Not a container 
for your perceptions. 
Not a box to stash yourself in. 

Seek no hard place in me.
You should not feel free
to come in and grind an ax.

Not a brand
or logo to wrap around
some crap you want to sell.

Be yourself with me
while I am being myself,
precisely because I strive to be

wholly myself. Let’s enter into 
tandem being.
Side by side. Enough.

I filled the feeders
and no sooner had I 
turned my back
upon them that
the downy woodpecker
landed upon one
with me not being more than
a couple of feet away,
not yet even off the mulch
that surrounds them 
in the front yard,
the front walk still
several feet ahead —
the concrete
that I’ve always seen as
demarcation, mine 
versus theirs, and
when I turned back
to watch him, his red
patch bright before me
as he hammered so lightly
upon the seed block,
he did not seem concerned
and I was so honored to be
thus disregarded.

Suppose you stop being
an entire universe for one minute,
become static just long enough
to allow for a chat with the universe
you now and then think you see next door,

the one that claims
to love you, the one that suggests
a merger or a default recognition
of the folly that one is not one
with others, that there is in fact 
only the One Universe and each of us

maintains our fiction of being separate 
because without those individual perceptions
the One would cease spinning and weaving
and begin to collapse, would indeed neither begin
nor end its dissolution, there would be no slow
entropy toward closure but instead — eh,

I am getting ahead of myself. Suppose
you stop being whole for a moment,
give up the private chants and personal incense
in favor of looking to the left and right
and underfoot and overhead for signs
that you are not alone and physics
and chemistry suggest bonds beyond
your conception. The imagined universe next door
is just how you conceive of your inner separations 
in order to justify locating them out there somewhere,
maintaining treasured fictions beyond credence.

There is no universe next door shaped like you, you giant.
You long to kiss or fight yourself, you colossus, you cosmos.
You are not alone and there is no wall
to be breached, you conqueror; you warrior: mounted and ready,
supple and loose for whatever comes next. I don’t know
what you think you might find in those eyes you seek
but there’s nothing there you don’t already contain. 

Suppose you stop being your own universe
and see you are not the center, that you are not alone,
that there is only One, that it laughs at you thinking
such grandiose thought; that you are in fact held up 
by the arms of the One as you spin through this;
that you are forever cradled, unready,
playing your small part, forgetting your lines, 
forgetting your marks, allowed to lose face,
allowed to begin again.