[Thespiritexpress] Confessions of a Marginal Mystic (a poem by Ed Balldinger)

[Toni Bernbaum]

Thank you, Ed,  for this confession of a marginal mystic…..wow ( i love the title)……every line makes me stop to listen…….
its inspired me to write up my own “should” confessional! And so fortuitous that you didn’t miss the seventh circle of the third heaven!
This poem is a mind bender!  I should read it one more time!

> On Feb 24, 2026, at 3:49 PM, Ed Balldinger via Thespiritexpress <thespiritexpress at lists.mcn.org> wrote:
> 
> As requested by one, some, a few, or nearly all of the above to be shared on the ever lively Spirit Express, this is a poem I read before our Recognition Sutras study today.  It's a poem from my 2009 book of poetry, "From Cavity's Kitchen to the Bone Comber's Home"... 
> 
>  
> 
> Confessions of a Marginal Mystic
>  
> I should have knelt in the tower
> of marginal love much longer than I did.
>  
> I should have danced until my feet
> were numb from moving in step.
>  
> I should have spun like a junk monkey
> on the marble floors of decimation.  
>  
> I should have split each hair into quarter shanks
> to prove the accuracy of my own axe.
>  
> In the grainy angularity of a circular
> dissension, I fell down – face forward –
> out of a temple and into a shell
> where over and under, I generally dwell.
>  
> I should have drained the desert dry of all
> its liquid dew when once I had the chance.
>  
> I should have purified all my altered states
> on the altar of figurative speech.    
>  
> I should have breached the wall that
> held me like a garden tilled in deep grief soil.
>  
> I should have broken out and trickled down in
> streams that flow less damned than this one does.
>  
> Of the insolvent knave who’s prone to
> steer, there is no direction given here –
> one part Dervish; two parts lore; three
> parts left as we who came before.
>  
> I could have slashed a razor gash
> into the granite rock of my own spotless tomb.
>  
> I could have chosen one less cloak to wrap
> myself within, spending all my pent up heat,
>  
> but I could not miss the seventh circle of a
> third heaven, when the mystic within me heard
>           the voice of God,
> and I stopped –
> to listen for once… 
>  
> Edgar Z. Balldinger
>                                 January 26, 2004
>                                  © Nublin’s Pub, 2004 
> 
> 
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