your living is firewood

STRANGE BUSINESS

You sit here for days saying,
This is strange business.
You’re the strange business.
You have the energy of the sun in you,
but you keep knotting it up at the base of your spine.
You’re some weird kind of gold that wants to stay melted in the furnace,
so you won’t have to become coins.
Say ONE in your lonesome house.
Loving all the rest is hiding inside a lie.
You’ve gotten drunk on so many kinds of wine.
Taste this.
It won’t make you wild.
It’s fire. Give up, if you don’t understand by this time
that your living is firewood.
This wave of talking builds.
Better we should not speak, but let it grow within.

Rumi translated by Coleman Barks in The Illuminated Rumi