Interlude

I am sorry about skipping days of posting. I got too sick, first allergies and then laryngitis and bronchial issues as complications to the allergies. This seems an ordinary experience in my life these days. My illness saps my energy beyond endurance and all I do next is what I must. I lost one day of work is all but my private life went to bed.

What follows is a post on obesity and diets. It seems it is part of a book that Dale Favier is writing, according to the post. Dale is a Massage Therapist (among other activities, including writing poetry that often reaches world class in my opinion). You could do worse than following his blog of many years: mole

I am so in agreement with his vision of obesity and diet that I am reposting it here. I asked Dale and he gave me permission.

I have had my own experiences with this diet thing and they seem to parallel Dale's. What is irritating about diet is that there are people who can successfully diet. There are people who can play their body like actors need to and blimp up for one part and slim down for another. That these people exist, that's like the people who claim because positive thinking works for them it works for all. Unlike Dale, I was overweight, hovered there for years, but am now obese. I feel like that happened out of one too many diets, the last one I undertook for really wrong reasons. I hate being this heavy but I hate trying and failing more. I have never been successful for more than a year, though I have had that year long success three times. My last attempt lasted maybe six months. Instead of fifty pounds or so like my best attempts, I lost only twenty. Now I need to lose a hundred.

The only time in my life that I waw actually slender while living a life not worrying about eating, I was thoroughly stoned all day most days. I was overweight as a child. In my young adulthood I was slender, but a dope fiend for over six years. Being a drunk did not work the same at all.

Everything is statistical when it comes to this stuff. The most common alcoholic has related emotional troubles, but not all do. The most common overeater also has related emotional troubles, but not all do. These two groups overlap but are not identical. Related emotional troubles are not necessarily causative even though they are associated. The brilliance of AA's analysis is that the resolution of the path to sobriety in part involves emotional cleansing, even though as a causative agent AA never accuses the emotional life. Some members think so about themselves, but AA says we like the effect produced by alcohol, not what that effect is.

AA says the will fails. That's what Dale says here about overeating and it is surely why I agree. Dale says there is a failure somewhere in the body's systems. Yes.

Dale writes:

Here is a simple set of four points summarizing the prevailing theory of why people get fat:

1) Human beings, having evolved in feast-or-famine conditions, are designed to store excess food as adipose tissue, which their bodies then consume to keep them alive when they don't have enough food.

2) By a simple exertion of will, such as that by which a person can make their bed each morning, a person can simply decide not to eat as much as they want.

3) Some people simply will not make the effort. These people get fat.

4) It doesn't matter what they eat. It's simple arithmetic: if you eat more calories than you expend, you get fatter; if you expend more calories than you eat, you get thinner.

I grew up believing these to be true. They are not abstruse propositions, nor are they particularly difficult to verify or disprove. In fact they are all false, and have been proven to be false: but their hold on the public consciousness is tenacious. Here are some contrary propositions:

1) Human beings don't “bank” calories, or not much. Fat people don't starve much more slowly than skinny people. When the body lays in excessive adipose tissue, it's because the endocrine system is malfunctioning.

2) People have no long-term control over how many calories they consume, just as they have no long-term control over how much oxygen they consume. The cerebral cortex can override the rest of the brain temporarily, but not permanently. The amount we eat is no more under our voluntary control than breathing is. If we found that people were taking in more oxygen than was good for them, we could tell them they ought to breathe less. We'd get results similar to the results we have gotten by telling them to eat less.

3) Some people have vulnerable endocrine systems. The homeostatic processes break down in these people, under certain environmental pressures, and they get fat. Some people do not have this vulnerability, and they do not get fat. There is no observable difference in the amount of will power between the two groups. Normal weight people, of course, think that their conscious decisions determine their weight, for the same reason that normal people confronted with lights that randomly switch on and off, and a switch that is disconnected from these lights, think that their flipping of the switch influences whether the lights come on and off. If there is supposed to be a causal connection between random events, people will perceive it.

4) It is indeed true that if you eat more calories than you expend, you will get fatter, and if you eat fewer, you will get thinner. But since the regulation of calorie intake is not under the long-term control of the cerebral cortex, this is not really useful information for someone who wants to lose weight. Human beings in general cannot, or will not (at the public health level, it doesn't matter which), regulate their calorie intake. If we can't change how much our bodies want to eat, we can't lose weight. We can torment ourselves, and struggle heroically, and lose weight for weeks or even months at a time, but in the end we will be fatter than ever.

I have arrived at these conclusions after a lot of reading and a lot of observation. I believe the second theory fits the observable facts much better than the first theory. The motivation for fat people to lose weight is overwhelming. They are led to believe (far more than is true, actually) that their health, their love lives, their sex lives, their careers – basically, their whole happiness – is at stake. If these motives don't suffice, it's hard to see what motives would. Far the simplest explanation for why people don't restrict their calorie intake, is because they can't.

The tantalizing thing is that diet obviously does affect weight. People can, to some extent, change their eating habits, and they do. They can induce great see-saw swings in the amount of fat they carry. What they can't seem to do is the one thing they want to do: lose fat and keep it off.

Some time ago I read quite a bit about weight loss, and I was startled by how little real science had been done. The real scientists considered the problem solved – people simply had to eat less: if they didn't, that was their own problem, not the scientists'. The field was left largely to hacks, who proposed diet after diet, claimed great success rates, and who rose and fell like the tides.

What the pop diet people understood – the solution they were groping for – was that there might be some kind of diet that would make people less hungry, some way of eating or thinking about eating that would solve the real problem. The real problem being that our bodies think they need more food than they do.

I believe this problem has now been partly solved: the single thing in the diet that most confuses our bodies are refined carbohydrates. Sugar and corn syrup, especially in liquid forms – the obvious and glaring culprits being soft drinks, fruit juices, “sport drinks,” and beer, which deliver incredible amounts of sugars virtually direct to the bloodstream – are the worst. After that come all the starches: the potatoes, and the overrefined grains: white flour, white rice, pasta. Nothing in our evolutionary history prepares us for these foods, and for some people – but not for others – they wreak havoc on the endocrine system.

Exactly how or when this damage is done, we really don't know. Some of it is observably “real time”: when I've been in a phase of eating lots of sugar and carbs, I am hungry virtually all the time, often savagely, ferociously hungry. But some of the damage may be done before birth, or in infancy. Some of it may be irreversible. And some of it may not be dietary at all.

I've done a lot of experimenting with diet and eating: I've become interested both objectively – interested in the science of it – and interested, as someone who practices meditation and introspection, in the mental processes involved. I've been overweight all my life – according to the usual (totally unscientifically arrived at) standards, by thirty to seventy pounds: that is, I tend to waver right around that magic line between “overweight” and “obese.” I have been as motivated as anyone else to lose that weight, and tried as many things as anyone else, and failed as miserably as everyone else. My knowledge of diet and nutrition is not that of an expert, but that of a well-read amateur. Likewise my knowledge of brain science. The only expertise I can claim is that of introspection. I have observed very closely what happens in my consciousness as I overeat, or do not overeat. It's fascinating and humbling to actually watch one's will crumble.

Will. It's an interesting concept, largely unexplored in the West, except among people who have a special interest in it: addicts and contemplatives, who are daily brought up against the fact that it doesn't work at all as advertised. We of all people know that will power is a very finite commodity, which has to be deployed with exquisite care. We can't afford the luxury of believing the cerebral cortex always controls our behavior: we know – by dint of repeated excruciating failure – that it does not.

I am writing this as part of an experiment. I already know that I am incapable of restricting my calorie intake. Whether this “should” be true is a question that I will leave to theologians, or anyone who thinks it is a meaningful question. That it is true, I have discovered empirically by repeated experiment, and I'm not interested in running any more (emotionally painful, if not devastating) experiments on that question.

My present experiment is to see if I can change what I eat (not the amounts, but the kinds of things), permanently. I am hoping, of course, that I can. And I am hoping that if I do, I will lose weight. But really at this point I am motivated more by curiosity and irritation than by hope. I'm ready to be done with this whole sorry business. If I can change what I eat, and maintain that change for six months, I will declare the experiment a success, regardless of whether my weight changes much. If I can't, I'll declare it a failure. This is not an experiment in diet so much as an experiment in will. My hypothesis is that if I deploy my will power carefully, at the points of maximum leverage, I can change my diet from one that makes me obese, to one that makes me merely overweight.

Lemon Cupcakes

Perhaps this offer of magic gems is overkill. Hmm. But you have no idea how GOOD those cupcakes really are, how good a cook she really is, how much I like lemon!

And besides, I might have ulterior motives…

I guess that’s obvious.

Lemon Cupcakes

If you gave me one
lemon and white chocolate
filled cupcake, meringue
topped, I would follow
stone trails that I know, searching
here, there for topaz,
also emeralds
to string up, make necklaces
I'd leave at your door,
leave them at midnight.

June 11, 2009 4:08 PM

Contemplating Slugs

One of the most important offerings of real science is the shift in perspective that allows a person to break free in the most radical way from a persistent and pernicious plague in human thinking. This is the illusion of central position. We as a species are not in a special location like that, not when you add in the real science. For example, measured in biomass, by far and away the most successful life on the planet is single celled. It is the oldest and still the most prevalent. We can rarely see it but science has revealed it. In fact, it is in us in critical ways and also in cells like we have in critical ways. The mitochondria are symbionts so deeply involved in us that they have been part of the cells that make us longer than we have been human by far. There is a separate line of descent too. The mitochondrial DNA is separate from cellular DNA. Cellular DNA traces both the paternal and maternal lines. Mitochondrial DNA is exclusively maternal. There are no mitochondria in sperm, but mitochondria are part of the egg.

In fact one writer has pointed out that it makes more than equal biological sense to turn this thing on its head and assert that more complex life forms are the single celled community’s experiment in creating ever larger biological environments for their use. We are farms for the care and feeding of bacteria, viri, and fungi.

It is difficult after really grasping that point to hold so strongly to the crown of creation theory. The level of complexity of the single celled creatures is already beyond easy comprehension. The order of magnitude in difference is not between humans and mammals or mammals and eukaryotes. The order of magnitude is life and non life. Even there, the actual dividing line has been fuzzed out and it is difficult to figure out where in the biochemistry life starts.

There is something though. The Buddhists assert it is a privileged position in relation to spiritual topology. For some reason life exists. It is not hard to suspect a divine spark and nothing in science denies it. Science merely challenges the data trying to see how far back in the chain of consequence you can go without being forced into the divinity game. This discipline of mind has been very successful. However, there is no reason to leap to the claim that there is no need for the divine, just that we can explain ever more data as chains of consequences. If that was all there is to God, then maybe it is game over but there are other directions, other needs than explaining how the world works.

But we humans, no longer the crown of creation, are privileged as a matter of position in another way. We are oddly close to divinity in more than one way, not only because of the divine spark at the heart of life but as well in terms of the availability of a path nearby our neck of the woods. This is a feature of the journey, which not only we are on but also the one celled and all others. If these paths appear elsewhere it does not appear that any creature before us has availed himself of it. So the Buddhists think it likely that there are few of these paths, maybe only one, the one near us. It is suggested that we exercise our privilege, but it is not necessary. The special path seems to be a shortening of the journey but the journey will take us there anyway. Hmm. This is quite far from some ways of thinking about such things. It is however not incompatible with science, just that thinking like this lies in areas in which science can have no opinion. Some of the other religious explanations unfortunately conflict more or less directly with science. This is no longer sane. Science has been way too successful to be ignored. There will never more be a time when the knowledge base which supports technology can be denied.

The complexity of a slug is different from mine but it is not less than mine. Period.

Contemplating Slugs

The point is how this
simple creature is so far
ahead in some ways,
sophisticated,
as if two creatures in one,
that it is too hard
for me to sit here
any more like I'm the top
of the pyramid.

June 11, 2009 12:37 PM

She Is Right There

My last girlfriend resembles this woman, though it is not she who inhabits tonight’s posted poem. What I mean is that she was entirely healthy in the area of support and leading by suggestion. She was not at all deceptive about it. She would gift you. Then she would push you to use the gift. The gift by the way was nearly always spot on. I not only had the experiences, I watched as she worked this way with others. Her children have benefited in big ways. Her youngest is taking an advanced degree at the London School of Economics, a degree in Environmental Policy and Regulation. Wow. She has sponsored at considerable lengths, two Mexican brothers, the younger in Canada is studying to be an operatic singer in the music program at the University of British Columbia. The elder brother is studying engineering in a university in Mexico. Both are primarily funded by her and by her complex planning to use other people’s money. She chose to adopt the younger brother who is with her in Canada several years ago as part of this work.

She did shit like this with me. I was irritated, a little, but really I was amazed and proud of her.

She Is Right There

Open your eyes she's said
to me, so many times, said
so insistently
and I honestly
try, believe she is right there
sitting in the front
row as if naked
with this intent grinning face
staring up at me.

I love this woman.

June 11, 2009 9:18 AM

Looking For Your Place

This is a North American poem, not a European poem. Thus the place of horses is very fresh three hundred years ago. Horses appear to have started in the new world. They died out somehow on the way to modern horses, but not before emigrating to Asia and Europe. After a very long time, Europeans returned them to the new world. The first nations of the plains found horses a blessing from God and the buffalo.

Looking For Your Place

I sit at my desk
watching you bareback your horse
as if born to it
three hundred years past
your time on the grassy plains
with mountains westward,
peaked with summer snow
and you looking for
your place in that time.

June 10, 2009 12:43 PM

I Don't Need An Answer

Imagine. I wake up in the middle of the night on a camping trip and my lover is gone. I know better than to go looking but I do become conscious in my waiting for her to return. It is not the few minutes of a potty run, longer than that by far, and then she returns quietly, as if to not disturb my sleep. She is naked. I know she has gone to worship beneath the full moon, like David before the temple. She slips in and bathes my back with the cool of the night air on her body.

This did not actually happen, but I know at least two women who might have given me this experience had I been their lover and had we gone camping.

I Don't Need An Answer

Gone too long for pee,
also the cool of you soothes
my back as you spoon
me. I know you go
to the moon, gain energy
from light on this full
moon night, don't need to
ask too much from you to know
you dance dance dance, love.

June 10, 2009 12:29 PM

Alzheimer's

In some kind of weird way this is how I feel about being here on the planet, as if I have forgotten something. It is indeed all so odd now.

Alzheimer's

I don't remember
the way you touched my cheek, mouth
and held me just so
beneath the soughing
pines in the dim light found there.
I do remember
that you did touch me
just not how and not what came
of it, nor of me.

It's all so odd now.

June 9, 2009 11:32 PM

Truly Ripe

One of the key lessons in AA is humility. Something miraculous happens. It happens often. I get to participate. It is my privilege. It is not my right, nor have I earned it, even though I am a good man and have been so. It is a grace note that I can offer if I offer anything. I neither write the theme nor am I more than one of the many voices in the choir. I now speak with some authority because I have 27 years of experience and it is not the same year of experience 27 times either. The authority is not mine. It belongs to the experience, the genuine experience of sobriety both in and out of AA, in the world, in the market place, in the relationships.

I have been on the blogs close to two years now. I have some experience here too. Lately I notice that my old friends are fading away. I am not complaining. This is natural. I know of this from AA too. Every human group has a rhythm and a life, a coming and going. There is no reason to stay when it is time to go. Some women had old tired relationships and are now in fresh ones. They have changed their intensity of participation. Others have other changes. It is time. What one does if one wants to change the fading away, one seeks out new friends. But here’s the deal over on this side of the wall. I am short of energy too. I don’t have it in me to do the extra stuff, even the normal visits to my old friends is too much now. I just barely make it through the week when I am working, but I notice it doesn’t make much difference when I am not working either. I am just to the point where I have to manage what energy I do have.

I know that people visit even when they do not post a comment. The counters prove that, not only that people visit but that they visit from everywhere. Now as I publish I am more like a print poet. I don’t know who it is who visits anymore. Do I need adulation or even kindness from my readers? No. These are not really my poems anyway. They come so quickly with so little effort that they cannot really be mine. I have written poetry my whole adult life. These haiku framed poems are not like my other poetry, not how I wrote, at least not how it felt to write before and in many ways not even the subjects I used to write about. The poetry is not really mine. The voice however, is.

Truly Ripe

Of course, go home, love.
Another fire night will come
in time, a long time
perhaps and yet songs
will still be sung to the moon
by someone truly
ready, truly ripe,
and you if not yet ready,
are still on the path.

June 9, 2009 7:20 AM

One Set Of Footprints

This poem speaks for itself. I bow in honor of the words.

One Set Of Footprints

The one who found love's
lightness of being also
learned to levitate
in her new found joy.

The other, whose heart knew God,
willingly let her
rise up above him
holding only her ribbon
to keep her tethered.

June 8, 2009 12:32 PM

At My Desk

I wonder how to describe it. I have no idea, really. When I try to say it, it comes out wrong and sounds like I am whining and self centered. I try for the poetry and sometimes I think it works. I try for the stories but if I told you I really believed the plots and the characters then you would declare me crazy and lost in fantasy and you would be right. This poem sits in the middle of it and tells no stories. I sit at my desk, I write this stuff. I dream of a home that cannot be found anywhere nearby. This sky’s shade ignores my fate. The shade of the world could not care less. The shades of my lost loves fade and depart without a word.

At My Desk

Where I sit the sky
appears in a slit between
the slats of curtains
on the shut window
just above my head, and just
above the neighbor's
garage roof. Now gray,
but sometimes bluer
than my thoughts might be, this sky's
shade ignores my fate.

June 7, 2009 7:54 PM

A Singular Eider

It is odd that this poem offers well oiled feathers. I of course mean the oil that comes from the glands that the waterfowl use to preen and waterproof their feathers. I do not mean the plumes of ancient hydrocarbons found floating in the ocean after an accident releases them. I do not mean the reservior under pressure in old rocks. I do not mean the oil in old rocks as they are turned under to cook and turn huge deposits of biomass into hydrocarbon soup and sludge where once the biosphere lived. I do not mean that kind of oil at all.

A Singular Eider

Floating in twilight,
well oiled feathers hold me up
though my heart still sinks.

Are there words to say?

A solitary ocean
replies, gives solace.

June 7, 2009 11:24 AM

Not Like All The Rest

This poem reads at this point with two equally possible second verses. How can I be honest might be a completely sincere and honest question, wanting very much to be honest, looking for the way. How can I be honest might be the question of a man with a secret that shames him in the clean light of the moment, a special moment calling for more than he is. I love the ambiguity. It is a deep thing.

Not Like All The Rest

Awareness cuts fine,
too fine for words. In the cracks
between them, your eyes
see me in the now
of things, in the now of worlds
beyond the current
path we walk holding
hands and wanting more of this.

How can I then speak
to you honestly
and with clarity this time
not like all the rest?

June 7, 2009 11:08 AM

If Hope Told Me

I apologize for the delay. There was too much traffic or something last night. It was still slow this morning. Maybe my computer is in trouble.

I thought of several things, like quests and writers and like the Ring trilogy and old loves and forests and sunshine and loss.

Grief is a strange thing. I think people fear grief as much as anything. Grief feels timeless and that means it feels like forever. At the same time it feels unreal, or like it ought to be unreal. Grief won’t go away but it sneaks into crannies, waiting for you to pass by. Then it pounces, like a cat, driving you down, and like a tiger will, it grabs you by the throat and then won’t let go until the life gasps out of you.

None of this is really the way things are but it is how grief feels. By the time you get old, all the griefs of life add up, or they can. A sad song can release a grief chain. Or if someone you love dies, then all the other deaths are remembered. Simon and Garfunkel singing The Boxer does this to me. The other day the Beatles singing Here Comes The Sun got me. That was the song at the end of our wedding ceremony. Judy Collins sang McCartney’s In My Life as our intro. I’m a little thick right now just bringing this up.

The reality of grief is of course that it is survivable. The solution is to in some sense welcome it and open wider, allow it to pass through as freely as possible instead of to resist it. It feels timeless but is not timeless.

If Hope Told Me
I went to the glade
where we found the golden ring,
where I last saw you
before the change came up,
before this new severance
came upon us here.

I would go to all
lengths I know, and seek new ones,
go there too if hope
would tell me to go,
if I could find you, lead you
back to what we had.

June 7, 2009 10:51 AM

Promenade

Here is enigma. Here is a story, a triptych, or with the poem, a quaternity. There is more to this story. I shall not tell it. Tell it to yourself.

Promenade

A whole life is here
in three pictures, one poem,
a song on the path
to summer's long light,
a promenade, expectant,
a mother and son,
and the others who
take the son further than this
vibrant holy night.

June 7, 2009 10:33 AM

Blurred Edges

The north end of the Willamette valley in June is odd. We all expect more sunshine than we actually get.

Blurred Edges

The weather just sucks,
it's in the way of us now,
all fog and dank wind
washing edges out
of sight, we blur and fade out,
cannot meet in this
muck.

I wish August
heat and you in bright colors,
willing to come near.

June 7, 2009 9:31 AM

Waiting For The Blue Moon

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I have had the experience of a clandestine love affair, in which the dominant experience was waiting. That gave me plenty of time to write many poems. I honed my mature poetic voice. The poems became integral to the seduction of us both as I wove a multitude of spells. The spells were aimed at turning a long shot into a transformed reality. That casting of spells did not work permanently but it did double our time together, extending the affair by at least a year. Our two years together was successful in the way that it started, assisting her in a life transition from unhappy marriage with complications to a divorce which did not hurt the children specifically by her behavior in the ending of the marriage. We remained discreet enough and were never found out in circles that would have hurt her at home. She also went to therapy and I supported that. She started with me as an offshoot of an assignment she was given in therapy. She changed therapists to one she told about me and he at least did not object too much. I believe he sensed I was careful and eyes wide open enough. I believe he knew about me from another of his clients as well and so understood me a little.

I would do it again with her, coming at it from the place that I was at the time. I would not do it for a second time with someone else. I have no idea if she asked for my return what I would do now. There is a real argument against it. My heart still argues for it but with a sense of doom in the argument.

I wonder how common it is for someone to see sense in returning to former lovers.

I think I have posted before on the Blue Moon, which is involved with the quarterly seasons rather than the actual months. Google it. There really is a Blue Moon, and there are others with other names too. I forget exactly, but I could Google it too as I did the first time I wanted to know.

Waiting For The Blue Moon

I waited for you
to come to me at the blue
moon, planning, dreaming,
hoping for true love
once in a blue moon with you,
with the blue presence
of your eyes, your eyes,
and your truest words of grace
and your feather touch.

June 6, 2009 4:52 PM

I've Given My Music

When I fall in love with you I let you in. You get to dance on my head. I will not complain. I will let you take the lead, though I will keep my bounds. My last lover talked me into doing things musical and otherwise that I never would do on my own. Ultimately she took that as a bad sign, as a sign I would change under long term conditions and refuse to do the things I did while we were just partners. She never did get it that I was already married to her in my heart. She flat refused to believe that. Maybe she was right. I see her regularly as she travels down to tend her property here (she lives as a Canadian now) and still feel that way. Nothing fundamental has changed for me in our relationship though we are no longer together. I worked hard for that to be okay.

She got me to speak in church on the topic of women. I was one of three men she chose to do this. I spoke about my mother who simply is the most remarkable woman I have ever known, who graduated Phi Beta Kappa and Sigma Cum Laude while being a single mom in the late forties. She was valedictorian at Cal Berkeley and shared the stage with Harry Truman because Cal was an amazing school in those years with the returning WWII boys. She turned down a career in the movies in order to go to school and then she became a high school teacher. At mid life she wrote a novel. Then she became a Unity minister. She wrote two more books of a spiritual nature. Finally she retired as a minister emeritus and received accolades from Unity for her lifetime service. I won’t go into that, except to say that she changed some fundamental stuff in her time there.

My last lover also got me to solo on a Judy Collins number. I would never have done either of these things without her suggestion.

I've Given My Music

You stand on my head,
then dance a bit. I don't dare
complain. You have me
where you've wanted me
for longer than this springtime,
longer than its moon.
In fact I've given
my music into your care,
no way but forward.

June 5, 2009 1:08 PM

Staying Open

It is many years now, a long time past the moment I realized the essential honesty of the spiritual walk. For many years I misconstrued sincerity for honesty. I mean I genuinely didn’t know the difference in some essential way, could not have told you I was dishonest but also would not have been forthright at all in certain areas, believing all the time that it just wasn’t your business.

I have written here before in other contexts of the work I did with my partner who was a licensed clinical psychologist. For several years we ran a group therapy in the late seventies as a team, partly as a seminar in astrology, and partly as exploratory therapeutics, delineating astrology and what it might mean in this context as well as what the experience of seeing one’s life through this template could mean. My partner was enthused, saying he got to places using astrology that he could never go without it in the group setting. Oddly, when it was his turn or mine in the “hot seat”, things didn’t go as well. For me things would often get really strange and I was all the time struggling to find a way to communicate so that the group members would not be so aggressive with me and me so defensive. All this time later I can know and have known for my entire sobriety that while I was totally sincere, I was less than honest with them.

I did not know then. I sort of knew. Here is mainly what stopped me. I would have had to talk about my drinking openly in order to open myself more with them, and my drinking, I was sure was none of their business. That was right too. They were not the people to entrust that issue with. Without that, however, I could not go to the levels they needed me to go. I had to dodge and deflect into the astrology too much and too little of me was there. They were of course simply trying to do with me what I was doing with them. Real work got done in many of our meetings, but seldom with either my partner or me. We took our turns in the hot seat in the spirit of the group. I did not pretend in any way, did not claim I did not drink, but my sharing about that sort of stuff stopped with my earlier drug use. I was completely open about that, but I would never have said how I would be going home and getting drunk before going to sleep, especially on group meeting nights. Hammer down. Need to get to sleep…

Staying Open

It's everything
I must learn, my entire life-
no good can come from
ducking this great task.
Then I will simply repeat this life
in some other form.

That's what my love said to me.
I agreed. Then I muttered,

It cuts deeper too.
How about this misery?
Depression, anguish?
This uneasiness?
I do not know the changes
these work inside me.

June 5, 2009 12:45 PM

For David

First, I apologize for not leaving some sort of note. I have a recurring illness I call allergies. It involves my right upper sinus but it dries me out so the discharge is thin and watery and chokes me badly. My right ear gets involved and fills up giving me vertigo as well. My left eye leaks tears more or less all the time, and my cough comes in spasms that are so severe that I am driven very close to unconsciousness. That is very dangerous on the road. So I quit doing anything except trying to sleep it out. I am a little better now. The sinus part is a long term consequence of a period of chronic infection. For years I was getting sinus bacterial infections periodically. I had an MRI and proved that I had a bit of an extra lip height naturally on that side that helped lock in drainage. The bacteria are now gone and have been for years but either the virus or the allergens have replaced them. I get this two or three times a year.

Getting old is not for sissies.

A few of you got worried and I am touched with your concern. I will try to remember to do something in the future. When I took one day off (I thought) I woke up so much worse the next day I couldn't get back.

Today is the 75th anniversary of the start of AA, June 10, 1935. That was the day that Bill Wilson had his first meaningful talk with Dr. Bob Smith, the talk that gave Dr. Bob his start in sobriety and led to them talking in due time with Bill D., helping him start his own sobriety and starting AA. What they figured out, they had to pass it on. They had to give sobriety away to keep it. It is still the formal AA opinion that absolutely nothing insures sobriety as much as work with other alcoholics - not that you have to succeed but that you engage in the work. AA calls that 12th step work and declares that a 12th step is successful not if the other guy stays sober but if you do. That's a relief. Most 12th steps are failures by any other measure.

This poem is about David Carradine.

For David

I was small when you
came into my house with your
calm face, slow movements,
your plain clothes and truth
in the midst of confusion
and outright evil.

Now you've hung yourself
in a closet. I never
expected that, nor
dreamed your mastery
would fall so far short of need,
nor of you just gone.

June 4, 2009 12:39 PM

Landlocked

It is hard to raise children, I think, and choose to keep the wings. We may wish with all our might but we are apes, not birds. We need to raise small apes and not confuse them with the possibilities of mythical flight. That comes in other ways. There are other things like that. The Hindus teach a threefold life stage, the first a stage of training for the second, the stage where one gives back and assists in the life of the community, while as well raising the next generation, all part of that, and the third when one sheds all responsibility as best one can, divests of all possession and begins the preparation for death and a good rebirth. These are each twenty-eight year cycles, roughly the cycle of Saturn and the Moon as progressed in a day for a year.

The point of the cycles is not so much to time things as to reveal that there really is a context to things and that one may have a duty to fulfill. Since this life is genuine, I cannot doubt the necessity of things. I mean I take the idea of life’s illusory nature seriously, but that raising children, for example is no illusion. I come in with a destiny to fulfill right here smack in the middle of illusory things. This destiny too is no illusion. If I am locked in right now, it may mean I am rightly placed in my own destiny, however constricted I feel.

I have learned that my feelings may not be the best way to measure my life. This is awkward because I am positive that my best thinking is not a good guide either. After all, my best thinking has driven me into desperation more than once. If my feelings are chancy guides and my best thinking leads me to disaster, how shall I guide my life? That’s a good question to sit with. I don’t think trying to answer it is very useful. I of course will make the best decisions I can using my feelings and my thinking, perhaps with vision and intuition, and perhaps with guidance from trusted advisors and the Divine, that’s really all I can do.

Landlocked

Landlocked by my life,
I recall you and those days
when all was open,
grand truths flying high
above a fertile country.

We had the view then,
the full scope of things,
but that was before we chose
to settle down like this.

Jun 4, 2009 12:13 PM

The Cost Of The Work

I have always had a problem with how much work things take. There is always something wrong, some demand, some contortion, some party line that is beyond my capacity. This is not true only when I am in some kind of fascination. If I am fascinated, then things are worth the effort because the effort is “effortless”. I was never able to just take a college course. I had to want it. It was amazing that I passed those required courses in the first two years even with “C’s”. When I left school behind, I had bits and pieces of several majors because I was only taking courses I could get “B’s” and “A’s” in. Even so, I could never take a full load: 12 credits max, never 15 or more. I often would only take one course in a term because there were no more available that I could stand.

When I finally got my career job I was incredibly fortunate or else it was designed by the Divine to suit me. I almost didn’t qualify. I knew it at the start. I worked really hard, trying to make the grade and almost didn’t. My six month review hinged on changes that occurred in the last two or three weeks. I made it and have held the same kind of job over thirty years. There is something about it that overcomes the malady that I suffer in most areas of my life. I really have to reach down deep inside to even vacuum floors, unless there is some compelling reason.

There’s a reason that some of us are alcoholic. This sort of thing is mine. The world just costs too freaking much.

The Cost Of The Work

After raising moons
I drink gallons to replace
the fluid that steams
from me, rising up
to then coalesce, become
overhead tidal
objects with craters,
more than one moon any time,
otherwise too much
work is in this dance.

June 3, 2009 12:48 PM

The Wind Of Your Truth

Most of my life is not involved in lessons. Most of my life is a process of tempering, or tumbling like a rock hound tumbles rocks on the way to polishing. The lessons are basic and not that hard but learning them over and over is what happens to me, knocking off the rougher edges as I go. Lovers temper me. Friends temper me. God tempers me. I change as I have written in some of my other posts from pig iron to tempered steel.

My time right now suspiciously feels as if I am about to be tempered again.

The Wind Of Your Truth

The wind of your truth
pushes against me, testing
my balance among
this grove of ancient
trees. Listen to the soughing
of the upper limbs
as the far dim sun
slowly wakes this day and me
thawing out beneath.

June 2, 2009 9:49 AM

Stranded At The Bus Stop

I will bet I first used the image of “waiting for the bus” as a part of my spiritual walk back in the seventies. My first big image was how I snuck into the mansion by the back door, the one used by the legitimate servants. I was not a servant, not appointed to any position. I just got in, perhaps even a thief. When you spread your spiritual wings out far enough to see the larger landscape, you discover many stories told quite seriously about this. There is a role for the Thief in the Kingdom. Prometheus stole fire for men, as an example. He paid the price but also is still remembered as an essential player in the realm. Hermes is the God of Thieves. Thieves have a God. The First Nations have a figure, perhaps Crow, or Jay, or Coyote, who displays this kind of trait. Hermes is not only a support for thieves, he is the Messenger. This means that anyone who aids in communications has a relationship to thievery through Hermes, the God of the Message. That sobers me up a little. These poems steal as well as standing as gifts.

I snuck in the servant’s entrance. Along with that, I say I made a decision to prove a point in an argument with God, why I have come, but how I got here, the bus let me off and I have been waiting ever since for it to come back and pick me up. I am sort of deflated. I think I will die waiting.

Stranded At The Bus Stop

I sit on this bench
here at the bus stop waiting
hoping for the bus
to come and worried
if this transfer is still good
or now out of date,
too old, me too old,
so even if the bus does
come it won't be mine.

June 2, 2009 9:16 AM

The Feathered Fan

I do have a baroque feathery purple fan in the central place on my mantel. This fan was left behind by one of my lovers and I cherish it. This woman had flair for the dramatic and for ritual. I would say love games but love was never really a game. Lovemaking was sacred for us. It should be, although love can also be play. I treat my fireplace mantel as an altar. I have pictures of my ancestors there and Indian bronze sacred statuary is placed among the pictures. A Garuda bird, the mount of Vishnu as a result of promises made and kept, is above the fan in a mirrored glass cage with an open door. This Garuda was cast in bronze shown with a snake in its beak. Garuda is a lesser but essential God in the Hindu tradition and is the implacable enemy of serpents, both sacred and profane. Among other Indian serpents are varieties of cobra, and a protector who defends us from cobras is a very good idea. Garuda is there above the fan as a protector of the love that was infused within it.

The Feathered Fan

You took your feathered
fan and stroked my back gently.
When you left I placed
my life on the shelf
above the banked fire you set
in my drafty house.
Now I contemplate
my shape there on the mantel,
wonder if I fit.

June 2, 2009 8:38 AM

Perceptions

Near the end of our marriage, for some fairly good reasons, my wife decided she couldn’t trust me to be on her side. It apparently didn't matter to her that she was a depressed, despairing completely non-functional alcoholic at the time, who couldn't get out of bed most of the time. Part of that transformed me into a violent man. I don’t mean that I was really violent. I mean that as far as she was concerned I was a violent man. Pretty much everyone in my life thought this exceedingly absurd.

Even now I have no way to explain all that but I have more than one time been burdened with the false impressions that others hold of me. There was another time when a small group of people considered me a predator on women. There is a man not in my direct circle but nearby who still thinks of me this way and that whole thing took place in 2003. He has never seen anything sufficient to change his mind. Interestingly, the women in my group all disagree as far as I know. I have no idea how to rectify these things. Once they get started they have a life of their own.

This poem is a conflation of several moments in my life rather than a description of one specific experience.

Perceptions

Aw Hell, and it was
me just a little angry...
Damn! Just somewhat hot.
There you go again
taking things so hard, so mean,
as if I would strike
you down like he did.

I'm just an old teddy bear,
all three hundred pounds.

June 1, 2009 12:32 PM

Life With Fairies

I have too much imagination. When I was a boy, my dad tried to reign me in. He thought I was too speculative on one hand and too excitable on the other. My wife thought of my dad years later that he walked around with a cob up his butt. I could not disagree. He was stiff and stern and lacked humor in many situations. Actually, he lived with pain in his back. He was a football player in his youth, nearly made pro. He might have had he remained single. He was given the opportunity and a slot on a San Francisco 49ers farm team, but they paid very little in those days. He had a family to consider. He chose to pursue education as a career instead. He was left with back complaints partly from the impact damage. Later he found out he also had an odd back with one extra partly fused vertebra in it. That didn’t help. He also had strong opinions about right and wrong.

He was not much for fairies of the winged variety. He was live and let live as far as I know about gays.

Life With Fairies

I have too many
fairies, a population
explosion of pests-
always asking me
the impossible, that I grow
wings and play with them.
Then they punish me,
tease me that I can't fly
like they do. My heart
breaks.

May 31, 2009 10:01 AM

Song Of The Fairy Ring

Quarks are bound in all but the most extreme temperatures and pressures, and these extreme states are found nowhere outside of black hole event horizons, if there. Here is the trouble with the magic imagination. We can imagine things which violate the fundamental states of matter. I suppose that God can violate the fundamental states of matter by choice at any time. It also seems that He seldom does. He appears to have made a covenant with creation to play by the rules. It would be very difficult for true magicians to succeed where God chooses otherwise.

These cool holy days – days in which the temperatures and pressures of the original state no longer exist.

And yet, and yet how shall I make peace? I seek out the stories and find myself wanting fairies. I want elves in the sense that Tolkein conceived of them. I used to hope for visitors from space. I have never been able to conceive of them as dangerous and cruel. I read an article one time about the total impracticability of war on the interplanetary scale, let alone the galactic scale. I believe that too. So you guys, please come and change everything. That of course is the real yearning, if my world changes enough, maybe pain and suffering are no longer required. I believe in magic because I have to.

Song Of The Fairy Ring

If I fell through you
would I end up anywhere?

(As if this question
leads somewhere I wish
to go or falling like that
would go way out too.)

It is a matter
of quarks bound as they all are
these cool holy days.

May 30, 2009 9:34 PM

My Whole Life

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

My Whole Life

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

May 30, 2009 7:53 PM

Saying It Straight

This is a poem about writing poems, I guess.

Saying It Straight

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

May 28, 2009 12:41 PM

Calling You

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

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

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

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

Calling You

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

May 28, 2009 12:14 PM

The Long Path

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

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

The Long Path

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

May 26, 2009 12:29 PM

Fancy Footwork

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

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

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

Fancy Footwork

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

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

May 23, 2009 10:36 AM

The Distance Between Us

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

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

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

The Distance Between Us

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

May 22, 2009 9:50 AM

What She Told Me

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

What She Told Me

What we glorify, distracts.

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

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

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

May 21, 2009 3:16 PM

Grasping For Straws

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

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

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

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

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

Grasping For Straws

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

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

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

May 19, 2009 12:53 PM

Purification

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

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

Purification

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

May 19, 2009 9:20 AM

Hesitation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Even so, this is an honest poem.

Hesitation

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

May 18, 2009 3:32 PM

It Always Comes To This

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

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

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

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

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

I had no comforter.

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

This is also the reason that alcoholics cannot sober up.

It Always Comes To This

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

I wish I had trust.

May 18, 2009 1:20 PM

The Mirrors

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

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

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

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

The Mirrors

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

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

May 18, 2009 12:29 PM

The Absent Tea Master

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

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

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

The Absent Tea Master

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

May 18, 2009 10:23 AM

I Woke Up Today

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

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

I Woke Up Today

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

May 17, 2009 12:01 PM

Pictures

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

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

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

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

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

Amen.

Pictures

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

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

May 16, 2009 10:19 PM

The Pearls

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

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

The Pearls

I heard you say love.

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

May 16, 2009 10:05 PM

Sun Dappled

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

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

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

I need Gods and Goddesses or my insides parch.

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

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

Challenge Your Whole Identity

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

-Jack Kornfield, "The Sure Hearts Release"

Amen.

Sun Dappled

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

May 16, 2009 8:54 AM

Dread People

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

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

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

Dread People

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

May 15, 2009 2:58 PM

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Glade

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

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

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

The Glade

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

May 15, 2009 9:31 AM

When I Was Seven

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When I Was Seven

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

May 15, 2009 9:04 AM

This Comes From The Pills

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

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

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

I no longer feel like that.

This Comes From The Pills

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

This comes from the pills
they make me take now.

May 14, 2009 2:16 PM

Getting The Picture

Our Deepest Well-Being

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

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

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

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

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

Getting The Picture

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

May 14, 2009 1:00 PM

Doing The Best I Can

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

Doing The Best I Can

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

May 13, 2009 9:08 AM

Almost A Poem

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Almost A Poem

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

This too is almost
a poem.

May 12, 2009 12:34 PM

The Chase

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

The Chase

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

May 12, 2009 12:49 PM

UltraViolet

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

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

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

UltraViolet

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

My New Role

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

My New Role

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

This is my new role.

May 12, 2009 11:41 PM

At The AA Meeting

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

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

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

At The AA Meeting

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

May 12, 2009 10:38 AM

Juggernaut

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

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

Juggernaut

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

May 11, 2009 8:34 AM

Like A Weasel

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

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

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

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

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

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

Like A Weasel

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

May 11, 2009 7:52 AM

After I Offered My Life

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

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

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

After I Offered My Life

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

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

May 11, 2009 7:41 AM