Baptism by Fire

A lyrical telling

Substances: DMT

Good day friends,

a kingfisher flew around and around my head;
the sound of flashing wings showed me this tale:

the crystal shards of DMT,
piled shiny and high on a bed of basil
(so as not to cloud my head with ghanja)
in the glass bowl of my bong,
pipe between my knocking knees I sit,
breathing deep and slow,
my heart rattling about my ribs.

Having just returned from a week spent digging through
layers of leaf-mold and rot in the closets of my
childhood home: love-letters past, photos of friends,
memories flushed out on the tide of my breath.
Having just immersed myself in past selves,
pinned down between father mother sister into brother and son,
I sit down to a dinner of death,
this sacrament that frights me so.

Baptism by fire:

As the smoke fills the chamber, crystals melting into vapor
before my eyes, I am caught in anticipation,
and then the smoke gusts out from between my lips,
"I" settle to the floor with closed eyes and my body slips away.
"I" am swallowed in a wash of shifting geometric forms,
panes of colored glass filter my knowledge of self.
I feel no fear for an interminable moment,
immersed in the melting of form into emptiness,
emptiness into form...
That moment, threaded out like the string that holds pearls,
that lack of self in which time fuses into sight, sound
becomes color, until knowledge coalesces around words again.
There is no room for fear in that flashing moment beyond self,
so who feels the fear of anticipation as the chamber
fills with pearly smoke?
And who is it that is flushed with fear
when "I" reconstitute enough to flinch from
the confusion of form?

"I" open my eyes to see my room,
the light, trees outside my window,
"I" open my eyes and realize that "I" am alive,
that the winds of the maelstrom have not ripped self
from the body that is my boat in the sea of time.
I close my eyes and fold my "self"
into the fabric of fractal geometries,
breathing deeply, safe in the knowledge that soon I will
be wholly human again,
not free from aversion to pain or grief,
nor free of attachment to joy and light.

Friends, I am thankful to be alive.

open heart to all,
may you learn what you have come here to learn.

namaste