-for Dan Good
Spiraled color on the dark void
Marks that which was and all that remains:
The fragments of some childish dream,
A whorl of affection for the fantastic, written escapades
Of deities and monks, wanderers and scientists –
Enclosed by chalked lines, impounding his essential
chaotic swell, this fallen body treelike
Reaches and gropes, in radiances of the mind,
For that which is beyond the linear thread.
Gently, the rain’s fall advents,
Abrading the illusion of barrier from All,
Streaming the chalk in a colored river,
Dyeing the black street with running,
Written words – the contained, borrowed hymns
Each soul knows as true, and sings through
Ineffable swirls of color.
__________________
Simon of Cyrene Plays the Sax
Grass, rising to the cosmos from under
city slabs of concrete impressed by
skeletal feet, attracted eternal to the bleak sun,
from under a slobbering urban nightmare,
satiated by the remnants of life deceased,
that which had already succumbed
to suffocation by lifeless rock –
I passed over this feckless grope at life,
yellowed grass, clutching out of the stony
roots of the Eternal City, the sickle moon of Death.
I passed over these roots, living and dead,
tongue alack and dry from bottles of liquor.
Stumbling along, my foot ensnared by
joyous cracks in the stifling cement,
ruptures of life through which
a verdant consciousness might peek,
my hazy mind formed the impression
of yellow skulking grass, and noted
the likeness between subject and object.
In glimpses beyond this smoggy Thursday,
across the river of alcohol, gazing on the shore
of Reality, my mind desperately craved surety,
only to be smothered by past debauchery and madness,
covered over by slabs of scattered, aborted thoughts.
Without mindfulness, beneath instinct,
below the baseness of brutes and beasts,
my razed mind ordered my disconnected body
to the park, where:
In the corner playground, jerkily, children swing.
Homeless bums begged to destroy their minds, as I did.
Horny girls presented themselves, beseeching any
for the final ejaculation of consciousness.
And an old graybeard blew jazz.
Transfixed in his own terrible glory,
detritus of life, as I was, a spectator ghoul,
he listened in awe to his own rotting blues
emitted from his zombie lips.
By some divine will, my skeletal feet
scraped across the dread soil of doom
to his right side, where I stumbled, and fell.
He gazed into my inanimate eyes,
and with half a smile (noting my state,
all that is good and wrong, Bodhidharma smile)
he ascended up the scale, up the sax,
until with rapture his flesh turned glowing,
my body was beatified, and reaching, groping,
careening up the scale and blue notes and then to
There –
My mind was free of intoxicants, and was.
Staggering in ecstasy, I fell prostrate
onto the park grass. Picking myself up
once more, I slowly walked to underneath
a tree, where I fell for a final time, and
fully awake, drifted asleep.
_____________________________________
The fan gently cyclic whirls above,
And beyond that, clouds layer on cloud.
She lays on the floor, painting Siddharta,
Stroke upon stroke revealing That:
The flowering lotus obscured by dead petals,
Contained in the being of each blossoming life.
___________________________________________-
Sent to the Mountains,
To Her Whom I Love
Dusk to dawn. We sat,
embers low, staring.
‘It will pass, love,
ephemeral as a dream,’
I declared, wary of
the rising sun –
shone on our final
hours together.
Summer passed, satori-flash.
Tears flowed that day;
what suns rose and set to
arrange our sundering?
And that day’s sun, too,
drifted dreamlike
into western clouds.
All things pass, I said,
trying to convince myself.
But how does this
fresh agony know
no end?
__________________________
The sun rises;
Light beams shattered into tenuous
Fragments by my shrouded window
Stir me from timeless sleep,
Rendering all the world visible
To my eye and pen.
Basho, many sunrises past had awoken
to this banana dawn with insightful Zen eyes
And maybe composed a haiku of sorts;
Or, he allowed this natural renga
To absorb him, he now a fluttering
Cherry blossom on the infinite winds.
Clocks tick as winter chills roam, incessant,
Indicating the lines of life in poor monotone,
Numbering poorly the dynamic, starry renga-bursts.
The old alarm clock beside me just so marks the passing moments,
Resigning each experience into the void of memorial reference,
That in my gained age I might grow nostalgic
Or fearful of the flowing time.
With each hideous intimacy of time’s coursing,
With each rising sun or waxing moon,
Time’s value becomes more and less apparent
As does my misuse of mortal moments:
What seconds have I discarded impatiently to the fell slayer of time,
The mausoleum of all hope and desire – the clock?
Markers of moments, timepieces, contrived or natural,
Have forever covertly watched the turning lines and
The cutting haiku, of my life’s renga.
From my birth moment, I was
Designated as appearing at a specific
Point, judged by heartless hands,
As though my first shrill cries could be
Muffled by the clicking of minute wheels.
The first lightening bug I ensnared in my hands,
A gross salute to the undying clear light in me –
This scene was caught under the obscene
Snarls of the cyclic moon.
In my dawn moments of life,
The directionless wind of time blew
Toward the single sensuous moment I existed in.
Now, aged, wrapped in a businesslike caul of newspaper headlines,
Fluttering scattered toward the single final banana peel of apocalypse,
I recall time not that I might quantify an instant,
But that I might note how long I’ve forgotten its marching.
Basho, his life’s time,
Composed his poems as presented,
Light or night;
He did not slow his course or travels
As his life’s petals floated quietly between the clouds of Tao.
Gently he wandered through the Japanese renga of time,
Peeling golden banana beauty from such moments as he might.
Even his death moment was an occasion for poetry,
as he penned the haiku:
Sick on a journey
Over parched fields
Dreams wander on
Will my dreams, my whimsical conceptions
wander after my passing, or will they be ground
Under the weary wheel of spinning time?
Under Basho’s distant tutelage,
Under the same eternal fading sun,
Under the impression of his continually
Wandering dreams,
I have taken this lesson:
Time cannot be bestially contended with,
Nor should I try to outwit its paces.
I must see through the fog of hours
As the sun evaporates an early mist.
I will fasten myself to the great American renga,
Curl through the poetry of the rivers,
Kiss the new, sickle, and full moons with my focus.
I will see the world as haikus stepping sideways
Through the Void.
Cross-legged,
I sit and watch time and
The valley roll