POEMS

In the last fifty years
There are 3 billion less birds living on Earth.
(habit loss, climate change, house cats)
Me, I wasn’t concerned.
Why would birds matter to me?
Here in my Megalopolis, I lived rough on the Street.
Here I obeyed or avoided the law as I liked.
Here I hustled shelter and hoarded stuff…
Once it was all deceit and maneuvering…
Off I ripped… on I tripped...
I got high on whatever… got off whenever I could…
Played the game as a gansta…
I drove around like there was no tomorrow.
I loved sometimes, hurt a lot.
And I was good when I wasn’t bad.

Rolling waves of wind…

This time-beaten house
This building of bones
Me…
I rise in the dark of the morning for zazen...
Rise and am grateful for these solid posts, these beams upholding…
Bones that are bearing the load still.
This flesh, my companion, this vessel, this body of me so travelled…
Has carried my weight across such distances…
Me, me this sagging, complaining bag,
Is grateful for the uprightness as I fold into a decrepit pose…
And dissolve into breath.
And ho!
The divine embrace welcomes me into the everlasting…
Folds me into the unformed…
I enter into the breadth of light, music, nectar.
Ah! awareness floats in the enthusiasm that is life.
All the tired busy-ness that is Buddhism
Is left to lie like the confinement of a coat behind on the floor.

I stumble drunk
unsubstantial, reality in intoxicated wisps blows by.
Such humor
Knowing the finality.
I stumble drunk
The essence of fascination
LOVE
As a fish I drink
My reason cuming divine.

Now I know how to die.
It was raining when I went to sleep.
It was raining when I woke up.
It is still raining here at noon.
I have been sitting since eight
Sitting, being but the boat of breath
Breath buoyant upon this ocean of water.
Do you understand?
Do you realize breath is the basis?
This is the what of why I am…
Life is alight and awake…
Is keen with feeling and fervor…
Life takes guts and grit… is soft and serene.

I might say I’m back, I could.
You might say, however, I’ve gone away.
Yes, I could say now I live away.
I’m back in what was before… in what is… in what seems beyond…
(beyond the bubble, before petroleum, away from the artificiality)
Back in what always is.

Old Poet sits another consumer...
Consuming comfortably in this bland Airforce-Base community Starbucks.
It’s 40 degrees C and we all sit as refugees in the AC.
Old Poet is but another placid non-irritant happily absorbed in the ambiance.
I maneuver through the crowd towards the toilets.
People tell me they are sorry as they move to accommodate me.
I say I’m sorry back.
What is it... in them, in me... that feels in the way, even apologetic?
I encounter this often in America.
“Sorry”.
I am sensitive.
Sometimes I feel what I do is "inappropriate”?
An American reflex.

Life…
To you what is life?

In the Center of Time
There is no-time.
Here silence rings,
Here bliss soaks,
Here love moves...
Effortlessly...
Silently...
Enthusiastically.

Ah, you want to come play?
Want to come and join in…
Come and play the realization game…
Join in with the Divine and play...
Come and double-down for love?
You then must come meet The Friend.
He is a master pilot.
He placed me in his craft... place me in a seat…
Place me in a seat… set my heart into the contoured comfort of the moment....
And I have reached such a relaxation... such an elevation…
An elevation deep within me like bedrock.

Here on this ridge of my home...
Here on this ocean-wind beaten knobby twisted chaparral dense ridge…
My only company is this hawk... this hawk whose company is so aloof...
Is so hard and uncaring…

This creature of the rough dangerous wind…
This wind pushing hard high up here…
Here high above this our canyon.
She shrieks sitting in the first morning sun …
Sits swearing at the world…
Swears enforcing with ferocity her territory…
Swears at me…
Swears at me…because I stand here within it.
I don’t care. I do the same silently.
I live here finished…
Finished with the civilized world.
I did the time… I did the custody…
I was ready…
Now I have been released.

Once I did not believe in bliss.
Now I sit somewhere on the planet in some kind friend’s guest room being menaced by mosquitos…
Drunk, blissed, blasted, drinking in a delicacy of ecstasy…gone from this world… blasted, blissed… given…
Gone.
Given to the gift of belonging to the divine.
Good for nothing but breathing.

You think you’re cool?
Cool? I left you in the dust a century ago.
Maybe life-times ago.
Socrates was cool… Rousseau, Rasputin were cool.
Keith Richards is cool. Basho was cool.
Wally Whitman was way cool.
Would fuck anything that winked his way.
Singing stoned deviates are always cool.
I am cool.

O you of milk cheeks,
O you of great round head…
O you now who are able to drink life…
O you whose divine eyes swim in the liquor…
O intoxicated mammal…
How happy you are to be human.

O it cuts into me…
Your mischievous smile…
Your prettiness beckoning…
You dance in front of me…
You young like a virgin, old like a trusted lover.