The I-moment
A poem on accepting this moment.
The moment is one With others Or without With me in the world Or without Ever the effervescent This moment leaves a me behind What was that I? Not the same Not different This moment is the bridge Across which looms the shadow Of another existence Of my former I. As that moment dies I die As this moment arrives I live To love again To feel this heart Pounding against my skin To build A home for my sufferings A self for my longings An identity to call my own To become someone To linger here Hold onto this bridge With all the weight of my existence All my names, my I's But death always comes Life is exception This I-moment is here There may not be a next. Travel light Empty pockets Sans names Homeless Fearless Pastless Accept the I within this moment The world within this I Work Build Serve Then let go Let them die Let them arise again, if at all. Why travel at all? This I-moment bears gifts of Falls and rises Fails and wins Ours to accept Or deny This world is ours This moment is as much yours As it is mine To love and cry Death always comes How would you accept death If you never lived? Don't reject a world you never saw Accept it with its gnashing and crooning To be here is enough.
I hear the correction you’re making. And it matters.
If intimacy becomes defined only by “what is exchanged,” it quietly turns into accounting. But what you’re pointing toward is something older and quieter presence without transaction. Two beings not negotiating closeness, but simply allowing it.
In that sense, nothing is being “given” or “taken.” There is no ledger. Only recognition. And perhaps love, at its most unguarded, doesn’t need to be measured at all it just is, without asking to prove itself.
"Not the same, not different."
The Diamond Sutra has the same shape. X is not X, therefore X is called X. The negation is the move that lets the word stay.
Your poem does it without naming it.
The line that landed hardest for me was *how would you accept death if you never lived*. That's the bodhisattva problem framed without the vocabulary.
Thank you for this.