My Whole Life

This is a poem of an arctic annual, as if my whole life takes places in one short season. There is no time to waste. It all happens now. There is no time. There is no waste. It all happens. Now.

My Whole Life

With seasons so short
what can I do but rush on,
then here you come like
a sweet soft rain. Mist
is no burden to my twigs,
to my tiny buds,
to the pale green fronds
that feed me in this season
that is my whole life.

May 30, 2009 7:53 PM

Saying It Straight

This is a poem about writing poems, I guess.

Saying It Straight

I have some good news,
not that no news is good news
(while elsewhere they say
such a thing often,
I won’t.) Instead I shall say
it straight: even here
in these made up words
you shall find the elements
of deeply true things.

May 28, 2009 12:41 PM

Calling You

When I read this poem today, I don’t remember who I had in mind writing it. Behind all, lurks God. I think perhaps I am luring God back, as if He is really gone infinitely beyond space and is not also infinitely near.

But mostly today I have thought of my mother. We both agreed this was to be the last time around here. We both agreed in those days (she passed in 2001) that reincarnation is the best guess for a perfect justice to happen on the planet. People get a raw deal or too sweet a deal otherwise. We both agreed in that context that this was to be the last time around here. My experience is precisely that.

Since Mom has gone on her way I have had no signals of any kind that she stayed around. She is thoroughly gone. Others early claimed some communication or presence and that may have been true, that she had business with them, but she did not with me.

There remains the possibility that the poem is fiction, that I didn’t have anyone “real” in mind when I wrote it.

Calling You

If I had voice strong
enough to reach beyond space
I would tell you why
you could now come back
to my odd neck of the woods,
to sit with me one
more time, laugh with me again
here by our old fire.

May 28, 2009 12:14 PM

The Long Path

My former lover loves a good hike. I felt like our relationship was one long trek through the wilderness. In fact, she gave me the best vacation of my life when we went to the Canadian Rockies. She had an idea what she wanted out of that vacation. We spent most of our time in the forested mountains in the area of area of Banff and Jasper but also in the Canadian Glacier National Park. My best day was in that park but only just, since there were so many good days. She decided that she wanted to live in Field and I sort of mark her decision to emigrate from that vacation. We hinted to each other that we would return to the resort that was built on the lake beneath the Burgess shale formation. That sounded to each of us that we were headed toward a honeymoon. We never made it back there, never made it to the marriage either. We hiked around that lake. On the back side, there was a territorial fly of some sort who decided to defend its territory from us. It buzzed us all the way across that swampy area in the back of the lake. When we reached a certain point that fly abruptly stopped bothering us. Guess that was the end of its territory.

I could not go to Canada. In any case, I was not invited.

The Long Path

Ah, a blank canvas
to smear my ink on,
to say anything I want,
to remark how fine
you are in the wind
with all your long hair streaming
as you scan your land
and step past the end
of the long path we once shared.

May 26, 2009 12:29 PM

Fancy Footwork

This poem is fiction in its way, or from long ago and far away. I don’t have anything like this in my life now and not for years if ever in this lifetime. I have fallen before, several times, but I have never needed to keep my lover's hands in sight, or at least I have never known I needed to.

I hooked into dancing in high school. I was doing musicals and thought it was a really cool way to handle women’s bodies with care and firmly. We were very fortunate to have good choreographers. I loved the idea and my musical ability let it happen for me. I didn’t have the slender body for a serious career and I never really learned the patterned dances, but I definitely can, or could follow music with my legs and my body sway and my arms and all that. I did get trained a bit in ballroom dancing a couple times in my life but not so I remember any but waltz and chacha, and them not much. I have loved to dance throughout my adult life, but I married a woman who wasn’t enough into music for us to get that going on. I suppose that she would have put up with it had I insisted.

I remember being very high once at Fillmore West in San Francisco. I don’t remember who was playing that night but I was tripping on acid and dancing. The thing was, I was able to anticipate the band well enough that I put on quite a show of spontaneous choreography. I am quite sure I heard people remark about how good I was once or twice. I didn’t have a partner. In those days at that kind of place you didn’t have to have one. That was in 1966. I was just twenty one.

Fancy Footwork

I have learned fancy
footwork going past your door
how to duck and weave
and place my hands right-

would ask for a dance with you
except I need your
wild hands in plain sight
while I look in your crafty
foxy eyes and fall
into your cavernous
heart.

May 23, 2009 10:36 AM

The Distance Between Us

Here is something all aspiring sorcerer's apprentices might do well to remember:

"However smart we may be, however rich and clever or loving or charitable or spiritual or impeccable, it doesn't help us at all. The real power comes in to us from the beyond. Life enters us from behind, where we are sightless, and from below, where we do not understand. And unless we yield to the beyond, and take our power and might and honor and glory from the unseen, from the unknown, we shall continue empty."
- D. H. Lawrence

This poem was written a year ago, thinking about my friend Jozien, who lives with wilderness just outside her door:

The Distance Between Us

To think, you atop
the mountain, in the bright air,
the noon heat, the time
and the space beyond
the weary places I'm found
staring at brick walls,
my breeze coming from
the fan I brought in to move
the stale office air.

May 22, 2009 9:50 AM

What She Told Me

I was not tracking the flow, so this poem surprised me and seems a really fine follow up. As an object love is fragile. If we make love too special, it’s a trap. As a space it is like the ocean. The blood plasma is very close to sea water in many respects. When creatures moved out of the sea onto the land it was only because they found a way to carry the sea with them. And consider this, sea creatures became creatures by finding the way to bind up the ocean inside them. Love is like this. Successful love makes it difficult to know where we begin and end and thus reveals both the beginning and ending of life itself as bright stars of consciousness in the spaciousness of love.

What She Told Me

What we glorify, distracts.

See love’s heart up close,
closer than my gaze.

Believe love so fragile
that it cannot be grasped,
only touched by the breath.

Believe it so immense
that we all live in love
like creatures in the sea,
often forgetting the water.

May 21, 2009 3:16 PM

Grasping For Straws

The biggest heartbreak in my life was when I realized that just because I had seen made no difference, gave me no privilege, offered no shortcut.

The Buddhists claim that the point of the practice is precisely a shortcut built into the scheme of things. They claim that otherwise there is a really long path, measured in uncountable lifetimes. With the shortcut, it is remotely possible (though highly unusual) that the job is done in one lifetime. On the other hand most of us can’t do that even if we want to, even though the shortcut is there.

As usual, there is responsibility and accountability. I am responsible and accountable for the risks I take or refuse. Ignorance is indeed no excuse, and there is no excuse for ignorance. There are so many resources now.

Well. That lacks compassion. Of course ignorance excuses, but it doesn’t change outcomes. Resources are no longer scarce but distribution really sucks.

I hide in beauty, hide in love, hide in things. I trap myself. What can it mean to hide in love? I want to believe that love is the answer. It is not true. Love is not an answer, it is an open space. There is no place to hide.

Grasping For Straws

I am not now whole
and have never been as you
say. You ring the gong.
Too much fear and pain
for that, too much chasing dreams.

I hide in beauty,
hide in love and things,
attempt to make them all last.

There is no secret,
slow progress only
because there's too much grasping
for straws in the way.

May 19, 2009 12:53 PM

Purification

There is always a price to pay, always. I have written before on this price - the cost of things – the sacrifice. It appears sacrifice is a central feature of the spiritual walk. I hate that. I am not sure why I hate that but I know it is my task to demonstrate something connected to sacrifice, to lay this work on God’s lap. I came into this life to do the work of gathering the case, just like a lawyer. I will not make the case this side of death. I will not settle things before I pass.

If I were to say it today, I would say there is entirely too much pain on the planet now. To increase or extend the pain for any reason, even holy sacrifice is not right. I know all the way down to my soul that things cost too much. The cost of living is too steep. If I were to say it today, that is what I would say, and I don’t mean it personally because my life is not so painful. However, I am immature yet and I know that I am making an immature case. I do not have enough information, though I know I am not the only one to come to such a realization. Buddhism for example says all life is suffering, the First Noble Truth. That is too steep a cost. Christianity says Christ chose to die for my sins. That too is too steep a cost. I will die for my own sins as is my obvious duty.

Purification

I squat by the pit
filled with coals, ready to walk,
to prove my freedom
from the pain of things.
You whisper to me the chant
I must speak within
my heart as I walk.
I still myself. Coals glow red,
so do my sore eyes.

May 19, 2009 9:20 AM

Hesitation

If I am outside my comfort zone I become painfully shy. I also lose my eloquence. I am not in my comfort zone at work some of the time, most of the time with some people. I lose my eloquence in critical moments because of it.

(By the way, this has been a wonderful day, like the first real day of summer. :oD )

When I look at breathtakingly beautiful women I know they are only for my viewing for they are far above the likes of me. This has always been my truth. I know it is not really so but I have no real way to break my impressions of my life here. Now that I am older, I really do know better but now I am too old and fat. Oh well.

I live with confidence in most ways. People who know me only by sight and presence at AA where I am comfortable think of me as tremendously serene. People at work think of me as amusing and a little tedious when things aren’t going my way. I have a reputation for accuracy but not for speed in getting the work done.

Beneath the “serene” surface of the swan on the lake the little feet are just churning away unseen. This is my brain on life, just churning away unseen.

Groucho said he could never join any exclusive club that would actually have him as a member. He could not approve of such a club.

I am not looking for denials of my attitude. You will know if you reflect any length of time that I have been living with it for over fifty years, that I have tried this and that and even laid it on God’s altar, even in His lap. I have done every fucking thing and it persists. So unless you are a true magician or exorcist there is no suggestion to give. Most of the time my attitude is of small account, basically right sized. It does not get in the way. I am almost never fired from my job, only one time. Many people like me. I get the job done. I know how to love a woman. I have it on good authority. I’m not doing so bad. I some ways I actually have more trouble with my arrogance.

Even so, this is an honest poem.

Hesitation

I hesitate to
touch your skin, suddenly shy
of how you will turn
and look in my eyes,
perhaps to send me away
so far that I will
never find my way
back to this green oasis
in the sandy waste.

May 18, 2009 3:32 PM

It Always Comes To This

How am I to reach beyond my capacity? Any mastery, any at all may have something of that reach in it. I have turned away more than one time when I actually grasped the monumental size of the task. This is one circumstance where ignorance may genuinely be bliss, but it is bliss that cannot last. One becomes conscious at some point along the path toward mastery and then the shit hits the fan.

I have written several times of my turning away from music. It is frankly true that I left music behind in 1973 and did not return to it in any form until I discovered while keeping time to the radio in my car that I was anticipating rhythm of the jazz well enough to syncopate creatively to music I had never heard before and I have never trained to do that. This completely blew me away and still does. I don’t know where it came from but I guess it had something to do with getting sober and staying that way long enough. It had something to do with the healing involved in that. It also had something to do with no longer having anything to prove long enough. In other words, it may have had something to do with growing up. As well, there is the spiritual factor, that I am under a discipline of sorts, have been since 1967, and after decades it is actually working.

I would not have really returned to music without back up. I gave it a start, but it was not until my last lover entered my life and pulled me in that I really began the re-entry. She was capable of that pull, unlike anyone else in my life because she was in many respects a better trained musician than I am and my peer in so many other ways that I could not see her pressure as manipulation. It was obviously love, several kinds of love, and not least for music itself.

The point of writing about this is to look at the reason that I stopped back in 1973, why for some time before I was losing momentum rapidly and the heart had gone out of my love for playing music after six years of intense daily practice. I had reached a wall I couldn’t break through. I realized that not only was I going to have to learn a bunch of new stuff from the bottom up, the only way for me to do that was to unlearn much of what I had mastered. I was in a trap of my own devising by pushing forward as I had. I realized all the way down to my soul this was so. The task was just too big and too unfair after so much work. I knew I couldn’t do it. See what I mean about becoming conscious? That's what happened. I woke up and it wasn't pretty. My motivation had always been screwed up. I created my own failure in that way.

I knew I couldn’t do it, not what had to come next. No. I’ve always known I couldn’t do it. I lost heart for the dependability of the power flow from beyond that supports this kind of activity. I lost my trust in the benevolence of the universe for my work. Without that trust I could not believe. Without that faith I knew that I not only couldn’t do it, I no longer wanted to. I suffered terminal discouragement. I had worn my guitar out. The frets needed replacing. Instead of fixing my guitar, I put it in the closet. I quit singing. That was that.

I had no comforter.

Lack of trust: no one can master anything without it. If you have to jump an abyss farther than you can jump, then you must rely on the universe to supply and span the gap in power. What if it lies just a little bit beyond? Most mastery is like that, just a little beyond. The work is doable but the immensity is daunting. If you are too self centered about the work, it will fail because the necessary power is beyond self.

This is also the reason that alcoholics cannot sober up.

It Always Comes To This

You have given me
the reach, the yearning for sky
and hope and truth, dream
of a way beyond
the chasm of my longing life,
a short leap, you said,
though it looks wider
than my best running long jump.

I wish I had trust.

May 18, 2009 1:20 PM

The Mirrors

There really is something out there. This must be true or else science wouldn’t work the way it does. At least I choose to not view God as an elaborate trickster down to the nth detail. Scientists are permitted while doing science to totally ignore the God idea, not as a matter of faith in the idea of not God, but instead faith in the idea that resorting to the assertion God did it stops inquiry. There is nowhere further to go. Nowhere further, you must not go there, has been a part of the debate over the centuries. Scientist have the faith that they can and should push to “go there”. They have the faith there really is something out there and that it is worth looking at, that there is something more to find out.

But there is more. Both the science and the experience of mind tell us firmly that our boundaries are pliable and do not hold still. We are difficult to map. The breath for example reaches beyond the skin and so do the bio-energetic fields. Some are sure the mind reaches farther than that. It is difficult to decide where our edges are. In fact there are definite overlaps in families, such that my boundary may actually extend into your insides in some real way. This takes place not only with family members. A good hunter often will claim that he has bonded with the prey animal or else he could not find it.

Finally there is this projection thing. I know under the right conditions, and once doing drugs was one of the conditions for me, that I am a psychic broadcaster. Another name for this is charisma. In other ways I call myself a weaver. It is music but not only music. I may do that here sometimes. That’s when it is effective and useful. As often, projection is more difficult. The traditional psychological definition is projection happens when some part of me is difficult and uncomfortable and I wish to not know it about myself, so I put it out into the world and pin it on some person, place or situation that fits the projection tolerably well. If I do that with very many parts of me, then the world begins to fill up with myself in weird ways, perhaps so full that really all I am seeing is me. That is an awkward state of affairs. It is also one aspect of what the Eastern Religions mean when they assert that we live illusory lives if we do not use some discipline to break the illusions. They assert the projections and other devices we use to adjust to things renders the "out there" that we see almost completely blanketed with ourselves, making any genuine observation basically impossible without a great deal of work. There is always a hidden personal agenda though not always the same one.

That is why scientists use a formal method and peer review so that even the geniuses like Einstein had to accept peer criticism. It is also why Newton actually spent much more time on biblical study and prophecy than his science but his science is so much more impressive. It was accessible to agreement where his prophecy is not. That is also why spiritual seekers enter a discipline, and often a community, why the self taught are dangerous and may be deluded.

The Mirrors

It is difficult
when my insides spill over
like this...what is true
then, really out there,
a vista, or a mirror?

I wish for answers
but fear them as well.
Long ago mirrors were cold
and I froze to death.

May 18, 2009 12:29 PM

The Absent Tea Master

The tea ceremony is a deeply spiritual undertaking in Japan, home to several kinds of Buddhism. The Buddhism of the Pure Land and its Buddha is by far the most common, but we know of Zen better here in the west. There is at least one other kind. In some ways you would think you were in a Christian church if you attended a Pure Land ceremony. There are churches of this kind around in any city with many Japanese. As far as I know, tea ceremonies are central to all Japanese ways, including Shinto. It is easily possible that a Japanese Samurai would defer to a tea master.

I rarely drink anything but water and a little sparkling water. Even tea is a bit much for me any more. Soft drinks are completely beyond my scope except once in a great while. I have a tonic concentrate I take in water, this twice a day. The Zip Fizz I can get at Costco – sometimes I will drink one of those too. Oh yes, when I remember and it feels right I will take a packet of gourmet hot chocolate and drink that.

I would be happy to sit with a master and have a cuppa.

The Absent Tea Master

The Tea Master has
wandered off into the world
to contend with things
showing us the way.
When it is time to pour, pour.
When time to work, work.
The seasons come, go
with equanimity, so
shall we come and go.

May 18, 2009 10:23 AM

I Woke Up Today

Sometimes I am just not myself. I may be a little weird. In fact there may be moments when I am full blown batshit. HooHoo…ooahhahhahhah…

I’m all better now. Or not… At this time last year I was still echoing from that three day hospital thing where they put a flexible cage of titanium wire inside my heart’s lower right artery. Holy crap! I’m a bionic gray squirrel, a tree rat, as it were.

I Woke Up Today

How odd to come to
sitting in a seedy tray
wondering, where next?
I have some strange bugs
on me and a curious
hankering to scold
someone, anyone
who dares mess with me today.
Maybe if I place
myself upside down
on that tree with tail twitching
I will feel better soon.

May 17, 2009 12:01 PM

Pictures

It is said of Merlin he lived backwards. The Buddhists say of reincarnation that one consequence is everyone has been everyone else’s mother at least once. This is the reason for not stepping on bugs. You crush your mother. Crows are spirits. So are butterflies.

The elves have departed middle earth for the lands of the west, but elven blood is still part of our heritage.

(Did you hear? Scientists are now claiming that Neanderthal and Sapiens could in fact interbreed and did. Many of us have a variable amount of Neanderthal DNA, between 1 and 4%. They have typed the Neanderthal genome from bone fragments of three 40,000 year old Neanderthal women in order to figure this out. We interbred mainly in the Middle East, it is said.)

When you paint your face and begin the dance, try to remember where you come from and how ancient your soul. Do not fall victim to your supposed inexperience. Do not claim you do not already know. Look deep. There within is the chanting of your former selves, the gathering around the primal fire, the awakening of the ancestors, and the praising of the Gods. Behold your elven kindred. There within is the counterpoint to the way the day has gone, the way your life has gone.

Kindred is rooted in very old words, kin- (exactly the same but also the child or children as in the German kinder) goes all the way back with cognates on every side of the Indo-european spread, though in oldest German one of the cognates is chun-, Latin and Greek is gen-, and Sanskrit is jan-. -red goes back to Old English, thus before 1200 AD, from raedan, meaning to rule, advise, guess, read. Thus to rule or read the child, to measure the lineage. Kindred is an ancient word, rich and dripping with the experience of the human species, like a juicy cut of aurochs or mammoth. In the poem, another old word, hang and hung, a different way to signal the past - hang and hanged (new), hang and hung (old). This is how it changes.

Amen.

Pictures

But crow still flies true
and releases one long call
to remind you where
you belong. Mirrors
don't hang well on those warm walls.

What we have hung there
are pictures God drew
of us when we were older
than this strange young world.

May 16, 2009 10:19 PM

The Pearls

I will never take love lightly. I never have. However, when I was younger I was unable to match my true devotion and the possible. I wound up married, in a relationship I settled for after becoming convinced of two things. First I was convinced that I only really fell for people either not healthy at all or at least unhealthy for me. Secondly, I was convinced that God had presented me with a real alternative and said, “Go here.” I did not say such a thing to Annie, and rightly, because this was a private thing between me and God. However, I was gambling on the same sort of long term thing that is part of arranged marriages. That would be where the people in favor of the marriage will tell the reluctant partner(s) that they will grow into true love. That actually happened in the practical ways.

I am in love with romantic love. I love it when I can sense the Goddess behind the woman. I am not sure that works for marriage, not over the long haul, but there is no better way to transform the world for a time from the mundane to a world filled with sacred possibility. It is a source of genuine power as well. There is even a Path called Tantra which harnesses the power of Eros quite specifically. I have not entered that path, though I came close one time. I am not afraid of that possibility. I have experienced both the long haul and the fire. I know the fire can last at least two years. I have been there twice in my life. When the fire is in my life so is heightened psychic power. My poetry in its present form is a direct gift of the fire that burned in my soul from 1998-2001.

The Pearls

I heard you say love.

When my heart changed in the force
of love I left home
on a sea journey
to the outer banks of life
in a small wild boat,
in faith I will find
you when I get back with pearls
I string on the way.

May 16, 2009 10:05 PM

Sun Dappled

Yet again I am going to present with a quote from tricycle, from a writer who practices Buddhism. It is a perfect counterpoint to yesterday’s post. Yesterday I got about as “political” and judgmental as I ever want to be. I find it very difficult. I don’t believe the solution can be found in this kind of thinking, at least no solution I am interested in.

I hesitate. I seem like a Buddhist when I quote professing Buddhists like Jack Kornfield. This is like if I post Randy Newman’s lyrics about short people it would seem that I agree with them. If I post so many Buddhists, I must be a Buddhist. The truth is more diffuse. I have these quotes appear in my email box because there is so much of Buddhist thought that I do agree with, that fits my experience. However, there is much that I find difficult too. I have several books on my shelf – well, strewn around my house is more like it – on Buddhism. I try to read them and cannot. I can only take my Buddhism in small doses.

I find it much easier to chant Sanskrit to Parameshwari, to Parabhrama, to Shivaya, to Ganapatiye, to Vasudevaya, than to sit in Buddhist silence. I even find it easier to invoke the Divinities than to chant with the Tibetan Buddhists, “Om mani padme hum.”

I need Gods and Goddesses or my insides parch.

On the other hand, I am not fair to myself if I don’t also add in the years of listening to Christian radio that I did on the way back and forth to work, listening intently to make sure I was true to myself in separating from the church of my youth. I listened to gather the arguments and apologies, postures and analyses of the Christian life. I had my favorites then, a certain local Foursquare preacher from Beaverton, Ron Mell, who taught me the most about Christian compassion, Jimmy Swaggert (he on TV) for his true passion for his work (he is as rock and roll as his cousin Jerry Lee Lewis), Charles Swindoll for his suavity, his avuncular approach to the message, Pastor John MacArthur for his austerity. All these men for a variety of reasons avoid many of the parts of the Christian message that stop me in so far as this is possible. That made it possible for me to look forward to their sermons.

Still, there are times when Buddhist messages delivered in well chosen small doses cut to the quick of things and center in my heart. The mix of serenity and compassion in them is beyond compare. This next message, as I wrote at the beginning of this post, is a perfect counterpart to my last post about Dread People.

Challenge Your Whole Identity

True dharma practice is a revolutionary activity, and you can't do it in a comfortable way. You really have to challenge the whole identity of your life. But the strength that's asked for is not necessarily the strength of eliminating the impurities of body and mind, or fighting against the defilements of greed, hatred, and delusion, the inner corruptions, though this language is very common in Theravadin, Tibetan, and Zen Buddhism. The strength that's needed is the courage of heart to remain undefended and open, a willingness to touch the ten-thousand joys and the ten-thousand sorrows from our compassion, the deepest place of our being. This is a different kind of fearlessness, which requires as much or more passion and fire.

-Jack Kornfield, "The Sure Hearts Release"

Amen.

Sun Dappled

Living in your shade
gives me a smaller vista
than I thought I'd have.
The sunny part works
while the rest of me takes naps,
wishes for a wrap.
I hear munching near
and begin to worry some
that my edges soon
will be food for thought.

May 16, 2009 8:54 AM

Dread People

I knew a lady many years ago who insisted that the world was full of NARPs. “Not A Real Person”. My wife Annie called them pod people after the science fiction movie about how the alien replacements grew in cocoons and slowly the human race was being replaced. There were others of whom she complained they walked around with cobs up their butts, making other people pay for their discomfort. I presume the cobs were stripped of kernels and were dry before they were inserted. Here is my version. I think these people are filled with dread.

We are called to love them. This is good for the soul. Heh.

Oh yes, I borrowed the first line from a song by Randy Newman which asserts "short people got no reason to live". That lyric has stuck with me.

Dread People

Dread people got no
reason to go on but they
do, just plod along
maybe at the mall, yo
maybe 'round the block, taking
time as if they had
all the time they need.

May 15, 2009 2:58 PM

The Short People song is mean. Here it is. Probably it fits Dread People better.

Short people got no reason
Short people got no reason
Short people got no reason
To live

They got little hands
Little eyes
They walk around
Tellin' great big lies
They got little noses
And tiny little teeth
They wear platform shoes
On their nasty little feet

Well, I don't want no short people
Don't want no short people
Don't want no short people
`Round here

Short people are just the same
As you and I
(A fool such as I)
All men are brothers
Until the day they die
(It's a wonderful world)

Short people got nobody
Short people got nobody
Short people got nobody
To love

They got little baby legs
That stand so low
You got to pick em up
Just to say hello
They got little cars
That go beep, beep, beep
They got little voices
Goin' peep, peep, peep
They got grubby little fingers
And dirty little minds
They're gonna get you every time
Well, I don't want no short people
Don't want no short people
Don't want no short people
'Round here

The song reminds me of M. Scott Peck's book People Of The Lie.

The Glade

I don’t know if it is the meds or my heart, my age or just this stage of my walk on the planet. I am not working just now and my rhythm has shifted. I go to bed around midnight, get up for an hour or two around three in the morning, go back to bed, get up around seven in the morning, go back to bed around nine, and then get up around eleven. Hmmm. Half the time I also nap in the afternoon. When I wrote this poem I was staring at the wall in my cubicle at work.

I sit under a transformer that hums. Part of this wall is a fire door, set up to slam shut against an active fire should the heat rise enough to melt the clip that holds the cable holding the door open. The tan fire bricks are five inch high and about a foot long. They are eight inch deep. In other areas of the plant I sometimes use the height of the bricks to estimate how high up some pipe or other piece of stuff is if I don’t need real precision.

I have taped up on that wall a variety of things I have found amusing in the past, like the cartoon of the convict digging his way out of prison. We see him in his hole just about to dig through to the cess pit under the outhouse. Oops. Some days are like that. Under my name tag at the other end of my space I have asserted: “Some days it just doesn’t pay to gnaw through the leather straps in the morning.”

The Glade

If I had a choice
right now, the tan fire brick wall
in back of this desk
would change into space
and I would find me in air
greened by the small glade
grandfather planted
just for the wide mesh hammock
where the breeze came by.

May 15, 2009 9:31 AM

When I Was Seven

"Samsara literally means "wandering-on." Many people think of it as the Buddhist name for the place where we currently live. But in the early Buddhist texts, it's the answer, not to the question, "Where are we?" but to the question, "What are we doing?" Instead of a place, it's a process: the tendency to keep creating worlds and then moving into them. As one world falls apart, you create another one and go there. At the same time, you bump into other people who are creating their own worlds, too.

The process can sometimes be enjoyable. In fact, it would be perfectly innocuous if it didn't entail so much suffering. The worlds we create keep caving in and killing us. Moving into a new world requires effort: not only the pains and risks of taking birth, but also the hard knocks - mental and physical - that come from going through childhood into adulthood, over and over again."
- Geoffrey DeGraff

What an intriguing vision, that we repeat the passage through childhood into adulthood over and over again, that this is the stuff of life's passage, only to have it dissolve and that forces us to do it again. I can hardly argue whether this is a symbolic statement within a single lifetime, or it is the larger statement of life after life. This is the stuff of my life but described in terms I might not myself actually use without Geoffrey's prompt. When it goes well there seems to be a certain joy in it. When it does not go well then there is much pain. The Buddhist comment about it is twofold, an ancient observation.

First, that even the pleasure parts will eventually turn out unpleasant, either because the natural drift of the experience is into pain or because if pleasure is repeated enough it cloys and clots and becomes ultimately painful. Second, there is a procedure and a path that eventually escapes this longer round of seeking pleasure and ultimately finding suffering. The Buddhist way out is considered to be a short cut but it is not often the case that any one of us gets free in this lifetime even if we could choose the full blown effort of striving.

For myself, while I do not doubt the basic Buddhist vision of the human predicament, I am not sure that the shortcut is the right path for me. I am also sure that the longer passage also leads to the same place. To me this sounds from the outside looking at Buddhism as the Buddhist version of if you don't do it this way you won't get there, in that sense not dissimilar to the Christian assertion that we cannot find salvation without accepting the sacrifice that Christ made to atone for us. Both of these feel suspect to me, because they are exclusionary, when I sense that the real divine deal is inclusionary. I do not mean to demand anything or criticize anyone. I am just saying. I am also saying that I have cast my fate on refusing to follow paths as they are presented to me if I sense this kind of exclusion in them.

I feel the sacred work itself is a sifter, that I can yearn for and even work for a universal inclusion that permits a wide variety of parallel journeys. Not many will follow anyway, not at this time. That's what all the masters have always said. The road is ultimately quite narrow. When Mahayana Buddhism came up with the Bodhisattva ideal a way to see all this was offered the world: I refuse my way out until you can come and want to and I work for that, not by insisting that you do anything but by myself refusing to separate until it works out. If it takes forever, so be it. I understand that if you take the shortcut then you may hover nearby in sacred space and also do this work, perhaps with even more power and precision. I assume this may have happened already, many times. It is not my path. Not in this lifetime.

In the meantime, there is this argument with God that is my appropriate mantle. This is the cloak I wore coming in and it would be an impolite form of littering at the least to discard it here. I shall carry it with me as I go. Loving you, and arguing with Him, that's my ticket.

Seven is the Catholic age of reason and marks the age (I believe) that you can take communion. It marks something, anyway. Seven years is also a lunar quarter moon in the Ages of Man in the astrological cycle of an ideal day for a year. The 28 day cycle repeats three times and completes a human life at 84 years, which is the Saturn ideal transit cycle also and marks one complete revolution of Uranus almost perfectly. These numbers are also Hindu life stage numbers. From 56 years to 84 years are the sacred path years. In them, one retreats to the forest, releases all worldly goods and takes up the begging bowl. From 28 to 56 are the years of social engagement. The first 28 years are the years of maturation.

When I Was Seven

I remember that
way of waking into new
worlds alone, sneaking
out to see what's what
before anyone else is
awake, then going
places I am not
supposed to, knowing if I
get back fast I will
not get in trouble,
and the glory I have seen
belongs just to me.

May 15, 2009 9:04 AM

This Comes From The Pills

I was angry with the side effects of the pills. They have loaded me up with three different blood pressure meds which approach the issue of my moderate high blood pressure from three different directions. I typically run at around 120/68 now.

I take a statin to keep the cholesterol low, this even though my cholesterol numbers were low. The reason for this is there is one vein in my heart that was 60% blocked. They said that taking this statin might actually reverse that situation. I want it better because this vein is too small for a stent. That means a fix is a bypass and that surgery is not nice.

I also take Plavix for thinning the blood, but it is time to get an appointment to check up on my heart work. I probably will cease taking the Plavix. On this day I felt the pills were in the way of my contact with my own soul.

I no longer feel like that.

This Comes From The Pills

You tell me to look
and I would if I were true
but I have dials
in my aching eyes
that have twisted toward lies.
Tatoos on my face,
oddly tribal have
marked my road to confusion.

This comes from the pills
they make me take now.

May 14, 2009 2:16 PM

Getting The Picture

Our Deepest Well-Being

Our society provides no curriculum or schooling on how to notice love or to recognize the many people who have transmitted its life-giving power. Most of us haven't been taught that to receive love deeply and transmit it wholeheartedly is a real human possibility, that it can be learned, and that to do so is the key to our deepest well-being, our spiritual life, and our capacity to bring more goodness into this world.

-John Makransky, 'Love Is All Around' tricycle, [Fall 2007]

The theme of the poem below, written on my mother’s birthday last year (may you rest easy, Hypatia, in that far land to which you have gone) corresponds well with the complaint in the small piece above I came across today in my emailbox. I did not write the poem to describe my inner state but to complain in my way as Makransky does in his. I am these days fundamentally at peace even though I am aware that my life may soon become far more difficult. I sit here right now, writing this post as if it is the most important thing. I feel just like that, that I am doing what I should.

There are secrets, powers, pathways to pursue. There are truths that shine with inner light. When the world turns, very little of today’s demand will remain significant. I am happy my stinky old cat was alive again this morning, that I could get out of bed with only a modicum of difficulty, that there is enough to eat, that as I am told the Oregon rain will keep things green and blossoming all around. I just saw the house finches in my feeder. If I needed to I could go to California or Vermont, starting in less than an hour. I am confident of my power, my place in amongst the real things. I ask again of this day,

May I perceive the love I know exists and set aside the rest.

Getting The Picture

Corner spillage piles
slow us down, narrow alleys
turn and clog like this
in forgotten lives,
lost lives overfed in place
of love, fatty lives
aching, short of breath,
seeking for the one true cure
as if arteries
held open with stents
would allow a recovery,
let me see my God.

May 14, 2009 1:00 PM

Doing The Best I Can

Here is a heart attack poem. Sober as a heart attack is kind of an odd phrase. The first thing they give you is enough morphine to feel it, really feel it. I don’t know how sober I was. Later, after the angioplasty and stent placement, they gave me a generous dose of dilaudid. Hoo boy! I can take or leave morphine alone, actually don’t really like it. Back in the day, I really really liked smoking tar opium. Not only does it work just fine, it tastes oh so good. That’s what that slug of dilaudid in my IV felt like. Yes indeedy. Oh well. I am

Doing The Best I Can

As I lie here all
tubed up, all wired, feeling drugs
swelling my old veins
I remember you,
how you said the real wisdom
is joy, happiness.
You called me to stand
upright in grief's gray light then
and now in the sour
red light of my pain.
I am not happy, not wise
but I'm mild mannered.

May 13, 2009 9:08 AM

Almost A Poem

Reinhold Niebuhr wrote the Serenity Prayer though he may have borrowed unconsciously on forms of prayer that were around in Christian circles. There is a whole sequence of dates listed in the Wikipedia article on this matter and it is useful reading for anyone interested, as most AA members might be. As a matter of corroboration, I have read in another source I found in Portland’s AA central office bookstore a similar version of the same history. The Serenity Prayer is indeed just the few lines normally attributed to it:

God, grant me the serenity
To accept the things I cannot change,
The courage to change the things I can,
And the wisdom to know the difference.

There is a longer version but it was published much later and was written in 1953 by a man named William Spence.

Bill Wilson, co-founder of AA, apparently got hold of the prayer and introduced it to AA in 1941. Niebuhr may have put it into a sermon in 1934, the prayer beginning to circulate as early as that. Obviously it was circulating prior to 1941.

The basic idea and similar form has been around for centuries. These other forms are different enough that the catchiness of the Serenity Prayer itself could have been copyrighted had Niebuhr seen any need to do so. I wonder what it would be like to have something of mine turn out like this. What if something of mine became so widely known, with many millions of people saying it daily? How would my life change? Would my life change? I think questions like these are worth asking but really stupid to try to answer.

My dad had very little patience for hypothetical questions because he fancied himself a real practical man. He would correct me in that manner, telling me to quit those questions. I think of myself as full of fantasy and fiction. I know I am not so practical. I get to ponder hypothetical questions all I like.

Here is one of my versions, written as dated last year.

Almost A Poem

Without acceptance
there's no place for me to stand.
Without truest grit
there is no way I'll go there.
Without deep wisdom
I cannot find you at all.

This too is almost
a poem.

May 12, 2009 12:34 PM

The Chase

You know who you are. This is definitely written as a response to another poem. That poet put me in a state. I love what happens. It becomes almost effortless to write a poem that feels right. It is as if I am reliving a memory, as if it is current. I can feel the fleas.

The Chase

Pepper heat stops me,
washes my eyes, nostrils flare,
I snuff the earth, search
for that trace of you
as my fur lifts and I scratch
my hide, ready now,
ready for you now.
I lope off trailing the scent
you've left just for me.

May 12, 2009 12:49 PM

UltraViolet

In my life, probably in yours, there are people who depart and return. If these people are truly important, truly special, they often send before them signals to you and me. We know. Often we will not know we know but will instead engage odd behaviors or notice odd things. Later, when that special person departs again, arrives again, that’s when it comes clear what has been going on. My last girlfriend who emigrated to Canada has a house here still. This is the house where we spent nearly five years together. I kept my house and we never officially set up housekeeping but we were partners nonetheless. When she goes, when she comes, looking after her property, my life changes each time. We are friends and spend time together most of these visits she makes. I did not write this poem about her, and as noted this poem was written last year. What is odd however, she came to town today.

This coincidence of poem and arrival, and others like this coincidence are matters of divine anonymity.

I have seen science shows and read science books that declare many flowers are much more colorful and demanding in the ultra-violet range, that this is the range that bees and other pollen spreading insects notice the most.

UltraViolet

Sometimes flowers shriek
in white, or red, or yellow
and I've heard colors
beyond violet
especially ecstatic
that we cannot see
but may sense other
ways in heart and soul, like I
sense you coming home.
May 12, 2009 12:09 PM

My New Role

Listen. If you get plowed up by God, what do you want to bet it hurts? If you get used as fertile ground, do you get to have your name in lights? What about my fame and fortune? Shit.

My New Role

God has plowed me up,
I am furrowed now, seeded,
and feel the stirrings,
rootlets stabbing me
in their search for food and drink.

This is my new role.

May 12, 2009 11:41 PM

At The AA Meeting

2001 was the year my girlfriend of two years dumped me, then my mother died, then my father died in July. That same year in October, my former wife also died. Several years before we had started and finished a divorce. We were in a complex situation and it was not a good one, not for either of us. It was not a lack of love between us but we were so not good for each other, not at all.

She had to go bankrupt, for one. If she stayed with me, then we would have to go bankrupt together but without her bills I was solvent. She had always worked. We had always kept separate accounts. This was mainly her idea. She wanted no oversight on her money. She unfortunately did not manage it well. I owed her something like thirteen thousand dollars if I sold the house, we decided. I had paid her other money along the way. She kept her retirement and I kept the house. As a strict financial deal, this left me with the refinanced mortgage debt. She defended this decision against her lawyer who felt that legal precedent would have given more of her bills and expenses to me, but she knew that wasn’t fair. In her love and mine, she could not treat me that way. A few years later she died alone in a Columbus, Ohio apartment I doubt she could pay for one more month. Her sister found her. They listed kidney failure. I still keep a small portion of her ashes.

I am not sure this is even a poem but it is the truth of what happened the evening I found out she had died. I am hesitant to post it. I am not looking for sympathy or whatever. It was many years ago and I long ago settled into my new life. I have had two lovers since our parting, one for two years and one for nearly five. Both of these women are fine and I consider them both friends. I carry the burden of that former life lightly even though it is a real burden. We both lacked courage probably ten or more years earlier when we should have divorced to avoid the last years of our marriage. She should have divorced me as I sobered up in 1983. Perhaps I should have divorced her even earlier when I realized she really might want to have children after all, so I could let her find someone who wanted children too. Perhaps her untimely death and her mental illness could have been avoided. Perhaps such an alternative is not so. What this post is, a tale of the end of a real relationship on the planet between two people who loved each other dearly but not well.

At The AA Meeting

They took you away
dead and gone and all ground dropped
from beneath my feet.
I shook hard sitting
in the formed blue plastic chair
placed in the front row.
Two women I knew
got up from where they had been
and sat close by me
til I quit shaking.
This is what love is, no more,
just simplicity.

May 12, 2009 10:38 AM

Juggernaut

Tomorrow’s Scorpio full moon is a particularly strong influence on my life which has pretty much ground to a full stop at the moment. Nothing much is going my way. This also happens to be a Mercury retrograde period. So for me the heart of the matter (since I am Scorpio) is experiencing emotional challenges and even oppositions (Moon) while my communications (Mercury Rx) will not really help in these matters either. There is a further trouble. The tendency to pop off or be aggressive is present too, with Mars in square to the full moon in opposition to the sun and Mercury.

It would be better right now to not take this shit too seriously. :D Otherwise I might just stay in bed tomorrow. Oddly enough, I wrote this poem last year but it is utterly appropriate today.

Juggernaut

Like a tree standing
in the volcano’s ashy
path, like being stuck
on the straight iron
tracks, foot caught, staring,
standing upright still,
like being lynched, lynched
in this day and age, this rude
life takes us, takes us.

May 11, 2009 8:34 AM

Like A Weasel

I am called to be if nothing else, true to myself. I have been in a hurry my whole life, intense my whole life. I also have more than the usual difficulty taking direction as it is offered from the ordinary sources. I am not the fellow next door.

I am not even the mainstream guy in my own fields of action.

The internet has opened up this arena for anyone of any stripe. This is good for me. I get to publish. I don’t have to cater to anyone to do it. I am not expecting anything either. It only costs me time. Because it was a possibility, I got astoundingly creative over this last year and a half. I have written over a thousand poems. I have also in this time written and published over five hundred posts. That’s enough. There is no question I am a writer.

I have yearned my life long for a place in the stream of things. I have it now. It turns out I am not seeking the fame I thought I was when I started learning the guitar. I wanted to be that guy sitting in the front with all of you willing to come and see me. I went through an early deep change and that pried me looser from the world by adding a depth to things beyond my imagination. It gave me a path as I strove to answer the question, “what the fuck was that?”

I wound up eventually trying for some sort of ordinary life but I had to take dope and then I had to drink. I kept to my path, my offbeat path. Along the way I got married but chose no children. I partnered with another man on some endeavors and for six years I strove to break free into an alternative structure, all the while also developing a more mainstream career as a designer for industry. That alternative structure would have connected my livelihood with my spiritual walk, or so I hoped. It never happened. I am not really a peer of my fellow designers.

Then I sobered up through AA and found an arena of service. I don’t need to go on with all this but by the time I came to blogging I was no longer young at all. I have nothing to prove and only do this because I am called. I am who I am.

Like A Weasel

What am I to do?
I think I know what I want
to do with it all
and I try, find walls
too high and wide, no way through,
so I do what can
be done, scurry like
a weasel down the rat hole
to do this thing, while
I live as true as
possible everywhere
else on the planet.

May 11, 2009 7:52 AM

After I Offered My Life

In AA they ask if I am willing to go to any length. Only then, they say, am I ready to take certain steps. That is the question that arises square in the middle of the spiritual walk. There is a prerequisite, it seems to me. Is the old way of doing things bankrupt? If not, can I offer what remains that is of value? If I hold anything back, this is not going to work. Only this love, she sings, that is all that remains. My principle prayer asks, may I perceive the love I know exists and set aside the rest.

Here is the fire that burns all the dross away. Here is the fire that creates the metallurgy of souls, the tempering and honing of the steel of spirit that shines, that sings, and here is the heat that warms all space and makes of life an eternal and holy work.

I say I am ready. You say the time is not yet.

After I Offered My Life

All is now ready
only the signal not yet,
departure not yet
permitted to me.
I am not given a pass
free or otherwise
and no bribe will work.

So I will sit. I will drink
this tea you offer
as if it's something,
as if a warm cup.

May 11, 2009 7:41 AM

Flying Above Clouds

I am feeling a little low, a little lonely. I go to my AA meetings and then I remember why I stay aloof, at least in the sense of avoiding intimate partnership with these people. It makes sense in my circle that we are all routinely saved from ourselves because not all of us are sick on the same day. Still – I am a little low, a little lonely today.

I went out last night. A friend of ours is a pro, a blues singer. She has entered a new trio and these guys are really good. They all sing well. I sense that my friend is playing catch up with their musicianship but she has a great voice and knows how to sing, can keep a good rhythm guitar going. The keyboardist is amazing. This puts me in a mood too. He is playing local clubs and he is that good. How steep the slope to the big time – how many people play at such a high level. I am just a dabbler when I compare myself with working musicians. I was among a crowd of people. Most were partners, one gay couple and three heteros. I was at one end with two women I invited along. They didn’t stay long. I was the next to leave, around ten. The trio did a mix of jazz and blues. We ate. This was an Italian place with pretty good food but steeper prices, though modest by big city standards. The restaurant is not in downtown, is out in a local town, the next one north from my place on the local route. They can’t charge like downtown.

It was standing room only. The Ellen Whyte Band logo is well known locally and she can fill the audience with her own fans. That’s what we were part of, all being friends of hers in another context. She has four CDs to her credit and has won local awards for her blues work. Ellen has been doing this for a while now. She is not young anymore, grown kids.

Flying Above Clouds

I followed updrafts
into the clear air above
the clouds. Bright Sun shines
without cover there,
but air is thin and so cold
in that clarity,
not like home, like you,
moist and warm citrus honey,
so I came back down.

May 11, 2009 7:20 AM

Feathered Horses

I have returned from the outer reaches.

My friend is guilty as charged. Of that there is no doubt, but the law stinks. I see him sit there in prison blues with the psychedelic orange logos identifying him as a convict. He is a little overweight, a little puffy looking. He has aged in five years. Lately he has erupted in hives on his right hand, mainly his fingers. He looks for solutions but has not yet found them. I assume he is allergic to doing this much time. He is not yet fully at six years. He is convicted of three counts, six years each. He is not eligible for any reductions for good time, no parole, nothing but straight time served or longer if he misbehaves or is caught in one of the weird twists that can happen in there. He is almost complete on the first count served, but still has two more to go.

I weep each time. This is a good man. He was of value to the community in all other ways and he earned in the six figures for his engineering marketing expertise. Now he is involved in Buddhist and Christian services, tutors the other inmates in a variety of subjects, mainly math, and he directs and sings in musical groups. He has gotten into honors housing and even found a way to cell up with his best friend. When he first got to Snake River he was wise enough to figure out how to pay rent, a mild form of extortion among the convicts, where you pay to have a guy watch your back. If you are known to pay rent then with some care on your part you never get into any beefs with the other inmates because they know you are connected. When he first got into honors housing he stopped paying rent but then some people figured it out and now he is back paying rent but it is reduced by a third.

Jesus. He writes poetry from time to time. He wrote one called Doing Time which was published in a special publication for inmates. He wrote another poem where he pointed out that an inmate he knew convicted of second degree murder was getting out in eight years where he is doing eighteen for a crime that involved no violence.

The journey itself was fine. My car behaved well and I was comfortable enough on the way over. This is absolutely the best time of year for the mountains and hills of eastern Oregon. They are still green. Soon they will dry up. The journey east on I-84 takes one through the Columbia Gorge, carved out when Lake Mazama broke loose and drove to the sea, not once, apparently, but several times. Lake Mazama was a huge inland sea at the base of the Ice Age glaciation in the region. It is worth coming to Oregon just to see how the Columbia River sets in its gorge. Further east the highway drifts south into the flats which are farmed, then ascends into the mountains in a dramatic rise up to Deadman Pass. The highway then passes through evergreen forest before descending again into hill country and winding through eastern high desert. There is one operating cement plant and another that is abandoned and ghostly. Then one hits Farewell Bend and the rich farmland near the Snake River. Headed into Ontario, one goes under the overpass for Stanton Blvd. and off to the west, there is the prison.

I got to Ontario just in time for a big thunderstorm with sixty mile per hour gusts.

We break in mid visit for lunch. I carry food, so I went to a nearby park on the Snake and napped because I knew I was going to push for home straightaway.

My cat is sitting with her forepaws resting on my hand rest, breathing on my right hand while I type. She approves this message.

Feathered Horses

On the willows' verge
are three small feathered horses.

I will ride today.

I will load the two
with an iridescent glow,
saddle the other
with my hope for peace.

I will depart for outer
reaches, still looking
to give you more time.

May 11, 2009 6:50 AM

Intermission

The next post will be perhaps Wednesday, perhaps Thursday. I am headed out of town, a shakedown cruise with my 2008 Mazda 5. I will go across the state to the eastern verge, to a town called Ontario, next stop Idaho, just across the Snake River. This is Oregon Trail country. Just up the river to the northwest is Farewell Bend, the jumping off place where the emigrants left the river behind to strike for Mt. Hood, Oregon City, or perhaps Stumptown (Portland). You had to go through some rather difficult hills headed west and the best way through was to follow a track leading westerly from Farewell Bend, farewell because you just left good water behind for several days and you might get a little thirsty if things don't go well.

It is better now. Sometimes I camp at Farewell Bend because that's what we do coming to Ontario. Other times like now I will take a motel in Ontario. The point of the trip is to go visit an incarcerated friend who is serving his time in Snake River Correctional Facility. Long term readers will remember me mentioning this part of my life before. This whole situation figures fairly large in my life because the fall out affected my church membership, my lover's employment, and ultimately changed things so much that I think it started the chain of events that led to our ultimate separation, my lover and me. The things that happen to one of us happen to many of us and in my life the events that put this man in prison are very much like that.

My friend has been treated abominably by the law and by that church. That church will never think so. Behind the scenes, the people involved in the law tend to agree with me, however.

Diamonds Everywhere

As you might surmise, this poem records an aspect or two of my heart trouble and its aftermath. I was driven in early May, 2009 by my renter to the local Kaiser facility in the middle of the night. I remained in emergency on a hospital cot for many hours while they made room for me upstairs on the heart patient floor. They gave me morphine and some other drugs, put me on a drip. In the meantime my nerves in my left hip were getting damaged by the cot. Finally they brought down a hospital bed, much more comfortable, but the damage to my nerves in my left leg was already done. From a year ago, they have not come back and in fact got much worse for a period of several months last fall and winter.

Do not go to the hospital frivolously. It may cost you in ways you don’t expect.

They put me on the heart floor and I got a bloody nose that was caused by the oxygen tube drying my nose out and the blood thinner not letting my blood clot. This lasted several hours until I screamed bloody (sic) murder. Finally they prescribed two healthy doses of Afrin and I will forever remember that as an effective tool to stop a bloody nose. The next day they operated, an angiogram, angioplasty, and stent placement in my heart’s lower right artery. The day after, I went home, weak but quite all right. My heart has behaved since. I take a blood thinner, a diuretic, an anti-cholesterol pill, and three different blood pressure pills. I hate them, but I take them.

I think I pay a price of getting more tired than I used to, maybe heart, maybe pills, maybe both. Maybe without this trouble I would be in the same boat. Maybe it is age. However, just last week I was climbing up and down ladders for much of the day, gimp leg and all, so I can still do my work if I must.

I was operated on by an experienced heart man with over ten thousand operations to his name, they said, but it was the second operation done in Kaiser’s theater. They were setting up their program. This operation cost me $200 dollars. You gotta love Kaiser. This is the best deal out there for this kind of trouble.

Diamonds Everywhere

Diamonds in skies,
diamonds on souls of shoes,
diamonds on blades
of green green grasses,
in my eyes and heart, my heart,
slicing my heart til it aches
and I wake up then
with this real bad ache
and call them up...

they say come on in.
My heart
removed, replaced with
stainless steel strapping
and bitter powders.

May 10, 2009 8:33 PM

Be Satisfied With Who You Are

It is seldom easy to understand what should happen next. I stand in the Buddhist sensibility as much as anything, though my devotions are eclectic. I look at the west and find the power grabbing and the controlling of things offensive. “I am the captain of my soul.” So says one of the cores of the American ideology. I believe this is delusional thinking.

On the other hand it is utterly clear, completely and thoroughly demonstrated that the consequence of the western dynamic has resulted in an easier life for more people on the planet than there have been people on the planet for most of our time here. Unfortunately, it has also increased the numbers of the desperately poor by a much greater amount. The accusations of imperialism were once literally the truth of empire and they remain true in terms of economics. Oligarchies otherwise named corporate structures are far too influential in human affairs. Politics lurks in this and I have no wish to go there.

Instead, I say the heart of the Judaeo-Christian-Islamic complex is evangelical and exploitative, but also dynamic and results oriented. The heart of the eastern religions tends to hold the status quo in place. I believe it is built in to the philosophy and theology in east and west that this is so. There is very much more to be said on such a topic, a whole book in fact, and more. I am not really qualified to write it. Instead I write this inner truth stuff in fairly short work.

That is actually my attention span at work. The other day I revisited chess, a game I was willing to try in my youth but left behind for virtually all of my adulthood. I have quickly remembered why I quit the game. I can be much better at the game if only I am willing to pay attention, but I do not want to. I don’t want to. I really don’t want to.

Another example, I don’t even want to write a book, not really. I did it to get my degree. That’s enough. I can. I know I can. I don’t want to. That’s paying attention to one thing way too long. The only way that can work for me is at God’s command. He so rarely commands me. It’s not about the money, not at all.

Sometimes a lover or friend, or even a stranger, jumps in my shit and hands me something to do. Sometimes I get it and respond with alacrity. These are the commands, God with skin on saying, “do this, do it now.” I am pretty good at following these moments in the right circumstance and most of my life has happened that way, truth be told.

Be Satisfied With Who You Are

Breathing is felt deeper
below the surface, where all
becomes a fleck, foam
floating on the work
of the universe, not my
breathing, not at all,
nor is it my thought.

Delusion and truth are one,
the same ocean shore.

May 10, 2009 12:10 PM

Why I Sang In Choir

I have had trouble keeping boundaries with my expectations of music. I know I have written of this before. In the beginning, as I came into my adult voice I was also a desperate kid looking for something that was missing, something I couldn’t even describe. I could not communicate about it. I had no words. I could only seek, only act out. There were some troubles of long standing with my parents arising from mistakes they could not have avoided making with me. I could easily say they should have done this or that rather than what they did, but how could they have known? How could I have known beforehand either? I had no way to guide them, to say, but this is really what I need.

I was in no way spiritual, didn’t even know you could be spiritual. That didn’t happen until I was twenty-one. What happened first were the high school and church choirs. This led in high school to musicals, dancing, hopes for drama as a college major, barbershop quartet and a madrigal group. That was the period that folk music started to get big and later on I found a coffee house with a group of performers. There was a particular guy named Paul Zeigler. They said of him that he was a guy other musicians listened to. Later he ran his own house down near the San Jose campus and in that place giants of the later San Francisco sound performed there, Paul Kantner did classical guitar, Jorma Kaukonen did his guitar picking country blues, and Skip Spence did his remarkably energetic folk rock. As I said these guys knew Paul Zeigler and honored him.

What I did was haunt the coffee house, called the Brass Knocker, and I learned Paul’s music and phrasing even though I was not good enough to do it on guitar. It was my template to learn from, carried inside me.

All of this was I demanded to become someone different, to shape shift, to get power I lacked, because I was certain that I was going to die without some freaking change. I was absolutely desperate. I had no clue how to really hold a job. My first real job was to serve in the dining room of a facility my church built for retired people. I did okay but I was not getting what I needed out of it and the nagging sense of impending doom was growing.

I had failed in my military service, going to West Point but crashing a month after Plebe Summer, knowing there was no way I could keep going under the disciplinary stuff building up. I was in the Army Reserve and hating it. Not only that, but it was in the way of my wish to be a drama major too. This was just too much.

I had been struck down with meningitis in my required basic training, lost a month to that and fried my brain with the really high fever I almost died of.

All that stuff was the ferment that was behind me when I smoked my first pot. There was no turning back when I started doing drugs, and I consider it true still that drugs quite literally saved my life. I started doing drugs in late August of 1966. By November I was absolutely committed, ready to be a dealer or whatever I needed to do. In January my mother came home from Persia, alerted by my sister that I was on the streets and appeared to be starving to death, which was a fair description, and she got me into a mental facility and started working on saving my ass from Leavenworth because I had just quit the army and was AWOL for several months by then already. She hinged my innocence on the meningitis and she was arguably right. But in my heart I knew it was bogus. The meningitis happened in the middle of the process of despair that had started back really before high school. She may have known that but there was something concrete about the meningitis which was of course a matter of record. She succeeded.

I stopped singing in groups mostly, but I continued to practice on my guitar and tried to become Paul Zeigler. That continued until I hit a wall. I was completely polished in a very narrow band of guitar music and dismally unable to broaden my scope. This is one problem of being self taught. Exhausted, I felt there was no more future. I put music on the shelf from 1972 to 1994. Twenty-two years lost to taking a false start. Since that time I returned to singing in a church choir for ten years, shifting over to an academic advanced choral group called Unistus, a group specializing in Estonian music, where I had the possibility of international travel before me. Unfortunately, I have had increasing trouble with my allergic condition as I age and no longer have the ability to trust my voice at the near professional level I need. So I have retired from group singing. I also have my keyboard work begun in the nineties. I am still hampered with the self taught stuff.

Why I Sang In Choir

The way it was then...
I sang in choir and looked for
you in some other
place because no one
near me would touch me as far
as I knew, except
the few odd ones from
the wrong side of my young mind,
could not see you then,
the way you would bloom,
the way you would know my truth
in some distant time.

May 10, 2009 11:13 AM

Columbia In The Air

A moment in time...

Columbia In The Air

Things come apart now
hear the rattle and crashing
shriek of hull rending
while my pilot cries
and the others stare amazed
at the glow around
us, the bright deep blue
appearing in widening cracks.

We watch as time ends.

May 10, 2009 10:41 AM

Stretched Between

The Truth of Nonduality

Money coming or going, harmony, wisdom, and health can all turn upon a single thought. With a single thought, poverty can be overcome; with a single thought, disease can be cured; with a single thought, you can embrace and help others. Because mind is infinite, it can embrace the universe and still have room left over. Thus, if you understand the truth of nonduality, you can completely embrace everything. If you raise one thought that is calm, noble, and humble, and do so without any trace of like or dislike, or of "I," then that thought begins to manifest in the world and becomes medicine for all suffering. All energy will follow and work together with this kind of thought.

Daehaeng Kun Sunim, "Thinking Big" tricycle (Winter 2008)

Life's Not Black and White

Buddhism encourages us to be wary of antithetical concepts, not only good and evil, but success and failure, rich and poor, even the duality between enlightenment and delusion. We distinguish between the opposing terms because we want one rather than the other, yet the meaning of each depends upon the other. That may sound abstract, but such dualities are actually quite troublesome for us. If, for example, it is important to live a pure life (however I understand purity), then I need to be preoccupied with avoiding impurity. If wealth is important for me, then I am also worried about avoiding poverty. We cannot take one lens without the other, and such pairs of spectacles filter our experience of the world.

David Loy, "The Nonduality of Good and Evil"" tricycle (Spring 2002)

Here are two passages that illustrate the excellence that I find in Buddhist thought. In the first passage startling statements are made at the end…

“If you raise one thought that is calm, noble, and humble, and do so without any trace of like or dislike, or of "I," then that thought begins to manifest in the world and becomes medicine for all suffering. All energy will follow and work together with this kind of thought.”

That is impressive. Can it really be true? Here is Buddhist magic. The whole point of the discipline from one point of view is to arrive in the world a genuine Bodhisattva, and this kind of thinking is what Bodhisattva does. Of course this kind of thinking does not come easily. I would call it from one perspective, “thinking in the gap”.

The second passage is an illustration of fundamental Buddhist psychology. What impresses me about that is not so much that it is true but that it was known first by Hindus (well, okay, also the Chinese Taoists) several thousand years ago and was clarified in this form by Buddhists in the last 600years BCE. This is old. We have known spiritual keys to our mental process for a very long time.

If you want to break free then this is the sort of stuff you have to reconcile. It really doesn’t matter what your faith is. This is the stuff that blocks the flow of the divine in the human frame.

This is the stuff that paves over the crack between the worlds. The worlds of which I write are the primary two, God’s World, and the world that God permits. Jesus called God’s World the Kingdom. The world God permits is the world that Job (read the book of Job) and we inhabit, where justice fails, love is impermanent and peace is elusive. It holds true however you decide to define divinity. Buddhism is humanist, perhaps, while Taoism and Hinduism tend to theist in diverse ways. The western religions focus in a different way in the mainstream, but in the mystical branches of the western religions, the exact same psychological issues arise. They are spoken of in Christian mysticism, in Sufism, and as well in the Kabbalah. The crack (or gap) of which I write is the way out, or the way in. It is the path the power flows through.

The Hindus say, “Neti, neti.” Not this, not that.

Stretched Between

Yesterday, I hit
the spot, the sweet spot, home base.
I knew I knew, yes!
Fully awake, grateful, graced,
and then with all that, to bed.

The dreams went all ways.
I awoke wondering where my
grace had gone. Not here.
But I am not asleep...not
really awake any more,
but not asleep, no,
stretched between, not this not that.

This might hurt a bit.

May 5, 2009 12:37 PM

Instant Forgiveness

When I was young, I loved the water. I probably still do, but not enough to go out of my way to find it. In those days I progressed all the way to a life guard’s license though to tell the truth, I wasn’t really good enough to actually be a life guard. That was not about the water and my capacity in the water, it was about my emotional maturity.

One of the best things was diving. I didn’t really get into the high board work but I loved the low board and could do several basic dives, and then half gainers. I loved being able to do half gainers. That dive made me exquisitely aware of the moment of decision. There is a whole set of things one has to do in that dive. Physically it is quite complex because one goes off the board with an unusual direction. It is as if one is deliberately aiming to hit the board, and it feels just like that. The truth is different because one has used a forward motion that continues after the approach. That is why there are a couple steps forward in a dive approach, to gain forward momentum that will continue and take the diver decidedly out beyond the board.

That doesn’t matter to the viscera; at least it didn’t matter to mine. In the half gainer the diver must loop backward toward the board, and there is a time in the middle of the dive where the diver has kicked his feet up while bending backwards. He is in the air basically lying flat with his back toward the water, and then he curls further backward and enters head first. The board will not be in sight. The sky is in sight. My gut told me every time that I was taking a bad risk.

That instinct made the moment of decision really stand out. I realized just before I made my approach that I had almost no time to abort. The only way through was to really try for the dive and that had to happen just before the final jump because my body had to go backwards while I was going forwards and there was no faking it. The whole thing rested on an instant.

So too with any other life decision, these decisions rest on an instant as well. Usually there are so many things happening that the decisive moment can slip past and not be noticed too well. It is good practice to become better aware of them. How about the moment I really asked Ann if she would let me be with her? Or the moment when we knew we were moving to Oregon together? Or the moment we knew we were really going to marry? Immediately after those moments everything had changed.

My friend Erin loves it when I write of the gaps. One of the gaps in things is at the peak of the tiny pause at the moment of decision. The world is one way before, another way after. When does an inhale change to an exhale?

Instant Forgiveness

there's really no other kind,
only how long it takes
to reach the balance
required for hearts to open.
Indeed like flowers
and like the birdsong
not as birds mean their beauty
but as we hear it,
that's how we can live.

May 5, 2009 12:13 PM

The Vultures

When you drink to sleep, 3 AM is bad news. If you wake then and can feel the blow back coming, then you have to drink some more to go back to sleep. If you don’t, the morning is going to suck big time, but if you do then the morning is also going to suck because you will still be drunk at 5 or 6. If this happens it will have been because you didn’t drink enough the night before, but that is unpredictable, how much it takes today is not the same as yesterday. That gets worse the longer you continue to drink after a certain point, possibly because you have hurt your kidneys and liver.

That is part of what it means to realize that your drinking has gone beyond what it was and has changed on you whether you like it or not.

Sober vultures are not nearly so bad as coming-off-a-drunk vultures. These days the sober vultures are largely infesting some other poor sap. I don’t have them so much, hardly at all. In my first eight years they were a regular visitation, right along with that difficulty going to sleep at all. Getting sober after serious drinking is no picnic.

By the way, in AA some will say, if you feel guilty, it might be because you are. Others will say, screw guilt. Somewhere in the middle, that's the ticket. Only half the vultures have the right to perch where they do.

The Vultures

When I wake and it's
3 AM, and the vultures
sit near the dim foot
of my empty bed,
always more than one, lurking,
plotting with a glint
in their mean old eyes,
that's when I know it's going
to be a different
damn day.

May 3, 2009 8:22 PM

Old Growth Dream

I thought of John Muir and originally this poem was for him. People in California know of John Muir, at least around Berkeley they did when I was growing up. He figures in the story of the Redwoods and the Sequoias, and Yosemite. He founded the Sierra Club, still around today. Read about him on Wiki if you like.

I began near Muir Woods, among other places, near Tilden Park, near the Big C on the hill above the Berkeley campus of the University of California, where my mother graduated and then taught for a little while. She met Stormy Hileman, center/linebacker for the Golden Bears after his duty as a Marine in the Pacific war and married him after I asked him to be my dad. Step-Father. He tried some things while my mom kept her university job, first trying for a slot on the 49ers, playing for a farm team in Pennsylvania, the Bethlehem Bulldogs. He didn't make enough money, tried other things. After a couple years they went off on their post war adventure, both determining to be high school teachers and he later trying for school administration. We went out to the valley then, settling in a small town on the way to Sonora from the Bay Area. There I spent time in fields by irrigation canals. There we raised Siamese cats. My mother taught English at the Oakdale High School, the town we lived in, on a provisional certificate pending her graduation, while my dad taught math and coached football at the Ripon High School on his provisional certificate. In those days post war there was such a shortage of teachers you could start teaching before you got the education completed. They both got their Teacher's license from University of the Pacific in Stocton. They made squat as pay so we continued poor as church mice for several years.

Old Growth Dream

I see it. This place
dissolves you impressively.
This is who I love.

Everything is
pulsing with breath and warm love
delightfully here
while the wing traces
a path through the sky like
deer make in forests.

The winds know, tell it,
I hear their voices far off
and I tell you so.

May 3, 2009 4:20 PM
Retitled April 11, 2010

Meeting The Saint

It is the main problem. There are not enough people in the business. They must be spread too thin. All they can currently do is hold this place, keep it from unraveling in the pressure of all the entanglements the rest of us create all the time, over and over. You cannot recognize the people in the business unless you reach a certain sensitivity but at that precise moment you are pressed into service and must leave the others behind because you are so needed somewhere else to hold this thing together. It slows us all down. After that first meeting, you know you cannot stay this time nor can you ever meet on purpose again. There is no time for that. There is no time to answer your questions. There is no real need in you for the answers anyway.

What you thought you wanted simply does not matter.

The maddening part is this is all in your peripheral vision anyway. You can never be sure if any of it is real.

Meeting The Saint

You walk on water
in your illumination
which visibly shines.
I am struck dumb as I feel
waves of palpable presence.

I know of your own
you could not do this. You ask
and it is given.
That is when you tell
me that should I meet you next
I must turn away.

May 3, 2009 11:20 AM

Intimate Magic

No one has ever had to keep this stuff secret, not on the planet like it is. We call this kind of knowing esoteric. There is a big assumption in it. The idea that this knowledge should stay hidden assumes that people undeserving of the power want the power. There is a major discipline and a struggle that comes with it. It is no longer true if it ever was that people would chase this power. People mostly don’t really believe in magic anymore. We don’t even have a good language for it. so far is it from the kind of reality games we play now.

What has happened to me, I have been forced into power because my weaknesses demand its presence in my life or I do not survive. This is an exchange every recovering alcoholic makes in some way. We mostly devise a spiritual process that keeps the power firmly in the hands of God. That is because so many alcoholics are squanderers of power in any form. However, the disciplines are precisely the same if the consciousness permits. Magic is very near by. The power that permits sobriety is the power that opens the door to the deeper realms.

Now you can ask whether I am writing some kind of weird fiction or the truth as I know it. Is this a distinction that matters? To be honest, I have been interested in the realm far longer than I have been sober. There have been other driving forces.

Intimate Magic

It is not the words
that make the change but how you
can be found so near
or far, deep within
the flow of words, a perfume
released in the gaps
between the constraints
of form, perhaps gathered best
when speaking the words
as one would deeply,
so deeply in love with things.
That's where magic is.

May 2, 2009 9:47 AM

Lighten Up

Absurdity, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
-- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

Never eat more than you can lift.
-- Miss Piggy

One doesn't have a sense of humor. It has you.
-- Larry Gelbart

http://www.quotationspage.com/qotd.html


I get four quotes every day, sent to my email box, random generations out of the library of all the quotes available on the Quotations website. The above quotes, three out of four, appear to me to tie together and mean something. Generated at random, they somehow relate to the issue expressed in my last post.

I am sure I get along better everywhere if I keep my sense of humor. I believe this attitude I hope to live up to is reflected fairly often in my poetry. Patia asked me a couple posts back if it was okay if she laughed. She meant that question "tongue in cheek". I know she already knew the answer. The subject of my poem seemed rather serious but the end of the poem was oddly humorous. That's precisely what I hoped for, and it commonly arises in my poetry fresh from my creative process when I see no reason to stay serious. I don't think I plan these things. So I am dropping the last quote provided in today's mailing of Quotes Of The Day (about kids) not because it was not good but because this last quote heard in another venue is better in context:

In order to achieve enlightenment, lighten up.
--anonymous, heard at an AA meeting

*******************************

Okay, I give up. This just in from Tricycle

Big Sky Mind

Tibetan teacher Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche described panoramic awareness as "a state without center or fringe" in which there is no watcher or perceiver, no division between subject and object. With a Big Mind, one does not view the sky, as eleventh-century Zen Master Dogen said most people do, by looking up at it "through a bamboo tube." Instead, the distinction between self and other is abolished in the experience of the empty sky itself.

-- Rick Fields, "Buddhism and the Beat Generation" Tricycle (Fall 1995)

What Today Was Like

May Day, 2009, what that day was like, or at least in those moments that I wrote this poem.

Something has come up that highlights the blogs for me. It is an aspect of the computer life, that I have wondered at for many years now, in many an iteration.

I was once in email AA groups and a girl in the Washington DC area started up with me. We developed a cyber relationship of sorts and while I never really lied or hid my stuff, it turned out that she did, a little. At one point she joined a new grouping under an assumed name and started a new relationship with me. Now she had two relationships with me. After some weeks, when nothing interesting happened she revealed herself and had some sort of reason why she did that. Not long after that I was done with that part of my life anyway.

This blog life is like that. Since there is no real practical way to check, there are plenty of chances to create and put a persona out there and try to live up to it. I know some people are doing that, creating a counterpoint to the life they live. Others are straight up enough but try for far more anonymity than I do. I think I understand, and I keep the confidences that some of you have given me too.

I think for the most part I am playing it straight here. What you see is what you would get if you had me alone in your living room, at least to the extent that I could hold the same conversations we have here. I could take out my hard copy of my poems for that part of the deal. I can talk about stuff pretty close to the same way I can write. I actually hold the beliefs that I express, at least most of the time, if the distractions are not too severe. Or perhaps, I have held them before if not now. I tell you intimacies of my life because I do not fear the stories. Believe me, there are more tender places that I do not share.

I tell you I am fat and old because I am fat and old.

But I am no fool. I know that people can act, can take this blog life and use it as if it was a stage, as if there was something to accomplish. There are others who try to turn the blogs into a pulpit or a forum. Sometimes I think that some people believe they can manipulate this medium all the way to something significant in their lives. I doubt that is true except in remarkable and rare cases, though the manipulation game has its own reward in some ways. For the rest of us, this effort is an amusement.

I am happy to know that most everyone around these parts is not doing that.

I have a world wide readership. It is a very small readership, but it is global. It pleases me. If I stopped tomorrow, there would be no sign of my readership in my life at all. I am sure of it. I am not aiming anywhere at anything or anyone.

What Today Was Like

Tonight the moon looks
like a fat twelve year old face.

All day the flowers
of this sunlit day
were so brightly colored I
would have required good
earplugs had they been
singing instead of shining
in the springtime sun.

May 1, 2009 2:18 PM

Paranoid Lament

Too many drugs...here comes the meth head.

Paranoid Lament

I struggle with it,
this make believe lack of trust,
this sense that you are
so malevolent.

I feel it creep up my bones
and curdle my guts as if
you really would kill.
If you could, you would kill me
as sure as God would.

Ain't my weird heart sad?

May 1, 2009 11:49 AM

The End Of Poetry

I have an agenda. Here it is. Sometimes my orbits are like the effing comets but at the near end of the ellipse is always the Bodhisattva ideal.

The End Of Poetry

I want my poems
to reach heaven's view and say
just everything
so clearly, without
refutation, that lives change
and we all can rise,
grow the angel bright white wings
and I no longer
have to write this stuff.

April 30, 2009 12:27 PM

The Message

If I love like this, someone like this, surely I can love another, love again.

The Message

Today I fell in love
with the message you sent me
and yes, I know not
only me, also
all the others you love like
you love me but still
now you have my heart
handed to you in a note
I wrote in heaven.

April 30, 2009 9:32 AM

It Is Finished

Yesterday I had to go in and have a back molar pulled. It was capped. This was a tooth that required root canals decades ago. A couple days ago it cracked longitudinally along one root. That led to an abscess. I have Kaiser as my medical and dental, so I had just a few minutes to asses whether or not I trusted this guy over some other stranger I would deal with later. The good news is that I could have it done on Saturday as an emergency procedure. It turned out okay but I am in more pain today than I was with the abscess. It is interesting how much psychology is in this though. Even though the pain is worse, I can take it better because I know what is happening. When it was the abscess, I didn’t know. The Percoset isn’t worth much as a pain killer. I will need tomorrow off from work.

It is odd that a poem like the following shows up next in line during this Easter weekend.

It Is Finished

As I stand upright
on the wall in the middle
of my holy name
I see farther than
all the works of man display.
I breathe cool free air
and ready myself
for the long final journey
to the central fire.

April 30, 2009 9:12 AM