writing another poem
is as pointless as
taking another breath
Tag Archives: poetry
On The Varieties Of Religious Experience, Part 2
The Great Mysteries
aren’t fiendishly difficult to solve,
which is why they are rarely solved;
too many search for
keys to the complex locks
so visible on the door,
when all they need to do
is push upon them and
walk right through;
the Greater Mysteries
have their solutions
written upon
the welcome mat
at the feet of the frantic
sleuths fumbling there;
the solution to
the Greatest Mystery
Of All
isn’t even on
the other side
of the door
but don’t expect to hear
anything about that one
if you refuse to put down
that key and turn away
from the door
that was put there
for the sole purpose of distracting you
and getting you to walk away
from the truth.
Chant: Emptiness
Considering the empty plate before me
Considering fullness of all our plates
Considering lack of nourishment there
Considering the Buddha-nature of a plate-maker
Considering the plate-maker creating emptiness
Considering broken plates that can hold nothing
Considering meals un-plated both good and bad
Considering a bowl of seeds
Considering it inedible yet so many meals to come there
Considering space that appears to be full of stars
Considering distances between them that hold next to nothing
Considering the pan my brain sits in
Considering the mind cannot be found there no matter how long you look
Considering an open door with a broken lock
Considering this a joyful damage as the room has emptied of its prisoners
Considering the words filling this page
Considering the silence in which they’ve been written
Considering my voice and its origin from deep caverns within me
Considering how I might never speak again and have no choice in that
Considering Death the great emptier that yet fills the world
Considering an empty place setting at a holiday table filling with presence
Considering hunger for its ample gnawing filling me
Considering a meal that empties the body of its hunger
Considering the empty plate before me
Wildest Dream
Never have had wild dreams.
Most of mine
have been quite mild.
There was the one, though, where
I carried the drowned body
of a large bird
into a room full of people
and it transformed
into a woman
who raised her head
and spoke to me, her face
like a Greek statue,
pale and bloodless
though she’d come
back to life,
her stone-gray eyes
restless upon mine.
What was wildest
about it is that now
and then to this day
I hear a voice
in the dark of the bedroom
and I know it is hers
though she never spoke
in the first dream
and I cannot make out
what she is saying;
what is wildest is how
I only dreamed it one time
and still recall it
and still wait for her
to speak and explain
how she drowned,
how she transformed,
why she did not fly away
instead of drowning,
how I found her,
how in death she transformed,
how she has stayed with me
for decades now —
how wild her voice,
how wild her granite eyes.
Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien
Originally posted 4/27/2013.
I turned around
at the end of a long corridor
to seek contemporaries.
Found a few.
Craned my neck
to find peers.
Found a few.
Looked then for friends.
Found very few.
They were distant,
at the far end of the hall,
whispering.
Little of what they said reached me
but from tone of voice I understood
that they felt I’d left them and
for me there was no way back.
No matter the clear corridor,
no matter the direct path —
there was no way back.
Edith Piaf’s voice rings out,
non, je ne regrette rien.
“I Regret Nothing.”
Her last words?
“Every damn fool thing
you do in this life,
you pay for.”
Fingerpicking Before Dawn
“John Barleycorn Must Die”
comes on the radio before dawn.
I play the guitar
because of that song;
when I was a boy I heard
the fingerpicking before dawn,
and I could not die
without having at least tried
to play like that before dawn,
sitting alone in growing light,
imagining I could pull the sun
closer toward the horizon with every note,
then break
into a hard and glorious strum
as it cleared the distant line
looking just as glorious.
It took me years to even come close,
and by then I knew how foolish
it was to think that I could make
things happen. I’d been like
the men in the song
who thought themselves strong
but ended up vanquished by
what they thought they controlled.
Like them, though, I’m still drunk on
the myth, and this morning
my fingers woke before the rest of me,
before I fully knew what I was hearing,
and they moved
as the light in the bedroom grew.
How The Dirt Accumulates
Sweeping floors
with a new broom
one finds debris and
is occasionally shocked
to recognize how old
some of these minute scraps
are, to recognize how long it’s been
since they first fell from their sources;
take for instance the corner
of a candy wrapper
from a few months back,
consumed in anger
while you muttered
at your body’s refusal to shrink,
after which you tossed all the candy
into the trash and haven’t bought
any since, so this is without question
from that wrapper you tore off
and that scrap is angering you
again, or your weight is, or
your sloth and slovenly habits are,
it never ends, a new broom
can only sweep so much clean,
why bother, why bother to sweep
at all, everything leaves its dirt behind
and underfoot it makes a sad noise
as it cuts into your sad feet,
needling and whining
remember, remember
as if forgetting was an option.
Good Night, Good Night
Good night,
good night. Off
these painful feet
for a while —
sleeping, dreaming
(maybe, it happens
so rarely). The bed
won’t hurt much
till morning;
the best part
of this day will be
spent unconscious,
darkly numb
in matching darkness,
soaking all night in that
without being aware of it.
Good night,
good night; no need
to say it again.
Smokyhead
Smoky in that head of yours —
can’t see to think, right? Can’t think
about what you see?
Right. You can smell it
through all that haze.
All that fragrance
of roasted cells and spent fuel
with the weight of
a wildfire out of control, the kind
they give names to;
the Canyon Burn,
the Summit Fire,
the Gully Blaze.
You’re waiting for
the name of this one
to manifest while choking
on its smoke. You need to
adjust your expectations.
Might just miss it if
you stay in there.
Might suffocate
if you don’t break out,
dummy up, admit defeat
at least for now,
smokyhead,
burnt bauble, ore without
value, trinket
on the blackened floor,
dead man from the neck up
with nothing and no one
to Lazarus you back
to bright.
Polytheist’s Lament
Originally posted 6/8/2013.
67,000 perfectly lovely
gods out there,
67,000 facets to the diamond
of God-Being,
yet here is one facet that insists the light’s
coming out of One and only One.
Care to guess which one he claims
is the only true source of all light?
Try to be serious!
That one must be
the God Of Cosmic Jokes,
or of the Ego.
67,000 perfect little gods
out there,
and those are just the ones
we can see. Probably
another 67,000 at least,
invisible to the poor
human eye, that we could call on
if we knew of them,
yet one god
in that crowded field of stars
demands we believe
in Just One, claims there is only
One God, a God of
Umbrella and Blanket
covering every possible
need for Deity.
Listen to this world screaming from its roots
to its crown canopies, abyssal waters
to rock peaks; listen the old way,
the way we listened
before we stopped listening to 67,000 gods
and started listening to that One
with the blanket and the umbrella
and the sword and the plow.
67,000 gods: at least that,
perhaps twice that
or even more than that.
They remind us that
before we ever heard
that insistent One,
they were talking directly to us
all the time. Remember how that sounded?
Like whales, like crickets, like wind, like water,
like fire: the 67,000 voices of the Gods
of our particular patches of Earth. A chorus of Divinity.
Every one singing along. Every last one a harmonic of Light.
Need
Need to cross
a crazy, busy highway,
twist an ankle getting
to the other side.
Need to break a window, cut myself,
enter a forbidden place. I miss
that kind of pain — that adventure pain,
that how’d I get here pain –anything but
this salty wounded routine
I live now. I know how this happened.
I know what put me achingly
here. I know what keeps me
cowering here: the calendar, the clock,
the skull-grin ahead of me I could always see
but far off, far off…Need to invite
that boneface valet
to come closer. Need to let it
brush me when I reach for ripe fruit
on the farthest, thinnest branch
I can get to. Need once again
to blow that smiling mistake a kiss
as the bough breaks
and I fall.
Big Joe Turner
Originally posted 6/13/2012.
Big Joe Turner
could palm a jump blues
like an egg,
handle it rough,
never break it.
“Shake Rattle And Roll.”
Big Joe Long Dead smiting us
with the soft club
of his voice.
Big Joe I Wish To Have Seen You Just Once,
how it must have been
back then: discovery
followed by imitation
till the fakers squeaked out loud that
they think they sound as good as you did.
The shell fragments
and the sticky yolk on their hands
say no.
Big Joe Founder,
they are starting
to forget you
and all your kiss curled
imitators too.
Big Joe Turner,
thank you for
the musical ache in our bones,
the unbroken eggs
still hatching.
That Bowl Of Smoke
Go at once to wherever you keep
your coffee cups and take one down.
It needn’t be your favorite cup; perhaps a gift cup
with a chip in the lip that you can’t toss
because of who gave it but won’t use
because of the hazards involved; maybe
something left by the previous renter,
long in need of a purpose,
a cup never used because you don’t trust
a particular stain inside
but it’s hung around the shelf
“just in case.” (You’re poor. You don’t toss
things you get for free — at least,
not until now.)
Take that cup and go somewhere
far away from the usual people.
Pray over it, or do whatever you do
that’s a prayer for you;
pour whiskey into it, burn a bill in it,
it’s yours to do with as you wish;
when done, hurl it into the distance
and listen to it break.
The next time you have a coffee
first thing in the morning — gray-lit, still tired
and dim headed
as you sip the weak automatic brew —
remember that sound.
You put it into the world,
that prayer, that bowl of smoke.
You filled it and broke it open.
You made sacred
what had been profanely useless.
Whenever you recall that sound
you will know what you’re capable of.
Rambling Bob Dylan Discovery Blues
“Positively 4th Street” is on the radio —
not the original but a damn good cover. I wonder
if anyone’s hearing this version as the first time
they’ve ever heard the song at all — thinking,
“what perfect spite I’ve discovered here in the voice
of the writer of this song.”
It could happen. I thought
Jimi Hendrix wrote “All Along The Watchtower”
for a while after I first heard it until an older friend
smugly played me the original. There’s a version
by Dave Mason out there, too, but I heard that later
on and it paled and faded and ghosted away
in comparison to the others I knew…
Dylan’s covering the Great American Songbook
these days. No one thinks he wrote those songs
because people who listen to Dylan now
and buy his albums as they come out know well enough
what his voice is like and what he writes and has written,
and any discovery they find there is in how it’s done,
not in what was done. It’s not my cup of tea
but it works for some. I suppose it works for Bob Dylan
since he’s on his second album of those songs. It must be
a relief at 75 not to worry about such things as legacy and
authorship and authority. He must say to himself,
“Positively 4th Street, Blowin’ In The Wind, Masters Of War,
Tangled Up in Blue…yeah, I’m good. Let’s do that Gershwin tune.
Let’s do something. Might discover something we don’t already know.”
Plastic Shaman
when you talk that way
of vision quest
and spirit animal
you lie
that’s not your shit to talk
stolen shit
that shit grew in
dirt that grew from
blood that
nourished
wherever you steal crystals from
and whoever you steal wisdom from
they mostly didn’t speak of it
as living it was plenty
it was side by side dirty and clean
it was a life not an add-on
nowadays they live it hard
you don’t
you lie
I can tell because
when you talk about it
so bloodlessly
you smell like funeral flowers
on a soft bed
for your weakly lucid dreaming
for an afterlife
to follow a barely lived now-life
how gently you wield
the stolen property
how little the source
resembled what you call it
how little what you have
resembles what was taken
how little it seems
when you use it
when once it was a communion with All
and as such
even the smallest stone of it
held a cosmos
Dark Matter 