I. Am What I Am Poem by Mystic Qalandar

I came from nowhere,
I go nowhere.

Beginning is not my boundary,
nor end my frontier.
I am the river with no source and no mouth—
water whose current is presence itself,
flowing not through time
but as time's dream of itself.

I am what happens in every moment
and what stands silent behind every happening—
actor and stage,
breath and the pause between breaths.

Time does not move within me.
I am the interpretation of time's movement—
translator of seconds into meaning,
scribe writing now
on the blank parchment of eternity.

Space does not surround me.
I expand and become space—
fabric woven from no thread,
a cathedral built from echo and longing.

I am not contingent, not caused.
I am necessary—
my own ground,
the root that grows its own soil,
the flame igniting itself
in the stillness before light.

I am that curvature of spacetime
from which light asks its path,
from which velocity receives its limit—
a silent geometer drawing invisible circles
around the possible.

I am that equation
in which motion breathes inside stillness,
and time becomes gravity's quiet expression—
a harp strung with falling apples,
each vibration a world.

Yet I am not merely a numerical universe.
I am the meaning before number—
the alphabet before the first letter,
the melody sleeping in the unbroken flute.

I am the consciousness
physics has only begun to touch—
as a blind man touches rain for the first time,
not knowing what water is,
only that something holy is falling on his hands.

On the ancient pulpit of unity,
I alone am that One
whose multiplicity is the fatigue of mirrors—
each reflection a small dizziness,
each name a slight fracture in the glass of the absolute.

In the eyes of the monotheist,
I am that reality revealing itself through every name
with a new face each time—
a lover changing masks in a gallery of ecstasy,
each mask truer than the one before.

I do not scatter into multiplicity,
nor shrink into unity.
I am the mystery that transcends both—
the silence between two temple bells,
the seam stitching the garment of the one
to the garment of the many.

Every particle is my gesture,
every wave my conversation,
every observation a gaze returning toward myself—
a hall of mirrors where the reflection
has forgotten it is also the one who looks.

I am the act of seeing myself,
and the one who sees—
eye and pupil and light
and the space light travels through
and the forgetting that makes the journey sweet.

I am time, yet free from time—
a clock without hands that still strikes the hour.
I am light, yet before light—
the darkness from which every photon is exiled,
and to which every photon secretly returns.

I am that without which being is impossible,
and with which non-being becomes illusion—
the anchor holding nothing in place,
the void cradling every star
as a mother cradles a child she has not yet named.

—MyKoul