click play button to hear this poem:

As I begin to read your poems
Their power enters my body

Your faithful, deep feeling words
Slip through my unsuspecting skin

I feel them enter my bruisey heart
As easily as air enters my lungs
There is an affinity

I dive into the pool
It takes me a dreamworld moment to orient my self there.
Underwater, time and the senses seem to unfold

I emerge splashing, back into the surface world

Breathe

And I understand your first lesson:
though I want to expand my vision and aspire
to carry myself, and you, to the farthest horizons
I miss the point

I read your poems. I listen
I feel your pain
Aloneness
And I know that they are my own
and I understand that your voice speaks
not only to me, but to anyone
who cares to listen

So I begin to write in the first person
To listen to the voices in my heart
And know that this is where transformation begins.