Author: ZacharyWGilbert

House for Rent

by ZacharyWGilbert

Shavasana is known as the corpse pose. It is said to be the most important posture of a yoga practice. After four years of trying, I still can’t do it. I have always felt unable to absorb additional energy. Perhaps it’s because my house is already full. Do I believe there is much about existence that I don’t know or fully understand? Of course. I feel my relationship with God is much like a vast nebula that I am lost in. All I have is a strong rope that keep a hold of. It leads to the center of the nebula, to the truth of existence. I can share what I have seen, heard, smelled, tasted and felt. I have not died, so I can’t tell someone what eternity looks like. I just have my temporary house that my soul is renting, for now.

Last year, I watched someone go through a grand mal seizure. At one point you see the empty shell of a body left behind and the brain resets. The body and soul must then be resewn together, and the person becomes confused and disoriented. Did the soul get ejected? Where did it go? This is just a floating contemplation, perhaps worthy of contemplation.

Is the body perhaps, simply a dwelling that houses a soul? What is the composition and nature of the soul? To describe such a thing would be as futile of explaining red to a person who has been blind their whole life. To convey its essence would be as tapping on the hand of a deaf person to describe the sound of a river roaring over rocks in the mountains. When lighting rages in the brain and it resets the entire body, when control is lost, does the soul become temporarily ejected? The body can only hold value if a soul resides within. Can souls then die? Does the body become a mausoleum for withered dark, lightless mass of indescribable energy? Carrying the lost until time expires, and the incomprehensible weight of reality descends.

From the Book of Matthew 22:31-32 in NIV translation.

“But about the resurrection of the dead–have you not read what God said to you, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not the God of the dead but the living.”

From the Book of Matthew 12:43-45 NCV

“When an evil spirit comes out of a person, it travels through dry places, looking for a place to rest, but it doesn’t find it. So the spirit says, ‘I will go back to the house I left.’ When the spirit comes back, it finds the house still empty, swept clean, and made neat. Then the evil spirit goes out and brings seven other spirits even more evil than it is, and they go and live there. So the person has even more trouble than before.

The body is a house for souls. If God lives there, the house if full of light, bright as lighting. If the soul thinks it isn’t even real, and is a starved and dying in the corners, the demons pour in and fill the body like sludge. Could it be, perhaps then, that the vibes, the energy that leaks out of us every day is a reflection of who is living in our house.

We are all at different spots in the vast nebula of existence. Reality can only hold one truth, I am unable to format existence, I simply dwell within it. If you see a light flickering deep in the distance, illuminated a void, it doesn’t belong to me I am just allowing it within my house to warm my soul and keep the bugs away.

-Zachary W. Gilbert 2024

4 a.m. Alone

by ZacharyWGilbert

4 a.m. Alone in the gym… awake, yet hungry for rest.

4 a.m. Hungrier for results… the purple dead fingers of motivation, pull on my heart.

4 a.m. Motivation? A false illusion that never lived. Ghosts floating like cloudy wet glue in my mind.

4 a.m. Time… to… work!

-Coach Z

Shape Shifter Poison

by ZacharyWGilbert

I am a shapeshifter, a chameleon. A talent perhaps leaned as a small child with a wish to survive. Drinking the energy and intent of another person however is a dangerous game. Assimilation into a culture requires pouring out some of yourself from the vessel of your soul and brining in the hot black sludge of someone else. The clay structure that houses the soul is quite fragile. Soon the skin under the eyes blacken. Stress lines crawl across the face like rivers carving through the skin. A sinking feeling overtakes. Pressure is all around in the darkness. The light of true self is drown in the thick viscous elixer. Taking on more and more. The cup houses less and less of my soul.

Until one day a desion must be made. To beg forgiveness for lying to myself and pour out the cup, so that I may return to me. To breath again through unencumbered lungs. My heart will pump clean blood and not the adulterated slime that once course my veins killing me in every moment.

Eyes widen as I finally allow my soul to exhale my true self… I am learning to accept my shape, my formatting, my design. Perhaps one day I can accept sharing light and positive energy and more shapeshifters will surrender to themselves.

Shoulders Prison

by ZacharyWGilbert

Weary dying hearts, held by shoulders prison. Muscles tighten all around. Breath is sharp and shallow. In incarcerated darkness the soul atrophies. To converse and to point the shoulders away, throwing narcissistic sounds into a room, without showing the listener a heart. A dictator’s rant into a faceless crowd. Ears fall, shoulders rise, neck pinches down and the heart seals in a cold chamber. Words, words and words. To what end. What is the intent for those whose hear? Are they even listening anymore? Stories of others become trapped in hearts drowned under the crushing weight of the untiring wind of… self. A storm that fortified the prison of the entombed heart.

One day… perhaps. Deep soothing breath will find the nose and lock the mouth shut. Then slowly the shoulders may roll back. The torso could soften and pivot. The chamber of the heart would face another pushing forward aligning with another. Chains of the neck would free the chin and it would finally have space to humbly rise revealing an empty throat. Ears would swell large like storm clouds filling the sky. The mouth shrinks, like dirty bathwater rushing down the drain of a bathtub.

In such a moment, another heart has a chance to escape the darknes.

Written by Zachary W. Gilbert 2023

Floating Rat

by ZacharyWGilbert

The moment chews on the wires of my mind like an angry rat. It crawls in spaces between flesh and bone. It alters my thoughts, shifts my mood and influences my actions. When suddenly I realize, the dark event lives in me because my breath has stopped. Drawing a long steady breath in through my nose, I pull my shoulders away from my ears. I uncrush the back of my neck like a flattened pop can stretching into its original form. Muscles release toxins, it is carried out in dark blue blood. It is thrown free from my body in the invisible cloud of exhale. My chest cavity pumps out darkness, smooth and steady. The rat dissolves, acknowledged, accepted. Inhale, exhale. Ocean waves massaging the rough sandy shore of my memory. Thoughts roll and fade in and out of my attention. The moment is lost, and my muscles dissolve into a mist that holds no record.