Pictures

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

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

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

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

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

Amen.

Pictures

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

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

May 16, 2009 10:19 PM

The Pearls

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

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

The Pearls

I heard you say love.

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

May 16, 2009 10:05 PM

Sun Dappled

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

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

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

I need Gods and Goddesses or my insides parch.

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

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

Challenge Your Whole Identity

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

-Jack Kornfield, "The Sure Hearts Release"

Amen.

Sun Dappled

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

May 16, 2009 8:54 AM

Dread People

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

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

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

Dread People

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

May 15, 2009 2:58 PM

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Glade

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

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

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

The Glade

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

May 15, 2009 9:31 AM

When I Was Seven

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When I Was Seven

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

May 15, 2009 9:04 AM

This Comes From The Pills

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

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

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

I no longer feel like that.

This Comes From The Pills

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

This comes from the pills
they make me take now.

May 14, 2009 2:16 PM

Getting The Picture

Our Deepest Well-Being

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

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

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

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

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

Getting The Picture

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

May 14, 2009 1:00 PM

Doing The Best I Can

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

Doing The Best I Can

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

May 13, 2009 9:08 AM

Almost A Poem

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Almost A Poem

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

This too is almost
a poem.

May 12, 2009 12:34 PM

The Chase

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

The Chase

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

May 12, 2009 12:49 PM

UltraViolet

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

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

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

UltraViolet

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

My New Role

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

My New Role

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

This is my new role.

May 12, 2009 11:41 PM

At The AA Meeting

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

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

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

At The AA Meeting

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

May 12, 2009 10:38 AM

Juggernaut

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

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

Juggernaut

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

May 11, 2009 8:34 AM

Like A Weasel

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

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

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

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

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

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

Like A Weasel

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

May 11, 2009 7:52 AM

After I Offered My Life

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

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

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

After I Offered My Life

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

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

May 11, 2009 7:41 AM

Flying Above Clouds

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

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

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

Flying Above Clouds

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

May 11, 2009 7:20 AM

Feathered Horses

I have returned from the outer reaches.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Feathered Horses

On the willows' verge
are three small feathered horses.

I will ride today.

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

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

May 11, 2009 6:50 AM

Intermission

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

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

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

Diamonds Everywhere

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

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

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

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

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

Diamonds Everywhere

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

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

May 10, 2009 8:33 PM

Be Satisfied With Who You Are

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

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

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

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

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

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

Be Satisfied With Who You Are

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

Delusion and truth are one,
the same ocean shore.

May 10, 2009 12:10 PM

Why I Sang In Choir

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why I Sang In Choir

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

May 10, 2009 11:13 AM

Columbia In The Air

A moment in time...

Columbia In The Air

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

We watch as time ends.

May 10, 2009 10:41 AM

Stretched Between

The Truth of Nonduality

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

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

Life's Not Black and White

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stretched Between

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

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

This might hurt a bit.

May 5, 2009 12:37 PM

Instant Forgiveness

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

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

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

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

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

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

Instant Forgiveness

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

May 5, 2009 12:13 PM

The Vultures

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

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

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

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

The Vultures

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

May 3, 2009 8:22 PM

Old Growth Dream

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

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

Old Growth Dream

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

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

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

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

Meeting The Saint

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

What you thought you wanted simply does not matter.

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

Meeting The Saint

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

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

May 3, 2009 11:20 AM

Intimate Magic

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

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

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

Intimate Magic

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

May 2, 2009 9:47 AM

Lighten Up

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

Okay, I give up. This just in from Tricycle

Big Sky Mind

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

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

What Today Was Like

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Today Was Like

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

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

May 1, 2009 2:18 PM

Paranoid Lament

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

Paranoid Lament

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

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

Ain't my weird heart sad?

May 1, 2009 11:49 AM

The End Of Poetry

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

The End Of Poetry

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

April 30, 2009 12:27 PM

The Message

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

The Message

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

April 30, 2009 9:32 AM

It Is Finished

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

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

It Is Finished

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

April 30, 2009 9:12 AM

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