itineraries,
Which weaves up the coastline to Peru and Australia.
You vagabondage teaches you about the customs
Of tribespeople unexposed to hair-dryers and cotter-pins.
Your wandering weaves an irregular path about the globe.
Sometimes it is a drunken man’s saunter, a ballerina’s twirl.
You teach privately the methods of releasing chakra-energy
These tribespeople taught you in their palm-leaf shelters
But you collected all their orgone energy on the sly,
And packed it in a little book no thicker than a ring finger.
To the converted alone do you preach these doctrines
Of energy release and of living. With the paint-brush
You weave another itinerary, among the jack-fruit thorns
And the Venus fly-traps. Your own backyard
Is wherever you happen to be standing, a point
On the itinerary, but hardly the end.