The Bellows Between

People sometimes wonder how I started writing poetry. I found that I enjoyed journaling, and I wanted to explore an artistic sort of writing, rather than straight journaling – a sort of infusing every day writing with romantic notions (not romantic like love, but romantic as in characterized by, or suggestive of an idealized view of reality).

So I just started writing about things and how they made me feel. My initial efforts sounded flat and flimsy, and I realized I was writing for this weird audience I had constructed in my mind. I was afraid of all sorts of things in regards to my writing, but specifically how this “audience” would respond.

Naturally, I wrote a poem about that feeling and it was the first poem I wrote that seemed like I had struck something solid, something resonant. It’s called “FEAR” and can be read here (scroll to the end of the post in the link).

I wanted to mention these things before sharing this new poem simply to relate that “The Bellows Between” came from that early period when I was still figuring out my voice (and I still am). I re-read it today and really enjoyed the imagery, the alliteration, and the uncut rawness that can be found in my early poems. I wrote it in 2018 and hadn’t developed the vulnerability to share it with anyone because I didn’t feel it was good enough for that “audience,” or I felt that it needed more refining or something… but reading it today, I realized that the poem had been ready all along – I was simply the piece that needed a little more work and time.

Enjoy.

The Bellows Between

In. 

Out. 

Breathe deeply, in between heaven and earth, for the air never exhausts there. Feel the breath of life flow over your mouth, your lips your tongues your teeth

Because the sky meets the ground just as heaven kisses earth, and

humanity moves and lives between those parted lips, never knowing if its the first or the last of a lover’s kiss. 

The first kiss, wet, weird… and wonderfully electric, 
both awkward and awe-inspiring, 
opening eyes to a wider world of wonder, where 
lovers get lost in the eyes of the other

Suddenly colors take on a brighter hue, when seen from the lover’s view
Nothing is wrong with the world, and nothing can be wrong with the world, for the world is dancing along to the tune that is rolling around the mind and over the mouth, and out through the lips, the tongues and teeth from the lungs carried by the breath. 

Yes this is a lover’s first kiss.

But time goes… as time so often does and each kiss gets closer to…

The mournful last one, 
slow and sunken in heart, 
lingering, defying what has to come, despairing of all things good and beautiful, for love has seemingly been lost. 

Love lost through death or worse, 
love passing on like a cloud in the sky,
love scorned and rejected, left out to die.
The long last kiss that knows the end is here.

And somewhere between those two disparate ends, 
life is lived, again and again… and again. 

Between first kiss, and the last
Between heaven and earth

Expectation, fulfillment, desire
Pull us up, and lift us higher.
Repetition, cycles, birds, dirt
Keep us grounded to our gritty worth
And through it all, in between, 
the tree of life grows evergreen

The space between,
the connection of infinite and earth where 
heavenly worth 
is
poured out and overflowing
overwhelming
and overcoming
the weak boundary lines
I all too often use to squeeze the divine.

My box is utterly small in the face of the space between heaven and earth,
the magnificent bellows,
effortlessly breathing life out through the mouth, over the lips, the tongue, the teeth, without exhaustion unto all things.

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Some quotes and artwork that inspired The Bellows Between:

“Is not the space between heaven and earth like a bellows? It is empty without being exhausted: the more it works the more comes out.”- Lao Tzu

“So heaven meets earth like a sloppy wet kiss, and my heart turns violently inside of my chest.” – John Mark McMillan 

“We’re walking around in it. We’re in the sky. There is sky and there is ground and we’re somewhere in between. That is where we live. And sometimes some of us take wing and when they do, when their feet leave the ground, even for a second, they pull the rest of us with them. And when we rise, and when we rise, and when we notice that the sky has been around us all along. We have been walking into it. It has been this constant collision. Divinity and depravity.” – David Crowder

The Tree of Life Gustav Klimt

The space between heaven and earth is full of life, beauty, wonder, magic, death, resurrection. There is a lot going on here; don’t close your eyes.