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

The Punishing God

More than one theologian has remarked on the way man’s perception of God, or perhaps God Himself has matured over the centuries. God growing up is actually an issue with God as He manifests in Europe and the Near East. In the Far East the apprehension of the Divine took a deeply sophisticated form at least from 600 BCE. The Buddhists of that day pointed out that God was not actually required for a spiritual practice to make sense. God at His most mature departs if we wish His departure. That is what makes room for science. Intellectually honest scientists know and admit that the issue of God is not resolved by science. Instead the statements concerning the place of God in things really go more like this:

It is axiomatic in the scientific world view that nature takes the simplest course possible at every point. That is truthfully not very damn simple in lots of areas, for example in biology. The axiom still seems to hold, even with these admitted instances of holding entropy at bay in some local systems. Thus we as scientists find the God explanation for things at least one layer more complex than necessary to explain everything. Furthermore there is the risk in positing a creator God that we introduce an infinite regress into things. This is to be abhorred in logical discourse. Risking infinite regress and more complexity than necessary does not rule out the existence of God, whatever that may mean. Instead it reveals with clarity that the idea of God lies outside the scope of science.

The rest is politics on both sides.

The evolution of God in the West is an interesting story that involves the demand that God enter history or else God makes no sense. He must really manifest concretely on the planet. This demand is different from the older human concept of God as manifest in the before time, the Golden Age, the world of the ancestors, in the world of myth. Even Jesus made this distinction when he spoke of this world and of God's World, or the Kingdom. Christian church, the kingdom of the saints, is an attempt to honor this distinction by drawing apart as befits the Children of God. A God in history must evolve, just as we do. History is by it's nature evolutionary, going someplace. Christianity demands Eschatology, a theology of the culmination of things. To have God actually present on the planet as He is in the story of the Jews, in the body of Christ, in the life of the prophet, is to have a historical God. Such a God can indeed change, grow up.

The Punishing God

I stood up right then,
where you said God sends disease
as retribution.
I would fire a God
like that, and go hire someone
on the divine list,
waiting for a job,
promising to do better
than that teenager.

April 29, 2009 12:36 PM

Follow The Curve

What is it I heard? The Large Hadron Collider is up and running and they have sent protons (hydrogen ions) into each other at energies three times as large as ever before. That kind of energy is not found very many places in the universe now but is in the core of stars of all kinds, perhaps, near black holes, or in them, and most especially very near the time of the big bang. They have already collected years of data, so many people are going to be very steadily busy, searching for things never before recorded. You can’t say seen. We do not see anything. All this is far too small for that. But we can record the events and their aftermath and see in the data around the invisibility corner.

Imagine that. We are creating events and recording the aftermath of things that happen smaller than the amplitude of light waves. Thus they are not visible because they really are too small. Light misses these events in the wiggle of its own waves. We have to use electrons and other smaller things to measure and record what happens. Their amplitudes are not too small. Then we use translation programs sometimes to simulate what we could see if we could see using these other particles (waves). The data is more useful in other ways, much of it going into computer analysis.

Apparently there was a break down and they had to repair stuff earlier when they first started up. This is only the beginning. They are tuning things up. The energies achieved will be greater than this. Hooah! I've been waiting since the fifties...

Follow The Curve

If I fall this time
will it be along Newton's
old straight track smack down
into the planet,
or shall I go with Einstein
along the long curve
of space time, perhaps
miss everything local
and find my way out?

This might take some work,
some heavy incantation,
a wee bit of help.

April 28, 2009 1:13 PM

Losing You

I am most days okay with the fact I am like this. I am trained. I have the psychology, the philosophy. I even have big chunks of the theology. More than this, I have been in the trenches in AA, quite intimate with realtime recovery as it plays out day to day. I have watched and experienced and can advise and consent with effectiveness.

All that I have written is in place and still I grab hold tightly and must enter the discipline to actually let go. When I lost my last lover, a big piece of me was pretty sure I would not have another. That’s what happened to my mother and I believe she was close to my age when it happened. It is now several years later and I have discovered I neither want to put myself out to get a partner, nor am I willing to settle for less than what I had last, and finally that I am okay living alone even though I believe I wish a partner. If I had another lover, I know that I would grab hold even though I know better. Hmmm.

Losing You

If I look at it
straight on I can often let
you go. Instead I
stuff my cubbyholes
full, in this room and that one,
pieces and things, sure
I dare not let them
leave my space or leave my heart.

But when I get square
with the world I know
I will not lose you like that,
not so easily.

April 28, 2009 3:43 PM

A Crow Story

This I swear is a true story of a tree near the condo we rented in Lake Grove, a wooded area of Lake Oswego in the greater Portland area. Lake Oswego is an upscale community focused on the lake, a largely manmade and man controlled body of water that can be totally drained for maintenance and is volume controlled in all but the worst drought years. There are mansions on the lakefront.

Lake Grove is a little lower in the scale in many neighborhoods. My wife and I moved there when we returned to Portland from Newport on the Oregon Coast, moved into the condominium. It was there that I sat and used my electric typewriter to write my way into my BA degree, sat at the dining table.

There were tall evergreens everywhere in and around our condominium complex. One of them on this particular day in late spring collected a huge number of crows, literally hundreds at least, with many coming and going. I have never seen anything like it, have no idea what it was about, but it made me a little nervous to have those crows so near, so many. They were definitely noisy. I don’t know when they left or where they went when they did leave, but they were no longer there the next day.

We liked living in Lake Grove so much that we put earnest money down on the condo when the landlord decided to sell it. Then we found the house in Willamette that had everything we had listed on our wish list, a fireplace, an attic, two baths, a garage, a small but landscaped yard with not much grass, a master bedroom big enough for the king sized water bed, a deck and a covered patio, and a study off the kitchen, away from the main part of the house. So we bought it and gave up the earnest money.

A Crow Story

A murder of crows
appeared one day in a tree
across the back street
and down below from
my balcony where I watched
in true awe as they
came and left, and came,
a circulation of crows,
convention of crows,
an entire city
of shiny black beaks, yellow
eyes and discussion.

I felt they were there
to judge me, to speak of things
I mustn't ever
know.

April 27, 2009 7:58 PM

Trespass

What is it about me, I want to be involved in these things? I somehow think I have something to contribute. Maybe I do. As a young man I was beat up by a distraught husband, but he was not very effective and that mainly because he was in the wrong and he knew it. He broke my watch. I was pissed. Actually over the years, I have gotten some practice and some wisdom. Mostly when I get in the middle like this it more or less works out. I do not cross intimacy lines without invitation.

Here I watch myself perhaps.

Trespass

I walked in to see
you and found you engaged,
serious effort,
I could tell, you pale,
eyes wide open, hands like claws,
you receiving her
embrace, while she cried.

I had no notion what that
was all about but
I was sure I had
no business in your place,
not at that time.

April 27, 2009 3:56 PM

The Scavenger On The Beach

Here’s a slice of life. I have things in my life like this. We all do. Some of us have lives that might seem more interesting to some. Here’s an example, my rock musician friend, who travels so much because that’s where the work is. His home is here. His band was a Detroit band in those days and some band members are still back there. He goes back to write music with them as well as they fly in to Las Vegas for shows and stuff like that. There is a seasonal aspect to this because while they make a living, they are no longer big names. Really for him it is same old, same old. The way he talks about it, I know this is true.

You could be the guy who chose to make a life following the surf. After some time at it, I know it would be as hard to get out of that as it is to get out of anything else. I was really lucky to find a relatively interesting way to make a living. Most of it is grinding work though, just like everyone else’s. I am completely grateful for the part where there is no time clock. That didn’t use to make a big difference. Now it does.

If I lost this thing I do, ready or not, I would be forced into retirement. I have no way to start again. The energy just isn’t there.

The Scavenger On The Beach

It's the way of things
to make choices and live them
for years after that.
No do overs, no,
not very often. Look back
then and see the change,
how it locks you down
and now you feed family
as if you want that.

April 27, 2009 12:28 PM

I Have Met My Match

Life is difficult. Water just wants to join with itself and seeks a straight path to that. Unfortunately for water, there are serious obstacles and demands along the way.

Most water stays ocean bound. Some water gets sucked up, drawn away from itself, shanghied as it were. It is forced to travel high in the air and fall someplace it might not choose.

If it is really unlucky water descends in the far north or south, or high enough up that it might get stuck, perhaps exiled. If it is more fortunate then it falls where there is more chance to find the ocean again. That is what happens so long as some crack in the earth doesn't catch it and store it for aeons. There is some water that gets waylaid by biology and cycles through the interactions with complex hydrocarbons. Some water may actually spend some time in the hydrocarbon cycle or even get stuck in petrified bones for aeons too.

I think water prefers staying in oceans over all the alternatives. If it is taken up by the heat of the sun, then I think it prefers a quick return.

Maybe this is an ecology poem.

I Have Met My Match

I am a river
that met its match at the cliff.

I have fallen off,
turned to a cascade,
a mist drifting on the wind,

can no longer float
your boat as I wish.

Consider this your warning
to get off my back.

April 27, 2009 12:03 PM

Standing On One Foot

Sometimes I feel really different. Sometimes I just want to come home, even on Friday night, even though my friends have gone out, even though I would enjoy it. No. I just want to come home. Actually I am accepting two things. I am older now and I am required to take six different pills every day around the five o’clock hour. That is the consequence of needing an angioplasty and a stent placement in my heart last May. By Friday, I am too tired to really want a gathering of 8 to 12 people. That would be too harsh, too hard to track. So they all feel the need to huddle and cavort. Me, I feel the need to quiet way down. I can’t find more energy, it seems, no matter what I do. I will be resting tomorrow, pretty much what I always do on Saturdays, basically nothing. This is not a complaint. It is acceptance. I have to work, so I have to get this tired. To recover, I have to rest.

Standing On One Foot

You tell me to use
imagination, and how
that happens, I start
to sprout stork feathers,
keeping one foot down, standing
on wet river ice,
drawing my other
foot up next to my belly
to warm it, thinking
"Should've stayed south, yup."

April 27, 2009 11:28 AM

Watching For Hawks

I love this power, these words, the true incantations found deep amidst the raw red of the hot rocks as they lie poised and waiting for the next eruption, the next ascension into air, into light.

An Icelandic volcano is demonstrating right now how to make new land, fire and ice. The Americas and Europe are getting ever further apart at a stately pace. No words are needed there. The evocation there needs no words, and stating protection in the face of that fire will not work. But here, here the words are singular and stout, present and deep and they rattle my bones until I find a new shape.

My brothers in Siberia read the maternal line, the mitochondrial code from a finger bone and found out that another man came out of Africa earlier than we did, and drew away from us a million years ago. This is too new for Erectus and Heidelbergensis. They drew away 2.5 million years ago. This man was not like us in his lineage but we might have known him anyway. He continued on the planet to at least 40,000 years ago, perhaps later. So now there are four different groups of Homo coexistent 40,000 eyears ago. Sapiens, called Cro-Magnon, Neanderthalensis, Floresiensis, and this new fellow we have just learned of and not yet named. All tool using, all probably speaking, all living in tribal societies and wearing jewelry, all probably burying their dead, but all coming from Africa in different migrations and reaching far away lands on foot. I pray it wasn’t us that killed them all off. I am afraid it was.

Watching For Hawks

I am riverine
watching for hawks when I see
you walking the bank.
My old heart catches
at the sight of your long legs
and my scales glisten.
I remember you
sister from before and yes,
that's when I leap out
to see you better.

April 26, 2009 3:55 PM

Counting Pile, 1981

Here’s a knocking indeed. That’s a line from Shakespeare. It’s the Porter’s line.

A steam hammer rigged up on the leads of a crane sufficient to lift the hammer above eighty feet of composite steel and creosoted wood or full length steel pile. The pile used to nail the dry crust to the compressed mud beneath after twenty feet of the mush of the Yaquina Slough, tidal water in the the Yaquina River upstream of Yaquina Bay. The steam hammer chuffs and blangs, driving a multi-ton hammer head against the giant nail we used to nail the land together. This is required to build any structure on that land, land you can drown in if you dig too deep, about eight feet. When the pile hits this layer it just drops for twenty feet.

Chuff, blang, chuff, blang, chuff, blang…and me, I stand right there in the spray of the steam and in the horizontal wind and rain. I have a stick for measuring a constant height by swinging off my foot against the pile and a piece of chalk. I watch the foot marks already scribed on the pile cans until the pile comes up and slows down to less than an inch per blow. Then I start marking and counting, looking for eighteen blows per inch. I get that and I cut off the driving. If I don’t and we run out of pile, they have to drive another beside it. That’s about one in fifteen.

When I was scribing foot marks on pile cans I was very near the welder. That night I got flash burn reactions even though I didn’t ever look at the welding directly. The day that I write about here, I was in a full blown gale, a winter ocean storm come ashore, just eight miles inland. It was very cold and very wet. Everything was wet no matter that I was in full slicker. I went in to the engineering office and sat at my desk on morning break and wondered how I was going to go back out there. I had no one to spell me. Wearing hard hat and steel toed boots and hearing protection, none of which would really matter if things came apart, so I am trusting the contractors and closer in than the pile bucks except when the setting the pile for driving. That hammer is in my face, literally at the critical time, and that means the pile is resisting the most, so everything is at its most explosive. Shit.

I never had to do that job again. I am proud I did it though. I created the record that proved the foundation for that building was going to be safe. That’s the kind of thing comes up when you work in engineering for a paper mill.

Counting Pile, 1981

Winter morning with
sideways rain, in full slicker
with my tools, a Write
In The Rain pad, chalk,
and mechanical pencil,
with hard hat and ear
protection, many
layers hoping to keep warm,
I stood next to steam
and noise so big it
hammered me and the pile cap
equally. I froze
in the winter rain.

April 26, 2009 4:03 PM

their attitude toward me has not changed

This is the feel of it. I argue with my silent partner and try to get a rise out of him. I poke and prod. I have been known to misbehave badly just to attract notice. I have quit that for the most part, though I am still capable. I still misbehave for somewhat better reasons these days. I try not to argue with the half wounded, though.

Today was not a good day. They were too fast for me and I lost my cool. Twice. And then the primary asshole wanted to know why. That is a useless exchange. I have tried before. He does not see it my way at all, will never see it my way, thinks my way is beneath notice basically. I have been that guy myself before. I know. End of story. I am powerless in this situation. I run preventative maintenance on it, but as I say, it tightened up far too quickly this morning. I was left raw and bleeding and angry. I was quiet but it was not over this afternoon and there it was again, different issue. Jesus.

My twisted beady little head actually believes that I am such a nice guy everyone should recognize how freaking valuable and wise I am and they do not. Amazing.

their attitude toward me has not changed

But I have changed, yes
changed so long ago, my bones
rattle loose in me
and take me along
for night rides, caught unawares
until I'm too high
to now call a halt.

Consider my shaky verse
as cries for release,
as arguments. God
knows I argue, keeps silent
as I continue.

April 26, 2009 12:41 PM

We Come And We Go

This poem speaks for itself, plainly enough.

We Come And We Go

Shall I be strong here
among the few of you who
shift and grow today
and hold together
in this odd bog of good words?

Will it change so soon?

Someone comes, then goes
for sound reasons could I know
but I am not told.
If this is like love
then war is closer to love
than I care to know.

There are so many
places to go in this swirl
of light, as just now
I found another
circle like this gathering
with their own true glow.

April 26, 2009 11:48 AM

Modern Magic

This is not a poem about all of me. It is a poem about a part of me. This part of me held sway for awhile…Dances With Words. I was smart enough to not attempt the thing I did with music though, thinking music would somehow save me.

I remember how that was, how I would go to the coffee house and Paul Zeigler would be singing and I learned all his stuff because I wanted so desperately to be him. I sat there night after night and learned his repertoire, not only the basic song but his phrasing.

That desperation was the source of the determination I had to learn the guitar, so I could be him. I got there. I did it. I still didn’t have his life and knowing his music didn’t work for me. I was blocked. I had powered my way in and pushed past the tough parts and I was at professional grade in the things I did know. There was a universe of music I knew little about. I realized I would have to deconstruct and start again. I didn’t have the stomach for it.

I had worn my guitar out, literally. The frets of a brass alloy needed replacement because the steel strings over six years of intense work had worn grooves in them. I had torn the finish off the face of my guitar around the pick guard learning to use a flat pick. My cigarettes had burned a couple holes in the guitar finish too.

I put the guitar down. Back when Frances fixed my guitar for me, in gratitude, I picked it up and recovered the music to a point. I started learning new things too. But I had the keyboard and that is what I work with now. During that time I had returned to singing in a church choir, how I met Frances and through all that began singing in community college choirs too. We had the opportunity to sing with professional orchestra and the Christmas program was challenging and wonderful.

The point is I forced it and believed I could turn into something I am not and in the end it caused me to walk away from the music for decades.

Now these poems come from Dances With Words but I know better. When I began blogging a blog friend called me Johnny Applepoem because I was dropping poems into the comment sections of other people’s blogs all the time.

Modern Magic

I chase the learning,
modern magic of this age,
the incantation
in the deep of me
rising out of my hunger
to know all, all, all.

I believe words will
save me despite all the wounds
of my raw old life.

So I dance with words,
with so many pages, forms
in the teeth of things.

April 26, 2009 9:44 PM

The Holy Shock Of The Kill

I return in some sort of cycle to all these subjects of mine. This is rather bare bones here. I am beyond my depth when I face certain parts of life. I want to step out of myself and stand aside. I want to travel to the throne of God, and there wait for audience. I want to demand an answer to the “WHY!!” that tears my throat and throws me against the wall, there to slide down sitting on the shit fouled rug of the drunk’s bedroom.

That last sentence is an actual place in my life, as I watched my life being torn apart.

I have holy rage, how it feels to me. I know I can kill from there. I have traveled across the planet and there is nowhere truly safe on it. I say sit anywhere and draw a radius out to maybe ten blocks. Then sweep it around and make the circle. Everything that can happen is probably happening to someone inside this circle if you include all sentient beings. Life preys on life. If it is in the city you do this, then all you need include is other people. Someone is for this moment happy and someone else so sad that their life might be threatened. People blithely say feelings won’t kill you. Wrong. I have witnessed that. Feelings do kill, and it can take years of suffering for feelings to succeed at it.

This is all one side. But it is real enough just as it is. I made a vow many years ago that when I am happy it will not be because I have swept this part under some ragged and dusty rug. Real happiness has to survive this, rebound, and rise up again and not in spite of it, neither in spite nor because it is now gone, hi ho the witch is dead. That is because this place is never that far away no matter what you do. Real happiness keeps full awareness of this so that the pain and suffering of others is not slighted in the least when you encounter them in their moments.

They are never far away. Suffering is never far away.

Neither is the beauty of the sun setting within the clouds of the clearing storm far away, nor the beauty of the woman singing to her newborn.

The Holy Shock Of The Kill

What happens in my ancient
blood when I see the young
chicks or pups or kits, see spring
delicacies of color rise new grown
and all fresh things, what happens then
is the memory of the fires and the paint,
the preparation for the hunt, and the eyes
of the newly killed - for we have to eat.

What happens is
the holy shock of the kill,
knowing this pleasure is so deeply right
when you're the cat, the bear, the wolf,
and eagle screams in holy triumph.

But rabbit screams differently, as does doe.
Fish flops and gasps on the bank.

When I was a boy I would kill like this, practice.
No one becomes hunter without practice.
This is not and cannot be clean. I remember.
The play of it is real, more real than food,
I realized how close killing is to sex that way,
the holy shock of the kill.

What happens as I remember, my bile rises
at the shape of my own heart.
I cannot hunt now even though I still eat.

I have become the man who would break the perfect
predatory pounce if I could, desperately sad,
even sadder that I would be wrong to do it.

March 24, 2009 12:59 PM

An Artist's Dream

“On the night of the Buddha's enlightenment, he is said to have understood that everything is completely interconnected and interdependent. Therefore it is impossible for anybody to go on retreat from the world. Everybody knows that when you go on retreat, the whole world, no matter how tiny your retreat cabin, is there, in terms of your experience. And the purpose of retreat is precisely to transform the world.”
- Richard Reoch, "The Path of Complete Engagement" tricycle (Winter 2004)

I saw the interconnections once. I tried to find my way back for several years. There is only going forward, what I have done for decades, ever since I realized I was not allowed back. There are ways that moment is still with me. Some people are saying lately that I have an unusual mind. I say, “Not really, but I did have an unusual experience.” That changed my mind. I am still interested in transforming the world, as I have always been. Like God, I honor free will. I would never compel anyone, not ever, not for any reason except perhaps saving them from immanent death. I have dropped the dime in that situation before and would again. I will let others take on the burden of the coercer, the trickster. It is not wrong to coerce or trick people into their own good necessarily but it may add to your future karmic debt unless you are simply impeccable at it. I know I am not that skillful. I have no interest in adding to my karmic debt unless God commands it.

An Artist's Dream

When East knows spring comes
she gives crocuses to North,
purple ones and gold,
sends the Western man
into fits of bearded glee
to know the kindness
of light and song, sun
and fine Southern exposure,
all an artist's dream.

April 24, 2009 11:02 PM

The Offering

The Core of Practice

"The core of Buddhist practice is the transformation of suffering (dukkha) and its roots into wisdom and compassion. As the Buddha pointed out, we all experience physical and emotional pain. We all get sick, lose people we love, and each of us will die. Our practice is not to try to get rid of this pain, which would be impossible. Rather, it is to avoid constricting around our pain, or blaming ourselves or others for it, or lashing out when we feel attacked-somehow believing that by so doing we will get rid of or resolve the initial hurt.

This cycle of reactivity is called suffering. The task of our practice is to transform such reactivity and the greed, hatred, and delusion that fuel it. It is to realize that it is possible to experience pain without suffering, without passing on the pain to ourselves or others."

-From Donald Rothberg, "Present Moment, Urgent Moment" tricycle, (Fall 2004)



There are so many I would be willing to sacrifice for. There are so many others I can barely tolerate. I search through my soul and must confess that I do not find it in me to love everyone. I am simply not built right for the notion of universal love, of agape. I do better with the part of love that is called compassion. I can wrap myself around that and feel fairly sure I am not disguising pity. I am fairly sure I am not aiming at some kind of codependent overprotection or something. Love your enemy as yourself. This is not possible for me. I can however show mercy.

There is a man in my local circle. I have had trouble with him for years. I cannot seem to express myself in a way that he doesn’t take offence. He usually goes away and stews awhile. He carries a grudge. In my last real conversation, it ended with him informing me that I had judged his ability to choose his investments wisely. What he was talking about was at least a decade old. I really don’t remember. He never brought it up until a few weeks ago. I am amazed that his stuff lasts that long, amazed that he is that touchy about such a subject, when, if I was in that area with him, I am sure I was joking or at least light hearted in my intention.

I cannot love this man, not after at least fifteen years of this crap. I have known him for most of twenty seven years. It is best for me to hold my distance peacefully and wish him well from there.

Situations like this give me the signal of how far I have to go. If I am to get out of here with a little added elevation, then there is much work to do. I follow the Bodhisattva ideal. The only hope I have for coming close to that ideal, I throw myself on God’s lap in a radical way and work with His Presence and Power. There is no other way open to me. I am starting too far back in my own rebellious spirit.

The Offering

I shall offer for
the moment, for you, golden
petals joined by stem
and scarlet center
by count fifteen and five more
all a dream, a song
calling you from pain,
from the chemistry, the ache
of your emptiness.

April 23, 2009 1:18 PM

The Curtain Rises

Have you ever been with Taurus? I don’t know about the men but the women seem to have drama, something like you would expect from Leo. I was raised by a consummate actress, Tony Award caliber, one who could direct as well. I mean this literally. She acted and directed. There is something about it. You just sit back and watch sometimes. Trouble comes when such a woman enlists you, demands that you perform. It’s for your own good, you know. I wound up defending against it on all sides. Finally my mother figured out that she didn’t want to test our relationship that much and she backed way off. She didn’t have any choice. I made sure her choices for me turned out terribly. I was a really unpleasant teen.

I have matured. Now when I run into a woman like that I just enjoy the show. I notice however, that I am not about to easily follow suggestions that come like stage directions. My last girlfriend is a marvelous example of a lady capable of producing a show. She possesses the endearing quality of not usually demanding participation. So often, what she was doing was wonderful and I freely wanted a part of it. She became the choir director for a time of the church choir we were in. She also bought for her house a Playel grand piano, in part because I can play. I loved having the chance to play that. Her best gift to me was to go into my closet when I didn’t know she did that, pull out my guitar, a 1966 Martin O-18 (parlor guitar) and go get it completely refurbished so I could play it again. She did that for my birthday in our first year together. That is the best birthday present anyone ever gave me. I had stopped playing in 1973 when I had no money and had worn out the brass frets over seven years of hard play. This gift got me to return to playing and it pushed me forward into other musical things too.

I should say about this drama thing, it might mean what we call a drama queen but it doesn’t have to. For the most part my mother was not a drama queen, just sometimes. My last girlfriend was nothing like what you would think of as a drama queen.

The Curtain Rises

The brightness reveals
you, not so bright that my eyes
shut tight in white heat
but more like stage lights
and make up would help reveal
your dramatic truth.

You are dramatic.

I hold a box seat, season
tickets to your show,
purchased at full price.

April 22, 2009 3:45 PM
modified
March 17, 2010 7:07 PM

Intentions

I am very pleased that I can write like this. When I sit at the keyboard and play my music, that too pleases me. Sometimes I am sure I am only a channel, that I really am not able to do any of this. If not this, then as a channel, I am pretty good. Pretty good for a bozo on the bus. This was another unfinished poem. The last half took extensive rework in the middle of the night.

Intentions

A rhyme and scheme, scheme
beyond meter to story
and beyond that too,
my liege, my lady
sets her intention within
the words to build it,
to build the walls and
seal the roof, ignite the fire
blazing in the hearth,
and quicken my words.

April 22, 2009 12:45 PM
Modified
March 16, 2010 2:44 AM

Divine Predicament

Occasionally, the Whiskey River blogsite publishes passages by writers who express one or another of the cores of my spiritual walk, gifting me with the understanding that I am not alone on the planet. I am not alone even though I have gone my own way. Here are today's quotes on the truth of things. Amen.

"There's a space at the bottom of an exhale, a little hitch between taking in and letting out that's a perfect zero you can go into. There's a rest point between the heart's muscle's close and open - an instant of keenest living when you're momentarily dead. You can rest there."
- Mary Karr

"The gaps are the thing. The gaps are the spirit's one home, the altitudes and latitudes so dazzlingly spare and clean that the spirit can discover itself like a once-blind man unbound. The gaps are the clefts in the rock where you cower to see the back parts of God; they are the fissures between mountains and cells the wind lances through, the icy narrowing fords splitting the cliffs of mystery. Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn, and unlock - more than a maple - a universe."
- Annie Dillard

This is my opinion. Don’t read it if you have your own strong opinion.

The gaps are essential and are central to the notion of the presence of God in a world filled with free will action. We live in the main on the surface of things, only dimly knowing of the deeps unless something special happens or else we enter into disciplines designed to change normal consciousness in fundamental ways. The gaps are those kind of doorways.

We tend to complete things, finish them, close the circles. This means we tend to enclose ourselves in the self will of our freedom. We value this. However the gaps in things are so fundamental that no matter what we do, we cannot completely close things. Even so, God has a covenant with us to not violate our free will.

We can’t succeed in closing things off but we can refuse His Presence, unless something is so important to His Work that we are disregarded. This can happen but it is really rare that any one of us is so essential to His Work that He cannot find anyone else to do it. In a world of alternatives, He does not have to violate free will.

The more of us there are on the planet, the more completely free will is the rule. That will be true until there are too many of us and we begin to limit each other in overcrowding. The gaps are still there, not far from us no matter what we do. That is the special privilege that the Buddhists refer to when they say we are in a special privileged position in all creation. We are in the position where we can actually access the gaps in things and enter them. This is not true for other sentient beings. It is a matter of spiritual scale. Some beings are metaphorically too small and others metaphorically too big. This does not mean that getting access to the gaps is an easy task, just that it is possible.

And my poem for this day is about some of the stuff that could be happening in the gaps…

Divine Predicament

When two goddesses
meet I hope I'm not the one
they've decided to
discuss in minute
detail, as if I lay on
some forensic slab
divinely opened
to precise judgmental view.

Perhaps instead I'm
bathed in vinegar,
curing and marinating,
being readied for
next week's stewing pot.

April 22, 2009 12:25 PM

Our Planetary Doom

I have posted before that C.S.Lewis wrote that our planet is a quarantined planet and a receiver of rebellious souls in an otherwise peaceful universe that lives in accord with God’s plan. I don’t think current astrophysics bears out his vision but I certainly understand his sense of things. I believe that he was more than half serious writing like that.

Welcome to daylight savings time, all you to whom this applies.

Our Planetary Doom

Look what happened when
I finally took courage
and said it to you,
not the damn questions
but the fact of them, always
lurking as they do
near the stars' night roads
to our planetary doom,
to the fate we earn.

April 21, 2009 3:32 PM

Yaquina Bay Gale

This is a real moment in 1976 or 1977. The central part of the Oregon Coast is subject to high winds and horizontal rain. They would call it gale but the winds actually reach hurricane force in the gusts. Our apartment was the upper floor of a duplex apartment in a line of four. Our view was facing south, the direction most of the weather came from. We were on a hillside overlooking the bay, a magnificent view. On the day of the boat parade people wouldn’t bother to ask, they would just show up at our place.

This particular wind was blowing across from west to east some of the time. At those moments the aligned apartment buildings acted like the top of a bottle, only the hoot was really deep in the bass range and actually shook things. Then the wind would shift and coming from the south would push and flex the walls in its force. Ann thought it just meant that the wind got in past the windows. She was partly right, it was leaking in also.

I pointed out to Annie that the wall was actually bending in enough in the wind force to cause the curtains to come away from the wall and then swing back as the wall straightened up again. She paled, went, “Ohhh…” and then went to bed in our bedroom that was at the back, the north end of our apartment. That was as far away as she could get.

Yaquina Bay Gale

Watching the walls breathe
with the big gusts that blew past
the side door entries
creating bass notes
that just shook everything.

When the curtains fell
away from the wall
you thought it was wind getting
through. I said it was
the wind bending walls.

You went to bed then, escaped
the gale force, dreaming.

April 21, 2009 1:00 PM

Like A Shattered Glass

I shall let this poem be without much comment. It is very close to a true story. I know it belongs to someone if not quite to me. I added to it for posting, replacing the last original line with four other lines. I found I had not finished it. I wish I could have a special place to put such things, don’t you? - like storing nuclear waste. Instead, my stuff tends to leak out of any container I devise and cause deflections. Windage is required in my aim. I can still strike the target but I must constantly check how the sightlines are skewed today. This is tedious and since I don’t always check, there are lost opportunities for better precision in my life. I guess I might do better if I tackle things more straight away. This is good advice. I am terrible at taking advice, even my own.

Like A Shattered Glass

Like a shattered glass
I reflect indecision
found at my crossroads,
the spot where I keep
such questions unasked as this,
Will you marry me?
Shall we emigrate?
Will I die before, after?

I keep these questions
in holes in the dust
left by the plague of rabbits
who once came this way.

April 20, 2009 12:59 PM

Last 4 lines added
March 12, 2010 5:15 PM

They Went Back To The World

This is a real world poem. There are enough stories. There were many people who got caught up in all the different attempts to humanize inhumane situations. This is what we do. This is of course my generation’s war in Vietnam. I have no real clue if things like this are happening in Iraq but somehow I doubt Islam makes good street women. This poem came about in sympathy with something Cat shared about a Thai girl last year if I remember right. There were many street women in Thailand too. Are? Probably. I wonder and don’t know much about what is happening in Vietnam these days.

They Went Back To The World

There were men intent
on saving the young street girls,
saving the beauty.
They would begin like
all the other customers
but then pay the rent,
play with the children,
figure ways to get them out,
usually fail.

I wonder too what
happened to those men when they
went back to the world.

April 19, 2009 11:26 AM

Faith's Remembrance

My mother never packed me a lunch with something special in it. We were poor, then we were under tight budget and such things were not budgeted. I remember other kids getting such things in their lunch. What did happen, I failed to observe anything to get all envious about in that scenario. The kids took their little presents so much for granted that they were bored with them. I never put it together that that should be something to cherish. I imagine now that the kids who did cherish such things kept it to themselves. They would have been teased otherwise. That’s what I remember so clearly about childhood in my neck of the woods. We all were pressed to avoid the possibility of being teased. For my part, the first two years of high school were bleak because I was a target. The last two years I got my growth and stopped being an overt target but I was not well liked by any means. I never had a real girl friend in my school. Instead my girl friends came from the church group I was associated with, or neighboring schools.

In this poem, I would point out that “turning to depart” doesn’t have to mean for good, perhaps just for the day, and “journey” the same, maybe even as small as going to the store, or like a kid going to school.

Faith's Remembrance

To find particles
of your passing through my life,
like finding kisses
left under my cloak
when I take it up to wear
on my next journey,
I remember you
as you stood in the doorway
turning to depart.

April 19, 2009 11:05 PM

After Lift Off

I still hold hope for lift off. I know how it is though. The hope is all tangled with the fantasy of desire. The reality will perhaps have in it enough to sustain the dream. I still practice music, still write poetry. I wrote my first serious poetry in 1967. I was invested in serious music earlier than that, singing in challenging choirs, musicals, barbershop quartet and madrigal in 1962. I had to quit singing two years ago because my bronchials and allergic nasal drip are not letting me control my voice any more, especially in the winter, which is the heart of the performance season. That broke my heart. At least I still have my keyboard. I fear the approach of arthritis.

After Lift Off

More than glass between
my shadow and yours, gleaning
as we do, distant
worlds with the cold void
that beckons the last breath out,
no inhaling left,
not after lift off,
not after giving notice
of our departure.

April 18, 2009 5:24 PM

Approaching The Holy

On the way back from East Pakistan in 1969 we traveled west. First we hit Karachi, then Beirut, then Istanbul, then Athens. We stayed three days in Athens and on one of them we went out to a Greek Island but I don’t remember which one. On a small day trip we went a little ways out of Athens to Delphi. I asked a question but I didn’t get an answer.

In those days I weighed 155, my dope weight. That didn’t change until I hooked with Annie and she started cooking for us in 1972. Annie was a good cook and she believed in it too.

I wrote a poem way back then, trying to do justice to some of what I felt climbing up that slope. I recall the broken shaped columns on the grassy slope. It was quite steep and there wasn’t much to see at the top, just a little indent in the ground. I think big changes took place since Delphi was a going concern. I wish now and know I wished then on that summer day in 1969 that I could have rolled back the time 2300 years or so.


Approaching The Holy

At Delphi, climbing
from the road, north and then east
up the slope devoid
of all but grass, all
but weary gray toppled stone
and me so thin then,
looking for the next
thing to do in the late sun,
searching for the truth.

April 18, 2009 4:58 PM

Making A List

This is real enough. Often I pray about my single life, asking God to interpret my need for me. The result is I live quite nicely, me and my old cat - yet I sorely miss the high of new erotic love. I miss the long term settling in. I miss the conversations. I miss the partnership. I have the chance for pieces of an old love from time to time and I think it amazing that I can settle in within minutes as if we never stopped being partners. I am grateful when it is time to part once more that the parting is easy, as if we were never more than friends.

Making A List

Each year I wait, count,
list your appearance nearby,
wonder if you will
come to me again.

I write cryptic notes like this:
-in the garden, and
-again under tree
I add the time and date.

Then I search the place
where you were, looking
for some sign, feather adrift
bent twig, a footprint.

April 18, 2009 1:45 PM

What Holds Me Back

The erotic part of life is not logical, or rather, it has a logic all its own. I don’t really know what to do with it all except to move through it as it comes. That was then, this is now. Then I was a philosopher, all disciplined, later an engineer, patient with the needs of the design, then a member of the club, playing on the team, and now, now I am transported with the presence of your scent.

Sometimes I lack courage.

What Holds Me Back

I am aware how
this is so messy, a herd
of cat-like desires.
If I were to touch
you right there, I fear you would
turn blue hot flame, sear
my soul from this near,
change me to a dry dead thing,
show me as I am.

April 18, 2009 9:11 AM

Telling Lies

This would be the Gray Jay I met in Canada who tried to steal my sandwich as I was sitting there with it but looked away for a second. He did a fly by and missed but not by much. He did not look dangerous at all before he tried. This would be the raccoon on my roof. This would be the possum who lived in my garage for quite a long time until I figured out how he did it. I knew he was there, just not where. I was cleaning up his poop all the time. This would be a basic strategy amongst all the kingdoms. It is only we humans who put great stock in what we call integrity and think there is a code. The rest of our partners come by integrity in very different ways. And they have integrity. There is no question. I love them for it.

The magician is a liar in his way. So are all the fantasists who entertain us. The carnies name us marks and take our money and we don’t seem to mind. I love pro wrestling for the blatancy of their shtick. One of the more fun sites on the internet is the one where you get to learn the lingo, the way they talk about their stuff and about their fans.. Once you learn the real rules, you can relax and enjoy the tremendous gymnastic display. Those guys work really hard to make what they do look dangerous in one way when it’s not but avoid the real danger that is there. You can’t be a pro wrestler unless you can take the pain. If you get that far, listen to them talk. Many of them are actual educated men. I guess I have this attitude because my uncle was a pro, may he rest easy now. He was also an artist, a good one. So when you look at lies and liars be careful. There may be areas in your life where you really depend on the lies people tell.

It may actually be true that we cannot live without at least some exaggerations and minimizations, white lies, we call them. I think they are quite necessary in most marriages, but in the best marriages they are tools of last resort.

Telling Lies

I love telling lies
to you, great windy pillows
where you rest your trust
while I stroke tender
places you've left in my care
for my purposes
for my advantage
as I keep my eyes ever
peeled for more chances.
I keep your eyes off
my plans with my distractions.

Don’t you find me out.

April 18, 2009 8:35 AM

I Am Peeled Back

I am caught in the mystery of change, how it approaches, how it recedes. I have been studying lifelong ever since that singular moment where everything changed for me and I was given life. I was intent on philosophy and psychology, so when I returned to school that’s what my major turned into and along the way I found other things that needed attention. Two of them, astrology and I Ching also became long term works. I came back to the states in 1969, and returned to school. In 1970 I started the study of both astrology and I Ching along with my college work. While overseas I had studied both philosophy and psychology on my own so I was ahead of the game in school.

Then early in 1972 my world exploded. I had to upend everything in order to stay alive and I left college behind with about 24 credits left to graduation. I took astrology and I Ching with me. In my flight, I ended up in a hotel, where I met my future wife. She was desk clerking there. Later I moved in with her, and still later we went to Oregon so she could get her Masters in Social Work. I began my career in engineering design to help fund her way through school. I also met a man, a clinical psychologist in private practice who was fascinated as I was with astrology and I Ching. He was teaching an astrology course and we quickly found out I knew as much or more than he. We decided to partner and started a group therapy setting where we would practice and teach astrology in Dane Rudhyar’s Person Centered format. We developed a way of using astrology as a tool for exploring consciousness. We began going to conferences and offering our work both to psychologists and astrologers because we were doing actual work that straddled both fields. We met several serious astrologers including Dane Rudhyar himself as we brought them to Portland and put on our own conferences.

Later, I turned all this and my work with I Ching into the rest of my college degree.

I did all this chasing change. I did all this as a way of looking at time and timing. I am a musician and music relies on time in essential ways. In poetry the way words flow also have fundamental connection to timing. I know for a fact that in order to really “get” a poem you have to read it aloud. I am not much into word art. I am too musically oriented, too time oriented.

I hardly touch astrology any more. I don’t know many people who have a degree in it however. Heh. I Ching is still in my life.

This next poem is about that weird moment of change and its departure.

I Am Peeled Back

I listen to you,
your high keening lululu
at departing fate
and within the spin
lowering sound of your loss,
within the oily scent
you found spilled nearby,
I begin to fall away,
peeled back like onions.

April 17, 2009 3:22 PM

Holy Waters

I guess I was in a mood. This poem was written on my wife’s birthday, though she died in 2001. I don’t think I was consciously thinking of her, and I have no idea if I had thought that day her birthday. Now it seems sort of obvious.

Huh. My internet connection is really sluggish tonight. I have not yet been totally driven off, even though this often happens at home. At work, I have a real 56k connection. I could live with that. I am frankly really turned off by the pricing of high speed. I simply don’t do enough computer internet things to justify the price. I also go for cheap cel phones. I have texting blocked on my phone because I was getting spam and it cost me money. I make my living using the computer but I really don’t want that much to do with it as a lifestyle. As a man who has written a book length document (283 pages) on an electric typewriter and many other school documents on a manual typewriter, I will say that word processing is without question progress. Now I can write very close to the speed of thought. The editing is beyond priceless. I do not have a problem, not even a little one composing a poem at the keyboard on the fly.

In my work life as a designer, I have both won and lost in the switch to computers. I was a damn good hand drafter, able to organize and scrub my errors as I went, so that very little red ever showed up on my check prints. I had peripheral vision for errors that bordered on psychic. The computer wipes all that out because the screen is tunnel vision. I can’t use my eyes the same way. Editing power probably makes up for the loss and then some. I got laid off today after a month back. There is a problem with the money flow.

Holy Waters

My insides take shapes
just like the symmetry found
in crystal faces
joined to each other
in the soft light of your eyes,
washed in morning dew,
in the hope of day,
in the holy waters love
gives to ease the way.

April 17, 2009 12:14 PM

I'm Already Taken

Here’s a poem about commitment. I wonder how many other things it is about.

I'm Already Taken

The wind and earth fought
over me but I belong
to the pale moonlight,
to starry rivers,
to the morning shine of sun,
to your warm rose heart.

April 15, 2009 12:58 PM

Midnight Encounter

They said that Robert Johnson, one of the greatest bluesmen of all time sold his soul at a crossroads in order to get his licks. I imagine an accidental encounter. As for me, the biggest decision in my life concerned my own accidental encounter. It did not speak for itself. I had to decide what had happened. The immediate experience was overwhelming, but the aftermath was mute and the challenges were quick to appear. I was neither permitted a return, nor any reassurance. I was left with the need to learn and learn quickly if I could. I was left on my own. Doubt and fear and the clear fact of others’ disinterest combined easily and grew my distrust.

It is a famous challenge. Was that God or demon? In modern terms, was that divinity or insanity? A decision was required of me. Should I choose to follow or choose to defend against this immersion? It was far more than vision, this movement of heart and soul.

I made my choice. I have kept my faith. I have done the work. What is left are my sunset years and my passing.

This next poem contemplates how I might have come to some other choice.

Midnight Encounter

The bright moon reflects
off his high top shiny shoes,
black like I'm told of
his empty sour soul.

His eyes too glint in the moon's light.

What am I to do
confronted this way?
Questioned intentions and hopes
fall shattered by his
presence in the night
found between the beats and breath
of my frantic life.

April 15, 2009 12:31 PM