Ode to a Lone Odist

"Hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other. All companionship can consist only in the strengthening of two neighboring solitudes, whereas everything that one is wont to call giving oneself is by nature harmful to companionship: for when a person abandons himself, he is no longer anything, and when two people both give themselves up in order to come close to each other, there is no longer any ground beneath them and their being together is a continual falling. …

Love your solitude, and try to sing out with the pain it causes you. …

To walk inside of yourself and meet no one for hours -- that is what you must be able to attain."

– Rainer Maria Rilke

Ode to a Lone Odist

Heroic solo poet,

Bold loner of prose,

Owned by no one.

Rowing a boat alone

In the blowing cyclone,

Knowing no port,

No hold,

No home.

No holy oath,

No whole from both.

No love.

Enclosed in a stove.

Cogito ergo sum ego.

What toll do we owe the odist

For oracular notions told?

Poems and tomes of soul probing,

Groping in a hole too cold for most.

A comatose ghost woken,

Then rolled to the old boneyard,

Closed

For us, open only as a footnote.

For those who wrote it, an open sore,

A molten core.

But that onliest core is gold

Those poets protect, promote so.

Alone flows the source,

The origin of the gorgeous.

Oh. No?

Associations, no association;

Approaches, no approaching;

Accords, according to no one;

Chords, no chorus.

Compose without decomposing.

Go from the shadow of the bodhi,

Loan your ego to the cosmos,

The glow shown within shone without.

No soul is an atoll.