In the Beginning was the Word

By the shore, a crow is giving chase to a red-tailed hawk. It's persistence is quite noteworthy.

Despite the hawk’s maneuvers in an April wind both brisk and steady, the crow is having none of it.

Its black discernment permeates each wave of wing and tail feather until the hawk heads out for open waters.

The crow cries out a single caw and turns into a butterfly. Its wings are black but bordered by a filigree of gold and seems to have no flight plan.

It flutters here and there as if connecting dots that only it can see. I walk into its verse and witness inspiration is the force behind each word.

I write a line that comes from blackest nowhere and then another one just follows it as if it saw a place to go I never saw before.

And so I see myself in open waters after what appears to be a span of countless years, although I know I'm only now conceiving all its reverie.

The Causeless Cause of Vietnam: April 25, 2015

So I saw some poets read today. One was Michael Casey reading poems about his tour in Vietnam.

Another was Paul Mariani who has a chair in poetry at Boston College and writes a kind of Catholic word and way.

I have a chair in poetry as well; it looks out upon the river, and from there I feel these poets were fortuitous for me to see and hear today.

I went to Boston College too which meant I was deferred from fighting in that war. And then I got the lucky number 2-0-4 selected in the lottery

which meant I could quit college finally; I didn't need it anymore. And by that time I’d forgot all other rationale for my attendance.

I talked to Casey after, had him sign his book I bought in 1972. He asked, was I a vet; I told him no but I had fought the good fight back at home.

No one my age got away from Vietnam. It either killed you or it detoured you from original intent, much like life itself one would suppose.

I went to school a few years later, got a liberal arts degree at Merrimack. Maybe if I'd finished Boston College, I'd've been a more fortunate son.

Now, the only thing I'm here for is to write unlettered poetry. So you can thank the war on what you had to hear from me tonight.

It's even making you less knowledgeable in this moment, or so I hope to figure, ain't I right?

The Fractal Wheels of Revelation

Some definition first is needed. Machines are non-volitional contrivances utilizing energy to undertake an action of Intent.

Ghost is that essential energetic spirit which remains upon the termination of an implement of that Intent.

Dreams are images in deepest vision playing out a way to see through my intended illusory objective known to know that pure subjective great unknown.

Fractals are phenomenal repeating patterns of self-similar arrangements in descending or ascending scale depending on one's point of view.

And now the poem begins.

Not a ghost in the machine,

but a machine in the ghost—

'we' are the holy spirit consciousness;

the machine is a dream within our self.

There is a fractal nature to reality—

as a nightmare is a dream in the mind,

the mind is a dream in consciousness,

and consciousness is a dream in absolute I.

A self-aware interpretation

of each fractal dream is just the way

I see through all the dream into my Self.

Seeing through the nightmare is psychological.

Seeing through the mind is mystical.

Seeing through consciousness is nondual 

pure awareness.

Questions to Experience

Let's deal with your beliefs in death and its accompanying fear which occupies your thoughts in all but deepest sleep.

Do you remember anything about your birth? Or have you taken that it happened on the word of someone else? Or something other.

And as a parent, did you see when consciousness was born, or were you merely witness to a transformational event? And its outcry.

And as to death itself, have you any evidence to bear that consciousness depends upon the body for its godlike power?

And you know the only thing you know is you exist. I am. That all resides in consciousness, with which without, you can't imagine.

And so to summarize. Do you remember birth as an experience? Have you experienced the state of death? And please be honest.

I'm asking this to one who prides oneself as being honestly concerned with proof. Like scientific, non-religious, totally objective.

Or have you just assumed you are the body that was born and destiny is death and disregard the evidence consciousness is all you know?

A Signal Discourse on Signs

Nothing doesn't fit within your story. 

Everything outside 

within your world 

is revelation of an understanding 

in your true essential depths 

becoming manifestly obvious. 

Don't let the blue jay fly away unnoticed. 

Listen to the caws of crow. 

You'll know a sign is more 

than just the traffic talking 

when you feel it stop and yield your heart. 

Its divination is the god without you 

talking to the god within you 

nearing an experiential realization of one self.

Translating My Self

The mind evolves into transparency and resonates in consciousness as lucid being—

and the unknown is the known that isn't named in this enlightening intent of that unknown to know oneself—

the walls come tumbling into clarity—the world is seen as revelation— love is sounding in the meadow with compassionate efflorescence—

I shall wear and write the form of my translation and samadhi when I'm dying to.

War and Love: April 24, 1971

On this date exactly forty-four unabridged but evanescent years ago, I marched on Washington D.C. with something like one-half a million others to protest the war in Vietnam.

We ended up before the Capitol and Peter, Paul, and Mary sang out Blowing In the Wind to ask how many years. I know the answer now is just as long as there are years themselves

divided into moments like just why it takes so long to get my Triple Venti Half Sweet Non-Fat Caramel Macchiato when I ordered it before his Non-Fat Frappuccino with Whipped Cream and Chocolate Sauce.

And that's the order which is difficult to understand because it's not about the ignorance of others but the basic lie of what we think we are. Divided from the universal, we, the personal, are war itself.

I could make the argument the only reason why so many were protesting Vietnam was just the simple fact there was a partisan Selective Service System and we the commoners could end up within that horrid jungle.

On the other hand, Afghanistan continues softly on its fourteenth bloody year and everyone now knows Iraq was not invaded for the yellowcake. It wasn't war the protests had effected but who would have to fight them.

On the bus back home I met a girl who for a single short and holy season would become my first true love. I was of course so very young. Despite the Beatles' song we sang out loud while driving through New Jersey

on the way to Washington the night before, I didn't know it then but it’s not being in love, but being is love, and what we truly are. It doesn't take a single moment to discern it if I never think about it.

Love!

PETER, PAUL & MARY, WASHINGTON PEACE MARCH, 1971

Amourterre (The Land of Love in Consciousness)

In and of and by this naked consciousness I am, and in this consciousness I find I've made a land of love.

That this discovery of self was lost at first in common seas of objectivity is just the way it is.

It's in conditioning, both chemical and social, DNA and Gladys, Leo, years of public education, television, well, you name it,

that I came to see the world as something outside myself. My daffodils are laughing at such obvious forgetfulness of its own headlessness,

or stated otherwise: this land of love is my own headland. It's Cape Farewell, Lands End, and Diamond Head all rolled in one,

and every element of it is not at all objective. Science calls it quantum probability; I could name it now potentiality,

but for the sake of this romantic poem, the land of love shall do what it shall do, and that, my secondary character who may be listening,

is love. This poem is now your own creation. There's no end to it because there's no beginning. Otherwise, it's all imagination.

A Mystic Looking Back at Making Love

It's almost been two years since last I loved a woman. And there has to be some kind of irony divine that it occurred on Independence Day,

or night to be specific. There were fireworks despite the fact the two of us had done that kind of thing for thirteen years together.

If I knew it was the last time, that this could be the last time, maybe just the last time, I don't know.

I may have paid attention, maybe kept a journal, at the least I could have written all those movements in a poem.

True I do appreciate detachment from the personal and all its gossiping concern for politics in every damned relationship between a me and you.

Yet it’s not sex but touch of flesh on flesh and lips to lips and tongue with tongue and more the overarching warm embrace of two becoming one,

as if the apex of this evolutionary realizational intent was being played out in a bed of flowering delight,

a whirling dervish mystic union of all this with That, like every ardent color of the spectrum reuniting with its secret dark and bright.

Oh yes, oh yes, oh yes, here comes that void of night!

A Taoist Spring in Northeast Massachusetts

Spring is slow in blossoming this year. On a walk along the river Sunday, I saw a patch of dandelions,

seven pussy willows laced in light green catkins, and the early petals of forsythia in their attempt to turn the empty branches yellow.

The rest was barely in a state of bud. But yesterday it rained, at times in downpours, and last night I heard a line of thunder

echo down the river like a lonely highway in Nebraska. Fog was low this morning but I know the curtain soon will rise.

Transformation is the only thing on earth that's certain. Oh, I also saw a butterfly.