Naked Before the Stars
by Mike Young

Will you not stand naked before the stars,
And rise into the mystery of life unbound, unfettered ?
Who are you to carry all this baggage ?
Every dent in a fender is moaned over
As if it were your own shin; or worse,
Your own honor somehow marred.
Ancient witches turned princes into frogs.
We work a weirder magic still.
We turn ourselves into things and roles
And imagined images conjured into
Stuff and non-sense glued like camouflage
So successfully that we have disappeared.
We must disenthrall ourselves.
We are not the things. What thing
Have you not survived the loss of ?
What role have you not put on
And taken off again like a mask
At a masquerade ball ? Even this mortal flesh
Which does seem so substantially you
Completely exchanges its molecules
With the ever enveloping universe
Every seven years or so. Your Past,
What you have done, you are not bound to;
Nor your future. If your dreams and desires fail
You are not destroyed. Or, if you succeed,
You are not bound to that either.

Will you not stand naked before the stars
And know that you have surrendered nothing ?
What is it that could be lost ?
The things are gone, but you knew that they would crumble.
Your image, so carefully manicured,
Has changed a dozen times or more.
Your roles were for the doing of this and that,
And when this or that are done
They are like an out grown, sloughed off snake skin.
Whatever small or large amount of truth
And worth was in that image of your self
Lives in the memory of those who loved you.
That's all you wanted of it anyway.
The rest was sham to start with.
Your body, too, will change. But it was changing daily,
And you got so used to that you hardly noticed.
Past and future are as much yours as they ever were.
You will be on to other things, as you always were
For all the anxiety and nostalgia you indulged in.
And if you die ? Ah, if you die,
Your relationship to what's out there has changed,
That's all. It always was, from day to day,
And is no more or less unknown now than then.

Will you not stand naked before the stars
And let that icy anxious thrill transform itself
From fear to ecstasy ?
To set your baggage down and shed your armor,
To peel away the layers to the silent naked center,
Is not loss; is not becoming less, but more.
In the stillness of the moment after
That sharp intake of breath, Ah,
There ! There is a brief glimpse
Of a you worthy of standing naked before the stars.
Under the layers of all that and all that,
Were you not there, before the stars,
Naked always after all ?
Will you not therefor rise
Into the mystery of life unbound, unfettered ?

--Mike Young