Call and Response

Division is the thing and love is seeing through it.

We join this story now in progress. It doesn't matter if the name was Cain, but somebody got killed and someone else is bound to get revenge.

Division is the thing and love is seeing through it.

Despite the universal truth that separation in this one holistic universe is unrealistic and impossible, the personal condition is accepted as the norm.

Division is the thing and love is seeing through it.

In a world accepting separation to be normal, war is not just inescapable, inevitable, and unpreventable, it's the definition of the state itself.

Division is the thing and love is seeing through it.

Who’s not to say the mental illness of a person is directly in proportion to an inability accepting this insanity as normal?

Division is the thing and love is seeing through it.

A knowing child is born into this world and cries to nurse upon a mother's breast.

Division is the thing and love is seeing through it.

A Very Mystic May Thirteenth

An oriole is being golden-voiced. Sea-level mountain air is expanding my appearance into gossamery glass.

I feel the druid life force of the spring like universal electricity illuminating every leaf and every cell within this body.

I am being powered by the source to know the source is what I am and I am That and this is Tao one syllable irradiating at a time.

These words reveal the infinite experience that's always there but overlooked until forgotten.

Within a cobalt sky, awareness pays attention and this being spends it on a thought or two.

The fool is thinking that it's me; devotees work for my intent; and I direct the universe so I may know myself.

Fantastic in a flash, this world is manifested. Every setting is bejeweled and every scene is circled with a ringing knowing.

Please excuse me for my one beloved is appearing now and I must go and join her.

The Peepers of Buddha Nature

Last night I listened to the peepers celebrate this paradise to which I came after I'd escaped from almost twenty years of marriage going down the crude proverbial tubes.

I heard them first in spring of ninety-five and I had never heard their like before, the chorus of an earth awakening from ice and its oblivion. They teach a simple lesson though.

The paradise that's lost is never really lost; it's in a state of limited suspended animation. So when I found this place, an unexceptional apartment on an antediluvian island in a tidal river valley,

I knew it wasn't just this place that was defining freedom, but thoughts defining my imprisonment had finally melted away, revealing what is always here although I had forgotten.

Too often we will move from place to place attempting to escape a state of consciousness which follows us from place to place, and even waits for us if we enjoy some sweet but short vacation. The irony is almost tragic.

So when, again, I found this place, I also, by some grace, had recognized I had to value its reflective qualities allowing me to then investigate the state of consciousness itself,

as if those peepers in the wetlands looked within, discovering they're not only of the earth, but they’re the earth itself, and winter is a season only passing through them.

Paradise, in other words, is not a place. It's what I am, this consciousness, this space.

The Unknown Sun and the Moon of Wu Wei

The cherry blossoms are departing and the lilacs in the dooryard are in deepest purple bloom. Fantastic tales are told by every latest leaf.

An absolute and unknown sun of pure awareness is reflecting in the moon of mind within the silent midnight sky of universal consciousness.

O wonder of that heavenly intent, now this moon is full upon the passing of its fourteen days of evolution, or it's fourteen million years,

depending how you measure. There is nothing one can do but bask within the light and watch as earthly shadows are directed.

Last night I woke within a dream as if rogue runaway thoughts had been impersonating the solar unnamed one, usurping its subjective singularity,

forgetting its intent, and doing everything it does to keep itself in insubstantial, incongruous, alienating motion.

But even such absurdity is powered by the simple way and sees in time surrendering is all the motivational free will it owns instead.

And resting in that unknown hour between the darkness and the dawn, the moon is shining free and knowing in its boundless springtime bed.

James Carville's Treatise on Enlightenment

Early leaf and bird call. Hiker, be like God. And keep your topographic map inside your own back pocket.

No tradition has been more successful than experiential now. This consciousness is all I know

and all I know about the world is in that knowledge. Yes, my yesterday is just a memory; now has nothing near in common to the past.

Turning words that point to now into a practice or belief or even worse, religion, is traditional,

and killing Buddha, Jesus, Zhuangzi after following their point to here and now is just a form of self-defense.

And finger me no finger; it's the moon, O stupid!

The Unknown Sonnet

Experience directs thought; thought impersonates experience.

Poetry is the song of bodhisattva.

My mythology is my poetry.

The first koan: now is three.

Body-surfing six foot waves.

The valley spirit can't get lower.

Not taking a stand is not the same as no mirror.

Play your character as if Tao was writing it.

First flash fiction: the unknowing knows.

You have to forget yourself before you know yourself.

The body is my sweet ride.

You make your night as long it needs to be.

The more I'm sure of myself, the less I know myself.

Evolution. Tao. Holy Spirit. Intent. Now without thought. Amen.

LNB-T5 Collateral Damage in Asserting Self

It was training in the art of self-assertion. The way I see it now is very simple. First you learn to build a house before you tear it down.

Or put more playfully yet crass, before one sees through this division, you'll need to grow a pair. Or show them off.

Otherwise, you're always lost in letting others build the edifice without the understanding that it's just a building of so many stories.

Of course, it's more destructive in its practice than a simple education in following your bliss, intent or Tao.

The fact is others had assisted in constructing what my person was and my adjusting, realigning, or creating something new

is bound to be a little disconcerting to a wife, for instance, who worked so hard to get her apprehensive partner to the point of some respectability

as a husband and a father and a member of society, if not exactly in good standing, then, at least a member.

So when I quit my part-time job, she was vociferously disappointed. And when I lost my job of ten full years

and started looking for another more in line with interest than merely money in itself, she threw me out. For half-a-year.

The Long Nervous Breakdown: Take Four

I question if this story is of any value. But it's the hardest thing I've ever written. So that means something. Still, it’s just a story.

We were sitting at the kitchen table to talk about unspoken matters which were driving us apart.

We both had our psychologists and could not afford a separate marriage counselor. So we tried to work things out amongst ourselves.

It was a big heart-breaking mistake. At some point, the conversation turned from love to war.

My strategy was simple. Tell her she no longer turned me on. I'd rather use a magazine than sleep with you, I thundered.

But she was ten-thousand times my better at this kind of thing. And not to go all psychological, but her parents both were alcoholics

and her childhood atmosphere was one of hurtful words and then denying they were said at all. It was a world of sad illusion for a child.

And what came next, although she would deny it really happened after all and that she only wished to hurt me

and that I in fact had just attempted something similar, I never could successfully forget, forgive, or understand, although, God knows, I tried.

She looked at me and laughed, I've used much more than pictures. Do you remember passing out that night when they demoted you at work,

she stabbed her finger straight at me. I told you, I replied. Those fuckers needed me to be the fall guy.

Sure, she said, and Nick came over, drinking you beneath the table. Well, he made a pass at me that night.

We left you in the living room and went upstairs. I guess he fucked the both of us. Real good. Her words, not mine.

The Long Nervous Breakdown: Take Three

When she stopped the car, I didn't exit. Instead I started sighing, I don't know, repeating it as if a formula to keep me grounded.

She waited silently until I stopped. I have to say, despite the wretchedness that would occur between the two of us in years to come,

she hit the right notes on that night. I think you need to see someone, she said. I looked at her in working class hero horror.

You don't mean I need to see an actual psychiatrist? Psychologist, a therapist, you need to talk about what's going on inside your head.

But that's the thing, I muttered. Everything has speeded up to such a point I feel as if it's all inside my head

and I can't get away from none of it. Then talk it out, she said. Or in, I actually found myself laughing.

The Long Nervous Breakdown: Take Two

I was married with a lovely daughter and endeavoring to live the life the way one is to live it as a middle-class American in nineteen-eighty-four.

I hadn't written poetry in years and my quixotic twenties filled with Transcendentalism, Tao, and Dostoevsky

seemed a million light-years in some other’s past. I even had attempted Christianity to fill some void but that's another story.

My therapist was asking me just who I wished to be and not what others wanted me to be. I didn't have a clue.

That's when she asked me why I gave up on Thoreau, which somehow came into our conversation half-an-hour ago.

He seems impractical, I said, or that's what others say, I further said. And what is it you say, she asked.

I couldn't say, I said. Then go and ask, she says, as fifty minutes is annunciated by an unembellished little bell.