Swan Song

At the wild mouth of the Merrimack, 

I pivot north to rove the shore. 

My Atlantic is quite pacific today; 

I feel my lake-like waves advancing 

like the white caps on a pond 

that seems like adolescent yesterday 

although it’s fifty years in memory now.

I didn’t know I was the lake back then,

and when I dived into the water

from the Dubois diving board,

I was really diving in myself.

This later insight arrived in meditation.

Earlier this morning I saw a swan upriver

floating on the slow outgoing tide.

I felt its graceful curve of neck in mine

as I turned to watch it pass, a brilliant

arc of white within the silvery mist.

Our silence watches all of this and knows

that none of this is what I am;

space-time is a single dream with infinite

dimensions in unfathomable intent.

Listen, the swan is going out to sea.

the heart of fall

leaves fall. 

fall is transformation. 

transformation is the time it takes to blink. 

blink is that great unknown i am which mind attempts to freeze in space and time. 

time is an interval between those transformations which occur in cycles like the sunrise or full moon.

moon is pointing to a wave.

wave is emptiness.

emptiness is wave. 

He’s Walt Whitman; Who Am I?

The absolute unknowable

is such the subject there’s no object

in that absolute subjective.

Since one can only know an object,

the absolute subjective doesn’t

even know itself. There’s nothing

but the empty mirror of an eye

with not even nothing to be seen—

extemporaneously

there’s absolute intent to know oneself.

Don’t you have that selfsame yearn to know yourself?

This universe is being subdivided for exactly that.

Have you reckoned with reckoning much?

Have you practiced to know the false as false?

Have you felt so proud to see you’re not the process

but the process is intent to know yourself?

Stop acting yin and yang and in that freeing

one possesses knowing of one’s being.

Mind’s Creation Isn’t Really Two

A blackbird on a live thin wire is vibrant 

with its Kwai Chang Caine Kung Fu. 

A great blue heron, like some prehistoric 

statue, is standing in the shallows that ensue. 

That one big bang is a brainstorm 

of the mind conjecturing this two. 

Which came first, the question or the answer? 

It's true the great blue heron isn’t really blue. 

Thoughts of fish begin to stir within 

an energy of water made anew. 

Again, the great blue heron isn’t really blue. 

The fork runs away with the spoon 

and the fool jumps over the moon, mon dieu! 

One last time, the great blue heron isn’t really blue.

And Every One a God

It appears to be a messy process—

to one identifying with the process. 

The Big Bang explodes like an awfully great notion. 

Stars collide like Bogart and Bacall. 

The earth erupts in a carnival of volcanic flames 

and breaks apart in workaday tectonic shifts. 

Hurricanes, tornadoes, waterspouts, oh my! 

And now, Neanderthals are clubbing like Neanderthals.

Everyone is acting like a god! 

But that’s the final measure of creation, 

last procedure in this grand holistic process. 

Evolution isn’t fundamentally pointless; 

fourteen billion years of cellular division 

arrives within this central nervous system 

suddenly now capable of self-awareness. 

So stop this moment to reflect within—

one is 

that great unknown 

making itself 

be known, 

for knowing is being 

which mind divides 

in order to know 

its self.

A Prayer for the True Fourth God

Three blackbirds aren’t enough. 

Without a fourth, direction is completely incomplete. 

The west is ceaselessly lost in trinity. 

And one may never know oneself 

without those ice floes of true north. 

O sacred vase and holy sake cup,

O Kachinas standing on the surface of a book case,

O blue guitar, O cactus plant, O radio,

without you i would never know

that what i am is nothing with potentiality

for everything within my own intent

to know my own unknowable existence.

O Parent, Child, and Holy Realizational Intent,

please accept these great ten-thousand objects

as another God within your sacred pantheon,

and let us pray the process is complete

and now and everlastingly perpetual.

Where the mind’s objectification is a vital operation

and the world is just the function run away within itself.

For hell is only heaven and samsara is nirvana—

so chop God and carry my true self.

synenergi

(there's this 

universal 

kinesthetic feeling 

like looking at thought 

with intuition 

there’s this soothing 

letting-go 

of yin 

and yang 

there’s this blissful quivering 

in intuitively assimilating 

the visceral universality of 

what I am) 

permeating all of this is formless 

silent 

unknown potentiality—

View Point: compassion and the false

Viewing the false as false without compassion is a viewing by the false.

And what is the false?

If the truth is simply the Unknown being—

Then the false is just the Known not-being.

Another word for the ‘Known not-being’ is ‘conceptual,’ or thought.

The Unknown is the noumenon, subjective, the absolute I, and never the me.

The truth of the Unknown being is therefore the I being, or I am.

Anything that follows the ‘I am’ is objective, conceptual, false.

I am a tinker. I am a tailor. I am a person. I am me.

Another word for ‘I am’ is unconditional love.

When this energetic Love is clouded by a thought, it’s called emotion.

It is light of Love filtered by the false conceptual.

I am fearful. I am happy. I am angry. I am sad.

To see the conceptual as conceptual is key to deconstructing the false.

When the false is deconstructed, only ever-present truth is now here.

But if the conceptual sees the conceptual as conceptual, then conceptual clouding remains.

When ‘I am’ sees the conceptual as conceptual, “I am’ is now here.

In other words, when Love sees thought as thought, Love is now here.

Compassion is the via negativa of Love as it sees the false as false.

If this seeing is viewed without compassion, then the viewing is conceptual.

And the ‘I am” is still clouded—

for viewing the false as false without compassion is a viewing by the false.

who says i am an ersatz villanelle pseutra

i've never lacked what i needed because i never lacked what i am. 

fear is the stand of love beclouded by the lie of death. 

half the things i say, i never said, and the rest of what i said, i didn't say. 

it's the need for complexity that makes it so difficult. 

it's the desire for simplicity that makes it seem too easy.

i've never lacked what i needed because i never lacked what i am.

romantic love is just emotion generated by a thought.

unconditional love is utterly the being of awareness.

half the things i say, i never said, and the rest of what i said, i didn't say.

you always yin to the yang to what you yanged to the yin.

if you see there isn't more to burn, there's always more to burn.

i've never lacked what i needed because i never lacked what i am.

every line is a letter in a bottle sent to others writing letters for a bottle.

prayer’s not desire for sustained existence but joy at unbelievable existence.

half the things i say, i never said, and the rest of what i said, i didn't say.

if love is not what’s moving you, then fear is driving you.

whatever doesn't kill you inevitably enlightens you.

i've never lacked what i needed because i never lacked what i am.

half the things i say, i never said, and the rest of what i said, i didn't say.

Four Enchantresses Usurping Memories of Richard Nixon - Prose as Poem, Poem as Prose

It was the Nixon Resignation Party, Van Morrison on the stereo singing ‘Jackie Wilson Said’ when she walked in and nothing mattered anymore. Who cares what Nixon knew and when he knew it? Who doesn’t have an eighteen minute gap?

Even that one memory isn’t actually reliable. It’s just a snippet here, a snippet there, and none of it resembles that specific holy now which happened then, or any other version of that moment from another universe we call a person.

She was married but something told me that it didn’t matter. Such prophetic moments will occur because there is no past or future in this universal consciousness and every now and then we know it. Did I really know it then?

Van Morrison is singing, I’m in heaven when she smiles, and Van is not the man but God, and I’m a prophet on a peak envisioning the pre-ordained apocalyptic mother of my cherished only child. I turn to Jesus, pass the joint, and say some words to this effect, I’m looking at the woman who redeems my overly materialistic world forever into now, and Christ says, man, that’s sacred stuff!

The rest is like some psychoactive dream. Her marriage heads out for the territories. We make love like Rosalita jumping higher. Five years later on, our guru child is born to teach us sacrificial love. But shit begins to happen faster than our amplifiers process it and this distortion ends in ultimate divorce upon the silver anniversary of John’s assassination.

The next thing that I know I’m standing in the ICU, my mother on the brink of death, although she’d last another four momentous months for daily heart-to-hearts; ex-wife, with our nomadic much-missed daughter all the way from California, surprisingly enough is there; and at my side my soul-mate lover for these latest thirteen years not knowing that we’d split apart the next one. I stop to look at these four universe-creating, life-transforming, heart-wise earth-strong women, and say something wise like right here right now within this single room are ALL the womenfolk who ever drove me unconditionally crazy.

But crazy in this world is sane. And sanity is love. And what I meant to say is love is all there is but it’s just filtered by the constant cloud of automatic unintentional unconscious thought, and these four influential goddesses have taught me that such undiluted love is more than just a lyric from a song. And this would light the way to other teachers teaching me there is no me, and further that this love there is, is all I am, indwelling in the unknown Absolutely Sweet Marie! For ‘Blonde on Blonde’ was playing on the stereo by then.