“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart. And try to love the questions themselves.” —Rainer Maria Rilke

Genuflect and Shield Me

Genuflect and shield me

From instruments and doubts that silk

Beyond the hemlock indecision,

Prosper me and rejoice

Over my wakeful inside

Outs and secret

Time

When

Nothing matters except the downward

Shiny figures weeping in the joys of

Thy deeper nightward watch.

Intensity and separateness have

Haunted all our days, and did

We not fear the clouds

And reckoning when the sea had

Gathered itself together.

Only once was the ghost of teaching

Children harried on the stone and

Oozed upon the witless

Spendthrift

Sages

Who

Incorporate the paradise offending

And swaggering their own invincible

Invective. In the secret time when

Nothing matters come with me to

Eden leave behind the strange

Instructed longings for

Calumny, take to the burning

Sea and wishful instead for the

Selfsame misread star and

Bleeding, never mind the farewell

Stop the vicarage houses veils

The blissful enter into

Oblivion and trail their

Final visions on a

Separate

Rhyme

Which

Insinuates the forever rock of

Mourning.

“None of these things made me feel at all cast down. It was as though they happened to someone else, and I merely watched them.” —Way of a Pilgrim

“If we differentiate things according to their differences, everything is different from the other. If we consider things similar according to their points of similarity, there is nothing which is not the same.” —Kuo Hsiang

Benediction

Say the words you

Want me to say,

Whisper them into

My ear, the right words,

The holy words, the words

You want me to hear.

Cast away the present tense

The parting child constrains,

Build and forge the dying

Cause, the onward human

Breed, the wearing thin

Abrasion night in silent serpent

Creed, the mother’s fight against

Her chance decline, whose

Dominion liveth for ever,

Hold fast unto these righteous

Words and dole them out

According to their need.

Say the words you

Want me to say,

Tell me what we must

Do, to flail the ways

That come between us,

And fulfill their partial meanings

Until no empty cup remains.

“Within is so great as to be Beyond.” —Emerson

“I know but one freedom and that is the freedom of the mind.” —Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

“Wherever thou seest a great end, be sure of a great beginning. Where a monstrous and painful destruction appalls thy mind, console it with the certainty of a large and great creation. God is there not only in the still small voice, but in the fire and in the whirlwind.” —Sri Aurobindo

Occam's Razor

Thus he and his conscious

Body were worthy

To walk this

Earth

To simplify,

Simplify

And go on pausing slothful

Missions, go around

Erecting thrift and farms and

Cash box priests and voices

Calling out when the land

Beneath

Them composed of judgment if

Ye seek him if ye forsake him,

Which they have wrought upon the

Earth

The land beneath them

Yearning to liquefy

Masonry fire on water, the abundance

Pointing across his face, shifting

To simplify, to

Justify.

If only he and his

Conscious body were able to

Try a little bit harder to

Do a bit more, if only

Carrion plentiful borne by

Waves of plummeting fires, shaking

Graves the price of his calling,

But simplicity is not the only

Elegance and chaos stretches

Beyond the lust for

Ease,

The error in his conscious

Body flexed against the

Onslaught silently

Surging against his knees

Bare feet and arms carved up

And smashed against the

Toothpick buildings and

Flooding trees,

To simplify and justify, and

Seek to call a treason for his

Voluptuous life he

Will forsake you.

“Thought is time, and time creates fear.” —Vivekananda

“Heaven arms with Love those it would not see destroyed.” —Lao Tzu

Janissaries

One thing only

Brothers and sons volunteered

Or taken away by

Force, one thing only

At Ampatuan, Maguidanao,

Andijan, Tucson Tripoli

and Cairo,

From the line between

A hunched and shielded

Mob and the

Brothers with swords machetes

And guns, the seraphs at

Luxor Acteal las abejas the

Janissaries in Cyprus

Brought with them only what

They had been taught

To do, the line between them,

Brothers and sons

Was punishment to whom

They were delivered was

Scattered to limbs and torn

Tortured buzzard wheeling in

The sky, was tangled

Doubt

And screaming jannisary

Srebrenica and villages of

Algeria

Hungerford Bogside Wounded

Knee, the blood flows just

The same from

Brothers and sons their women

And babes in arms at Wola and

Kalavryta and

No Gun Ri.

“When it is darkest, men see the stars.” —Emerson

Almost Forgotten

How it felt to be with you

Once

Together in a dreamscape

Standing near your temple

Holy legs the hymns

The sun converted not yet over,

Not yet gone,

The yard and the playing games,

Faster than the day could

Fathom, accomplished because

The overlooked necessity of

Traveling here and growing there

Could never compensate for

What

We had and what we lost.

“I realized in this place that people feared silence more than anything else, that our tendency to talk arises from self-defense and is always based upon a reluctance to see something, a reluctance to confess something to oneself.”

—P.D. Ouspensky

“One reason for writing, of course, is that no one’s written what you want to read.” —Philip Larkin

Complex Knowing - Number 5

Booze sipping in light shade

Pale write noting derision

Palliative,

Stoned arido colombard

Pays d’oc la baume,

The afternoon slips away

Detested.

All angles and bones, all

Pale skin dreaming of ways

To work painting Egon

Irrevocable touch of

Unconsciousness,

Oracle eyes brown and

Immutable

Bedroom changing, involved to sell the oil

And pay your debts, pressed fast

Hard against the glass. Light

Slips away, winter does her mouth

Flickers a smile takes

Possession.

And granted, there is no more

Of this, but there is always knowing adult

Needful consolation, doorknob closing

Against the acrostics against

The span of attention.

“I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free.” —Nikos Kazantzakis

“Another way to reach zero is to expand, expand, to infinitely expand. That is also zero. Zero and the infinite are the same.” —Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev

Frozen

Miles thick once the ice

Pressed down and flattened the

Earth, shoved trees and

Dirt and boulders into valleys,

Gouged river beds, left lakes

The size of seas. Now, a shining

Silver coating, curtain fallen

From the sky,

Binds the land an inch or two at

Most, enough to castigate

The weary world of cars and

Loans and hospitals,

And satisfaction cheap enough

For all to strive.

Locked in place, attention

Drifts across the frozen

Sheets of ice towards the

Sun, which witnesses the brief

Disaster and seeks the shortest

Distance sealed away and shut

From any eye.

“When nothing is sure, everything is possible.” –Margaret Drabble

Tide Pool Night

Every evening over by the wisher well he

Walked his well-wept dog and

Sang his radius of self-encompassed

Feeling.

His thoughts eclipsed the jug he

Fetched, and burst the close diameter of

Meaning.

With best intent he climbed the hill he

Stalked the greening of each day,

He juggled forth his flimsy life, his

House

His carpet wounds, his balance book and

Best

Advice, and yet his loose-hung limbs

Rescinded, gave him away, and kept him

Glinting through the noonday still. And

When the tide pulled in, the rocks

Exposed beyond the wayward

Sticks and mud, the sandy strewn

With broken shells and sabbaths

Conquered by the

Load,

The ruined vesicles of animals

That shrunk and dried upon the shore,

That midnight creeping inward

Thick, astonished him and drunk the

Seeping

Life from him and

Left him nothing further to

Explore.

“Any story that succeeds in evoking that felt sense of participating in larger and more meaningful patterns of truth than our own individual comfort or discomfort is, by definition, a ‘sacred narrative,’ and will have a tendency to attract adherents who take it literally.” –Jeremy Taylor

Standing Still

In a double traveled year they ruined the presence

Duty business of a friend who stands, shoulders

Taught and striding still, supports the burden,

Who looks into the past without a shadow

Without a doubt, they look with wonder at

The hallowed wailing ground that is before

Them and he stands still, impetuous

And imperious, embracing morning desolate

And delicate in all its resounding scorn and

Glory.

Instead of lurching and leaping from one

Thing to the next, in happenstance he

Resonates, he leaves his feet upon the

Solid ground, the harvest ground,

Whereupon the grimly definite reapers

Watch, the timely chalky fine keepers of

The cost elaborate and whirl about the

Spot, he stands in place and his eyes observe

The vanity and increase and all the swallowed

Up destruction reach above the mountain

Fields, above the starry semblance of the sky

Above, he stands in one space and everything

Else unfolds itself around him, initiates and

Elaborates into all it was ever destined to

Become.

“There is no need to seek truth, only stop having views.” –Seng T’san