Where Do The Letters Go?

Timelessness

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Listen Here- Author Podcast Style Reading

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The dead surround the living. The living are the core of the dead.
In this core are the dimensions of time and space.
What surrounds the core is timelessness.

John Berger

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Photo by J.Millard

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Time arrives every morning battering on the door before dawn. I wake with wonder.
We all have a perpetual purpose. A continuous craving of being that speaks through our creativity. The leitmotif of my life lives into the letters of questions. It is a ceaseless becoming. This journey from flesh to soul. The form seems to change. Yet the essence remains. Like letters that create a word. Am I alive in time or is time alive in me?

I ask myself; where does the time go? The ephemeral. Maybe time doesn’t go anywhere? The eternal. Maybe it just changes form? Maybe it’s a delusion?
No absolute ending and no beginning. Maybe the past, the future, are one continuous present. The lens we look through will always be what we see.
Is life a documentary or an editorial? Maybe both. Perception becomes perspective.
A loom weaves in two directions. The expected and the unexpected.
The temporal and the timeless. The worded and the wordless. Space and place.
Where do the letters go? Bone and marrow. Flesh and soul.

Do the stars keep time?
Maybe we were never points on a line? Maybe we are the centre of a circle?
The celestial observing eye of an Orloj versus the falling sand of an hourglass.
The centre of a labyrinth. An expanding ripple. A red thread.
Moving in two directions? Being in two dimensions? The no longer and the not yet. Spiralling. Into the now of here.

When language is carved off the bone of time. Maybe life
is not a question of time but a question of depth?
Maybe life is more a marrow of density?
Two naked chests confluencing into one
somewhere between mystery and meaning.
The blue grey gown of the original womb.
A pearl of the maternal deep.
The brine and flow of my blood
swelling beneath the words.
A spiral current carrying me
to a harvest and horizon of home.
The place I came from.
The wave I will return to.
The intimacy of a moment.
An eternal presence.
Where do the letters go?
Maybe they become
the “I” of
a poem.

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Where Do The Letters Go?

I chew on time.
A fork pierces the paper tines of silence.
I feel my tongue trace a word.
Slowly tasting the letters
as they shape into the firm form of a moment.
Words come from silence. To gaze
like a fork in a hand that asks for only a letter.
Life sends a whole book to swallow.
Somehow these words
have become my story.
Yet no words can contain it.
Does it matter what they say
or what is said within me?
Bone and marrow.
Where do the letters go?
Bones giving words the shape.
They change form. The essence remains.
Marrow creating the story of new meaning.
Metaphor is marrow.
Smothered by the thighs of soul.
Opening up wonder.
Questions. Not conclusions.
The way light unfolds shadow. 
The way shadow rides the light.
A hunger woken in the warm blood
of becoming.
Where do the letters go?
The deep way
poetry plunges presence
right down to the hilt.

© Jamie Millard

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Before me there was no time, after me there will be none.
With me she gives birth, with me she too departs.

Daniel von Czepko (1655)

May we live into the depth of our own questions
as we drink from the coffee of this clock.
Where do the letters go?
May the timeless light of our leitmotif dance our life home.
May we become the “I” - of our poem.

Thank You for Being - Here.

*The full author recorded reading podcast style is found below the main title at the top of the article*

Lots of Love,

Jamie