I'm Stuck With You

Not much to say tonight. This poem might not be about what you think, though.

I'm Stuck With You

I thought that was you
touching me so deep. No one
else could, not like that.
You warn me I'm stuck
with you. Oh boy. This is sweet.
If you expect me
to try to scrape you
off me by diving into
the dirt, think again.

March 20, 2009 2:45 PM

No Tattoo

Vietnam is the legacy of my generation. When I graduated from high school I had somewhere to go. I had received a Congressional appointment to West Point, the United States Military Academy (Army). Immediately after graduation, my family took off for a vacation, traveled across country from the west coast (the left coast I hear it called these days) to the east coast. There were stops along the way. They left me at West Point, just a little ways up the Hudson River. West Point was established early in our nation’s history. Generals on both sides of the the Civil War were graduates of West Point. I marveled at the little things, like the marble stair treads worn out by the feet of those who had been there.

I failed at West Point. I was too young. I survived the summer and the first month of the first semester and then couldn’t do another day. This was 1963. I left in October, at the very last moment and got into Santa Clara University to finish the semester. I nearly flunked out of there too, but continued to the end of that school year. I had been assigned to a signal company in the army reserve. In the summer of 1964 I went to boot camp. Just before graduation I fell to the meningitis epidemic that was alive at Fort Ord in California. After a month in hospital, I was assigned as a supply clerk to that same signal company.

I went to meetings and summer camp until 1966. In the fall of 1966, I found drugs and quit the army. Heh. There is of course no such thing, but if you stop going to meetings they don’t hunt you down, or they didn’t then. For that matter I quit everything, let my money run out, and started living on the street. I went from 185 pounds down to 148. My mother came back and masterminded a way to keep me out of jail. She stuck me in a mental institution. Then she pointed out that I suffered from brain damage due to the high fever of the meningitis in 1964. She finagled that argument into a way to get the charges against me for desertion not filed. This was a difficult thing to do. It took the four months that I was in the institution, probably no coincidence of timing, that I got out after the case was settled.

Then we went overseas in 1967 right after I was released from the hospital. I spent the next two years in East Pakistan. In the summer of 1969 as I was returning home to the States, I received my Honorable Discharge from the army upon completion of my six year military obligation.

That’s my military history. It has taken me most of my life to get it that when my mom stuck me in a mental institution, I actually qualified for it. But I still think my mom was “God with skin on” on this one. That’s what I thought then. What a remarkable skate. When I quit the army I knew what I was doing. I said to myself, I don’t care if I spend the rest of my life in Leavenworth. It was really literally beyond me to keep going to those god damned meetings.

Decades later in AA, I ran into the walking wounded still fighting the war in Vietnam. This poem is about me coming home intact. On the way to Bangkok from Hong Kong, I found out that we flew a route directly over Danang. That put me at 35,000 feet above the war. That is not very far. I marveled that everyone on the plane didn’t seem to care. This poem is also about one of the walking wounded. It is very hard still to keep them sober.

No Tattoo

I thought I escaped
the war when I came home whole,
intact, no tattoo.

I thought you came home
with me but I see you there
still among paddies
and pain, the click of
Bettys, nowhere to go now,
or the bamboo pits'
pointy shit smeared stakes.

How can I get you away?
I am too far gone.

March 20, 2009 9:29 PM

The Fountain Of Youth

I read a book recently about the experiences of the early European visitors to the New World. There is quite a bit to it. Especially the Spanish had quite a time trying to get a handle on the expanse of things. Coronado made it all the way to southern Kansas. That surprised me. De Leon’s expedition started in Florida and made it all the way to Texas. This was all happening before colonies were established in North America.

They were chasing gold. There were other fantasies driving the chase. Because the Spanish had already found two really civilized and rich Native American groups, it was easy for them to expect another just over the next hill. I wrote this poem months before I read the book.

The Fountain Of Youth

My eyeballs are fried
over hard and my head aches
from all this watching.
I'm asleep on feet
not made for all this standing
around the fountain
of youth as they say,
waiting for it to bubble
up, waiting to drink.

March 20, 2009 12:55 PM

I Replied

This moment goes back to the few days before everything changed for me. It is the heart of what actually happened in the afternoon of a fall day, in November of 1966. The setting is the living room of my downstairs bachelor one bedroom apartment in a fourplex upstairs/downstairs southwest of San Jose State. This was before the state system upgraded the college to a state university. The setting is in contrast also a golden fog lit with inner light, a place with no definite edges, corners, walls, or floor and a consciousness that was bodiless and singular. There was no one else, nothing else in that nowhere place. There was no thought, no narrative, no self, just awareness. My return to my living room holds this memory of awareness as clear as the room is. This is what Bruce did and said. This is what I said.

I Replied

When I came awake,
flat on my back with sore head,
you were laying there
on our ratty couch
laughing hard, hysterically.
Your freckles glowed red.
Your eyes flamed ice blue.
You asked, Did you get the point?
I replied, I died.

March 20, 2009 12:24 PM

Erotic Certainty

For I am old now...

There is nothing to say. I was a lover but now no longer equal to that task, no longer on the quest for dragons, no longer willing to stand my ground and hold the dark at bay. What I do, I do in story and fable and poem, do with cleverness and delegation. I give way to the young bucks who know everything and then I watch how it turns out. It is ever thus, always this way. I fell short of independence. I do not have enough. I am in the position of the elderly who go out on the ice to save the tribe the burden. This is nothing to grieve, not in the best of worlds, just what is. Most days I am okay with it.

While this is still a story at this moment, it is really there in my near future. That is the point. This is not far away for me. It is easily right next door. If I pretend otherwise I begin to be pathetic in my denial. I watched a dear friend who tried desperately to deny his mortality while it trimmed his edges piece by piece. I vowed I would not let myself be in that position. I have carried death on my shoulder for decades, ever since Don Juan Matus (Casteneda) made that spiritual gesture so obviously right for me to do. Now I am reaping the benefit.

Erotic Certainty

You have given me
words, ruby flames rising
higher than I can
for I am old now
and you hold the true arrow
of the time to come.
Still we both know words
with erotic certainty
given as we love.

March 19, 2009 8:14 AM

A Redpoll Meditation

This one I believe is a result of pictures posted on Lucy’s Box Elder, or Jozien’s KEEPER OF WILD PLACES. There are no redpolls around here. I liked the name of these rather plain little birds. I took a quick look and think there could be redpolls nearby. They like birch trees. There are birch stands in Oregon, I think. I like finches best. That’s what I get here the most, House Finches and Goldfinches.

A Redpoll Meditation

I sit on my branch
amused at the two-footed
all bundled below.
She, yes I know it,
is unable to ruffle
feathers with all that
stuff on. I wonder
how she can scratch her itches
with her mittened hands.

March 18, 2009 8:26 PM

Embroidery Art

This is a true story about a lover who knew how to draw using embroidery art. She created a remarkable lion’s head on my tee shirt. I did feel just like this. I would have married that woman. How God pried me free of her is one of the primary stories of my life. Why do I have to nearly die to do the right thing?

Heh.

I am a hard head. The truth, it wasn’t only her, not even by half, but a whole lifestyle and livelihood that expelled me violently, projectile vomit. That was when I stopped being an outlaw and got a day job. I got another girl friend, a new town to live in, eventually a move to Oregon, a career and a wife. When that woman visited me in Oregon, one time, just passing through, I saw her very differently, but my own heart was still torqued sideways. It was only two years passed.

Embroidery Art

I watched stitch by stitch
as you built the lion's head
in many colors
over my true heart,
embroidered on my black tee
just as if I earned
this special warm care
from you, as if you knighted
me into love's realm.

March 18, 2009 11:47 AM

The Oil Spill

Sometimes help comes in unacceptable packages.

I have been tricked into accepting help before. Worse, I have been the recipient of intervention. Once I was basically kidnapped. I was given an ultimatum one time, and it was a very close thing whether I would accept the help or not. In each case I accepted the help but I had to go against my instinct to do it. I still preach against the “kidnapping” (I was 21 at the time). I would never do that, even though it worked in my case, even though the one needing the help might die without it. It didn’t work that well, not from my side of things. My part in that one, I could have walked away any time in the next four months.

The alternatives at the time would have been possibly starving to death, military prison, some other kind of jail, perhaps help in some other form a little later down the road. As the dust settled, I knew enough about my situation to know these things, so I stayed in sanctuary.

I have been the one who had the oil cleaned off my body. You would have to trap the gull, kidnap it essentially. The other choice, wait for the gull to be so ill that it might be too late. That was the dilemma my mother faced with me, when she kidnapped her 21 year old son. I would be unable to do that. Even though it worked, it should not have. Most times it doesn’t, not with us humans, and not with gulls either.

It is, however, a choice the rescuer makes. I spent ten years in Alanon over the pressure of a drunk and dying wife. I learned in the fire. I discovered that intervening is a matter of doing for me about someone I love, not doing for them. Since the intervention almost never actually works, then the motivation must be mine about me. I intervene because I must or else lose my integrity if I leave the situation alone. That’s where it actually landed with my wife. I would not let her die on my watch, not if I could help it. At that point I didn’t care any more whether Annie wanted to live (about half the time she did). I was dialing 911 to save my soul. That’s what the 1990s were about for me.

The Oil Spill

In the sand a gull
struggles with the goo that coats
her and now the sand
coats her too. Tarry
oil from the damaged tanker
going south has killed
her, is killing me.
I try to help but she runs
fighting for her life.

March 18, 2009 12:30 PM

A Downstream Guy

This is a troublesome poem. My old hippie sense says you go with the flow. That seems so self evident to me. Back in the day we wrote songs about that. It was a goal. Don’t strive, don’t push the river. Then I got sober and there has been a challenge from that direction. It is all packaged in the thing so many of us in AA will say, “My best thinking got me to AA.” That is not a really great thing. It means my best thinking is out to kill me, and in an effort to save my life I was driven into AA. So what seems easy to me is probably not very trustworthy. Going with the flow will mean getting drunk. Not good.

I want to just drift downstream, just like the Beatles sang of it.

Even so, I have lived the upstream life for nearly 27 years now. I have gone against the current. I have chosen to believe that the current eventually leads back to some kind of addiction. I cannot afford that.

A Downstream Guy

You tell me to swim
upstream against the current.
I am not so sure.
You say swimming down
the stream I'll stay unaware
of the way currents
control my pathway.
I hope I'm more sensitive
than that. I hope all
I need is to tack
side to side a little bit
to tell the currents.

I'm a downstream guy.

March 18, 2009 11:04 AM

Rejoice And Rejoice

Love is lost, love is found again. Love is lost again. I believe it is fundamental to living well that I master this beginning and ending of love. I have learned that I am passionate and want to be. I do not wish to learn to use the sanding tool of experience on my highs just to avoid my lows. I want the highs. I want to play the music.

I must be born into love and die out. My love thrusts in two directions, Eros, and Theos. There is sometimes no distance between them. Other times passion becomes the basis of the world and I can all but forget God. Once in my life passion became the basis of God and I all but forgot the world. It was made plain that would not be my walk.

Remnants remain in my dream, my music, my poetry, my magic.

The Hindu story of the world says that the beginning was a song. Really, the beginning was a chord, an arrangement of uncounted pure sounds in a divine and infinite harmony that formed the whole of all possibilities. It is this sustained chord that holds us up right now. And God Said, Let There BE SOUND. And it was good. They claim that our speech is the most sacred thing we have, especially when we speak spirit, when we sing our hearts. That is why certain syllables are sacred, and chanting is one form of effective prayer.

*************
The Moola Mantra

Om sat chit ananda
para Brahma
purushothama param Atma
Om sri bhagavati sametha
sri bhagavate namaha.
Hari Om tat sat.
**************

Rejoice And Rejoice

I remember that.
I remember the goddess.
I was saved by her,
Though it did not last.
In the ending a sound ripped
through me and beyond
to the farthest reach.
In the beginning was sound,
so also the end.
I was born in sound.
So I also died, and lived
again, loved again.
I will not predict,
cannot but hold you up now,
rejoice and rejoice.

March 17, 2009 8:31 PM

Why Snakes Have No Hands

I was talking to Brother Snake last year and I asked this question. I asked what was going to happen to us. He didn’t say but he told me this story. It soured my lunch. He slithered off and I swear his scales whistled.

Why Snakes Have No Hands

Snakes once had two hands
but didn't want the burden,
so they gave their hands
to children of men
so we could shoulder the blame
for the end of things.

In fact they gave us shoulders
also. We thought this a boon.

March 17, 2009 12:33 PM

The Mage Of Winds

If you don’t like the poem so much the way it is written, then try reversing the voices. Don’t say, “You are a wizard”, say “I am a wizard.” And so on. It is easily done and works just fine until right at the end. But I am not the Mage of Winds. I am the Man of the Northern Wall. This Mage was my first teacher.

The Mage Of Winds

You are a wizard,
a mage of winds, of the wand.
When you stand upright
your bones are revealed
as dark emerald. You warned
me I would see this
before you stood up.
Now you tell me fire blooms in
a cave in the air
behind you, secret,
not available to any
but you and the wind.
You say poets might
know what you mean when you say
such things. I wonder.

March 17, 2009 11:18 AM

Just How It Is

I don’t think I have to say much about this one. I think this is really common among those of us who have gone through it. It seems to me that women can let go of men easier than men can let go of women when you sieve out the game players and only talk of the ones who really try for love. That has been my experience. So maybe this poem is more for men in the aftermath than it is for women. This is serious stuff. Sometimes we men die of it.

Just How It Is

I have let you go
again, again, and again.
There is still a thread
of you left in me
that will not depart even
though that bit of you
that extends beyond
me hooks, catches on odd things
and tears holes in me
as I pass on through,
minding my own path without
you. This is just how
it is.

March 17, 2009 8:56 AM

Bone And Dust

Here are the edges. All the rest is filler. Here is the cross. Here is the viewpoint of all the rest, in the center of the cross.

Bone And Dust

The cross of life, deep
and true, birth begins and death
ends, crossed by lovers
and adoration
of the heart of god reaching
beyond sense and sight,
the fourfold nature,
the edges of our journey,
it is here I watch
you crumble to bits
of bone and dust, you having
gone ahead of me.

March 17, 2009 7:41 AM

Life Eats Life

I have a complaint about predator/prey relationships because I too easily can identify with the prey. I suspect there is not wholehearted agreement among the prey as to the manner and timing of turning from a living being into a food source. I suspect they might feel interrupted and preempted. I cannot imagine feeling less free, less in charge of my own life. I just can’t help taking this a little personally.

As a child I hunted as little boys do. I have watched creatures die at my hand. Even darker, I have toyed with them, as cats will. There is more; so many of us have these experiences with killing and more. I have not been to war myself, only through the experiences of my close friends. Killing and eating are very close together. Farming is the harvesting of life. It is so completely necessary. At the heart of so many kinds of farming is a death moment imposed on another life form, a living being is turned in that moment into a food source. Those that have the power kill, those that don’t are killed.

I have no solution. When I enjoy a steak (and I really like a good steak) I try not to think in this way. I appreciate that I don’t have to butcher my own meat. But I have been here in this mood eating most things, and it troubles me that I have no solution. I believe it puts me at a disadvantage spiritually when I want to think of myself as all pure and ascended that I participate in killing many creatures so regularly and so often, creatures who would surely refuse me if they could. I don’t think there is a way to live as a human without this loose end.

It is one facet of humility to know that I live at the price of other life. Others have to die so that I can live.

Life Eats Life

I know it is hard,
that life does eat life.
It is expected of us.
All we get is choice,
what life shall we eat today?

Why should my orange
be okay with my
hands stripping its skin, pulling
wedges, little squirts
of juice, cast away
seeds that were meant for planting.
Why not grieve that?

March 16, 2009 12:52 PM

The Royal Path

Ocasionally (like yesterday) I find something so intriguing that I jump the queue and bring something out that is fresh. I have touched on the idea of Royalty before, because it figures in my stories. I say I was once a mage to a queen. I don't know if I have ever shared this:

My mother used to wonder how I came by certain traits. One of them was my displayed sense of "to the manor born". She divorced my father when I was two. Already some characteristics of his were mine. More appeared in me as time went on. She marveled at how aspects of my character seemed genetic since my father was nowhere around to drive them. This drove her crazy, since some of these characteristics were the ones she didn't care for in my father. Oh well. Some of my character seemed to skip generations too.

My paternal grandmother came from the south, from a line that included landed gentry, plantation owners. She herself was not rich, not land rich even but she had certain Southern attitudes. Robert de Bruce of Scotland (remember the movie Braveheart? That movie about William Wallace is fractured history but history nonetheless, and Robert is the son of the ailing and devastated king of Scotland, a large part of that story as told in the movie) is a reputed relation in my grandmother's line.

My mother thought there was a genetic thread carrying this sense of inheritance that seems to always have informed certain parts of my character coming up through this lineage. We were university student, post depression poor in my early years, me a child of a single mother, and I was raised up in the liberal and egalitarian leftist politics of the post war forties, nearly socialist. Yet here I was a scion of the realm even so. I carry royal blood and in certain ways, not all fortunate, I act like it.
***********

The true person is an active participant, engaged in her environment while remaining unoppressed by it. Although all phenomena are going through the various appearances of birth, abiding, changing, and dying, the true person doesn't become a victim of sadness, happiness, love, or hate. She lives in awareness as an ordinary person, whether standing, walking, lying down, or sitting. She doesn't act a part, even the part of a great Zen master. This is what Master Linji means by "being sovereign wherever you are and using that place as your seat of awakening."
--Thich Nhat Hanh, “Simply Stop,” Fall, 2007 Tricycle


The Royal Path

You tell me I am.
You say I am sovereign
anywhere I am,
anywhere I go.
You say I can use myself
as the throne you left
me, the legacy
of my gracious royal birth,
the seat of my loft,
my awakening,
my victorious return.

January 5, 2010 2:16 AM

Here Are Stones

My friend, Liz, is fond of stones. She is teaching me to think of them, cherish them, let them appear in my words. She says words are stones. Her stones are not cold inert things, not like a heart of stone. They are not to be thought of darkly. They are the bones of the world. The bones of life. When we eat, we eat stones leavened with solar energy and lunar gravity.

The oldest stones in the world are in Australia and on the Canadian shield. Australia is the most stable surface on the planet, and that’s why the stones are so old there. The Canadian shield has been scoured by the ice. Newer stone has been scraped away. I think that is how it goes. I believe that geologists claim that the entire surface has turned over at least once, that there is no stone that reaches back to the beginnings of the earth. The earth was molten for a long time, once enough of it coalesced.

Then as many scientists claim, something major happened. The History Channel explained it. I believe it’s the right story. A Mars sized body hit the early earth more or less head on.

The iron core in that Mars sized body sank into the center and so the earth has a bigger iron core than would be normal. The reflective bounce back put a large amount of material into orbit. That’s where the moon came from. The rest of the material settled down, all molten and so forming a spheroid with no wound in it, with the iron at the center because it is so heavy. The extra large core also includes heavier radioactive elements that heat it, creating currents that continue to this day.

They say that radioactive heat and the way the moon worked the planet through gravity is what started plate tectonics, and plate tectonics is a recirculation device that has played a major role in making life possible by renewing the surface periodically with fresh minerals. This is evident by observing how life loves the ejecta of volcanoes and returns in profusion to volcanic slopes in remarkably short time frames.

The moon has played as well the primary role in stabilizing the earth’s rotation, also making life possible by slowing down the planetary climatic and geologic changes to a time frame that evolution can handle. Thus the old astrological vision of Father Sun and Mother Moon is fundamentally correct. No life is possible without the energy of Sun and the stabilizing recirculation of Moon.

To know stones are holy as the source of all nutrients, all food, is as basic as worship of Sun and Moon. This is not an error, not at all. It is the wisdom of the ancients. Scientists are telling this story in new ways, but the human soul already knew long ago. It is our soulful heritage.

Here Are Stones

I have kneeled in front
of you and placed myself on
an altar of hope
amidst the garden
that perfumes the fact of love.
There as well I have
placed three stones, each old,
older than time I suspect,
so smooth, and each is
different, and so
I've offered a trinity
to mirror the world.

March 16, 2009 11:58 AM

A Quality Of The Heart

Holy cow! Down on the Feedjit widget I track in a broad way who visits this site. Today is a red letter day. Africa showed up for the first time. Welcome, Africa.

Lost love really hurts. We all know that pain. Some of it is true loss. Much of it is tangled up in other spheres of mental and emotional anguish. I can’t help knowing many things related to my lost love, stories of how it has come to be. There are always at least three stories. There are often many more.

When I love you, if I am truly mature, some of it will really be aimed at you. If I am truly mature then enough of my love will really be given to you rather than to some vision I have of you. Even then what that really means, if you are really mature, then the “really you” I know matches up with the most mature vision of the “really you” that you hold these days.

When we lose these tangled knots there is a genuine chaos of pain but much of our loss is less than real, more than real. Look closely. Some of it may be hurt false pride. How much? I only bring this up because a hurt to false pride requires one kind of healing and genuine grief quite another.

If we didn’t desperately need these connections, then we wouldn’t do this. It is much too complicated.

A Quality Of The Heart

I thought I lost love
when you left me here alone,
moving on, you said,
time to go roaming
with the boy you found next door.
Such a cliche, that.
Why couldn't you choose
someone more interesting
to run away with?
I thought I lost love
but found it wasn't in you,
my love, but in me.

March 14, 2009 9:37 PM

Out In The Night

I have had to run before. I have had to get out of town, leave the state and stay away awhile. To my recollection, I have never run as far as this poem says in this lifetime. In general I have been taught that I should be careful with the tool of geographical change, or extra-galactic change for that matter because I need to be clear where the real threat lies. No matter where I go, there I am. I take the vultures in my head with me.

As this poem suggests, it is better to run to something than from something.

Out In The Night

I left this place in
a hurry, aimed at open
space, at the old dust
found outside clusters,
outside galaxies where dark
matter stirs to tunes
emitted by dark
energy, out in the night
where stars are so sparse,
where solitude is.

I have gone there to weave spells,
to sing the old songs.

March 14, 2009 8:59 PM

Sun Stealing

I was born in California, in the Bay Area as they call it, across the bay from San Francisco. I am used to the seasons as they happen there and further south. It turns out that I am used to that all the way to my bones. I am still surprised by how dark it gets here in Portland in the winter, still amazed to have snow as we do at least once each winter. We would have snow in the Bay Area maybe once a decade. The surprise I feel at the seasons in Portland remains despite the fact that I moved here in 1973.

I have friends who live much further north than I do. I imagine what that must be like. One friend remarked not long ago that the sun set around 3:30. It wasn’t the winter solstice yet. I try to get that, what it must be like to live in the dark. For that matter, what is it like to live in the light of the long summer day? How about the winter cold? Last spring, it was still winter up north.

Sun Stealing

It's just five below
zero centigrade, nearly
shirtsleeve weather, hey?
Pioneer spirit
by God. I'll lay myself down
on this black cleaned off
trampoline, gaze at
the sky, at the dark ravens
while I take the sun
and run off with it
in my wandering fine mind.

The ravens speak out,
have something to say,
consider my sun stealing
inconvenient.

March 13, 2009 8:31 PM