I Will Read for You: The Voice and Writings of Jaiya John

Reading a selection from my book, Freedom: Medicine Words for Your Brave Revolution, which begins, "A naked, diaphanous soul is dancing..." My new book, the short story No Man Came, and all my books are available online at booksellers worldwide. eBooks are exclusively at my website. Thank you for posting your copies on Instagram, tagging #jaiyajohn, encouraging others to purchase, posting readings of your favorite passages, and sharing online book reviews. My whole heart cries Grateful. jaiyajohn.com.

VERSE:

A naked, diaphanous figure is dancing everywhere you look. You can barely bare its beauty, a radiance so impossible that tears spring from your soul spring when you glance at its aura. You fall so in Love you spend your whole life trying to possess this miracle. This nascent light in every corner. You adhere to all the rules passed down to you. You follow all the approved paths, even when it breaks your heart. You achieve all the expected achievements. You acquire all the titles, relationships, and status. Yet the divine candlelight keeps taunting you, dancing closer, then further away. You feel its warmth against your pleading skin, but it draws back and leaves you cold. You spend your life pleasing what humans want from you, losing touch with true pleasure assigned to you by Glory. You become a searcher, a wanderer, a traveling ache. You renounce pleasure and romance, start digging in the hard desert earth for the nakedness of your obsession. Years go by. Decades. You feel you have been cheated. You rebel against all rules. You rebel against your soul. Your gamble is that if you perform anarchy against life, you will finally possess this effervescent creature for yourself. Nothing works. The dancing ecstasy comes into you and out of you in flashes of euphoria and torture. At last, one day, when your yearning has grown exhausted, you collapse into a kind of surrender. You fall into the boiling vat of your own soul water, which has been within you all along. The you of you gets cooked. Old bindings come undone. You are rearranged into particles of light. Your seven senses die into a new sense that makes no sense. You are born into the same body, the same world, but everything now is breeze and movement. The dancing form you always sought is nowhere to be found. But you are dancing. You no longer care about the music or the beat. Your dance is bliss without boundary. Pains come and go. You stay dancing. Your ideas die as soon as they form in you. Great Sky above calls you Friend and joins you dancing. This, dear soul, is freedom.

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Reading a selection from my book, Lyric of Silence, which begins, In the soft nook of  an old tree... My new book, Fragrance After Rain, and all my books are available online at booksellers worldwide. eBooks are exclusively at my website. Thank you for posting your copies on Instagram, tagging #jaiyajohn, encouraging others to purchase, posting readings of your favorite passages, and sharing online book reviews. My whole heart cries Grateful. jaiyajohn.com.

VERSE:

In the soft nook of an old tree, on a canyon side painted in night, a luminescent beating heart calls out to a known soul on the canyon’s far side:

Would you have drawn your arrow and sent its force into my place of origin had you known a spring of wanting would burst forth into a geyser?

Known soul answers:

Yes. For I am nothing but that which goes where wanting grows. I am that swollen plum gathering my sugar and flesh, preparing to be dearly eaten. I am dying to be devoured in the collective aching heart. I am suffrage on the lip. I am called out of the chasm, to return to the chasm with bits of light and frayed notes from a song. I have come for those who bleed in the dire dust. I am a bee driven mad by the sweet pollen of joy and laughter. I am dew dropped by sky into the tearful buttercup heart of the passionate ones. I am sky pouring out over itself, earth running over its earth. 

I cannot stop this weeping, which is my own weeping, left in washed out gullies, in villages of despair, to mark faces in salt, so this Love can find them. I have a kite string tied to joy’s updraft. I will not let go. When the fearsome beast roars in the apogee of our primal fear, I will kneel to stroke its  broad sternum and offer my head to its daggered jaws if that be my fate. I am drawn to wanting, that phosphorescent tidal pool from which I first emerged, slick and sniffing air when dawns had yet no light. 

This stretched skin I shred in every moment is the drumhead handed down by the ones who sing in darkness and hew light from charcoaled walls of cave. They who with sharp bleached bone spill their hearts at the river feeding the valley their red romance of Lovingness. They who see the mist inside the minutiae seen by solemn seers. They who cover their faces in old mud and dance in the cold current until new corn grows. They have given me this skin that taunts me in its echo and leaves from me daily aloft in tattered uprisings. 

This heart within is a sounding bell. Only the deepest soulful yearning in this world can make it tremble. And when it moves, its only voice is an absolute elation destined for those fields of wanting, brushed by sky beneath sky in their unattended serendipity...

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Reading a selection from my book, Fragrance After Rain, which begins, Jasmine tea...
My new book, Fragrance After Rain, and all my books are available online at booksellers worldwide. eBooks are exclusively at my website. Thank you for posting your copies on Instagram, tagging #jaiyajohn, encouraging others to purchase, posting readings of your favorite passages, and sharing online book reviews. My whole heart cries Grateful. jaiyajohn.com...   

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An interview with host Sonali Fiske for her Revolutionary Voices radio show, airing on Rukus Avenue Radio, itself hosted on Dash Radio. Our conversation addresses grief in these times of pandemic and social trauma, and how we may exercise our personal and collective sovereignty as a path of healing and humanizing change. This interview aired on May 10, 2022. Rukus Avenue Radio is the #1 South Asian Radio/Podcast Network, serving nearly 7 million monthly global listeners.

My new book, Fragrance After Rain, and all my books are available online at booksellers worldwide. eBooks are exclusively at my website. Thank you for posting your copies on Instagram, tagging #jaiyajohn, encouraging others to purchase, posting readings of your favorite passages, and sharing online book reviews. My whole heart cries Grateful. jaiyajohn.com...    

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Reciting I'm Gonna Make You See Me, from my book, Beautiful: A Poetic Celebration of Displaced Children, during my keynote speech to 600 9th graders at Gar-Field Senior High School, Prince William County, Virginia School District. September 30, 2011...

My new book, Fragrance After Rain, and all my books are available online at booksellers worldwide. eBooks are exclusively at my website. Thank you for posting your copies on Instagram, tagging #jaiyajohn, encouraging others to purchase, posting readings of your favorite passages, and sharing online book reviews. My whole heart cries Grateful. jaiyajohn.com...   

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Reading a selection from my book, Fragrance After Rain, which begins, Today, I will write poetry for you...

My new book, Fragrance After Rain, and all my books are available online at booksellers worldwide. eBooks are exclusively at my website. Thank you for posting your copies on Instagram, tagging #jaiyajohn, encouraging others to purchase, posting readings of your favorite passages, and sharing online book reviews. My whole heart cries Grateful. jaiyajohn.com...  

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Reading a selection from my book, Fragrance After Rain, which begins, I sit in the garden, in the poetry of blossoms...

My new book, Fragrance After Rain, and all my books are available online at booksellers worldwide. eBooks are exclusively at my website. Thank you for posting your copies on Instagram, tagging #jaiyajohn, encouraging others to purchase, posting readings of your favorite passages, and sharing online book reviews. My whole heart cries Grateful. jaiyajohn.com...   

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Reading a selection from my book, Fragrance After Rain, which begins, She woke beneath a blanket of moonlight...

My new book, Fragrance After Rain, and all my books are available online at booksellers worldwide. eBooks are exclusively at my website. Thank you for posting your copies on Instagram, tagging #jaiyajohn, encouraging others to purchase, posting readings of your favorite passages, and sharing online book reviews. My whole heart cries Grateful. jaiyajohn.com...  

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Sharing a live keynote clip, reciting my spoken word piece on youth leadership, I Lead Myself, from my book, Beautiful: A Poetic Celebration of Displaced Children. Keynote presented at the California Youth Connection Leadership and Policy Conference. Thousand Oaks, California, Aug. 4, 2012.

My new book, Fragrance After Rain, and all my books are available online at booksellers worldwide, in both hardcover and softcover. Ebooks are exclusively at my website. Thank you for posting your copies on Instagram, tagging #jaiyajohn, encouraging others to purchase, posting readings of your favorite passages, and sharing online book reviews. My whole heart cries Grateful. jaiyajohn.com...

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Sharing a past live recording, reciting my spoken word piece, This Home I Am, from my book Beautiful: A Poetic Celebration of Displaced Children, as part of my keynote speech for the National Association for the Education of Homeless Children and Youth (NAEHCY), National Conference, Pittsburgh, PA, November 7, 2011.

This poem addresses psychological and spiritual homelessness and their counterpart condition that I call, Homefulness.

My new book, Fragrance After Rain, and all my books are available online at booksellers worldwide, in both hardcover and softcover. Ebooks are exclusively at my website. Thank you for posting your copies on Instagram, tagging #jaiyajohn, encouraging others to purchase, posting readings of your favorite passages, and sharing online book reviews. My whole heart cries Grateful. jaiyajohn.com...

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