Naked Touch
The hand balled up unfolds
Baby eyes stare at the unknown
And know it not
The mother reaches out from the darkness
Hand slowly, hand slowly
To the moment of meeting
Skin to skin; finger to finger
The first contact
A moment of love
Naked touch
One who knows
But greets a stranger
One who does not know
But encounters the other
A memory not of mind
But of flesh

Pure Contact
Is a meeting
With no meaning
An event?
An event of no consequence?
Is it the primary event?
The first and last pure encounter
At-one-ment

Knowing the Loss
Is the search for that moment
The source of religion
Of our hunt for God
The cause of our own sense
Of being incomplete
That which makes us
Eternally alone
The first experiencing of experience
The first experience of experiencing
Gives to us; takes from us
The joy of intimacy
Yet never more than closeness

Hidden Intimacy
Gone is that state
Of being the other
Lost behind the awareness
Of the other
Buried under a landslide
Of processes
Of feeder, of cleaner,
Of teacher, of punisher,
Of protector, of persecutor
The source of the good
That which denies us the good
Our guide, our frustrator,
Our Mother, our mother
That touch; that moment
Just knowing the other
Both togetherness and
The breaking of symmetry
The moment
Of the Birth of the World
When the sound is known
Before anyone is there
As the tree falls in the forest

The Ultimate Separation
When the crowd is there
Everyone hears the sounds
Of life’s happening
We hug one another
And say hello
Across the distance
Between us
And in our togetherness
Is our loneliness
In our deepest intimacy
Lies the space
Of ultimate separation
That allows with no connection
Action without compassion
Rendering the other asunder
In callousness and equanimity

Seeking a Way Home
Yet too it calls to us
To stretch across the divide
Challenges us to be
The greatest we can be
Not loving but empathetic
And to seek a way home
Beneath all that
Which divides us
To that first touch
Not one to one
Just