COLLECTED POEMS ON BUDDHIST THEMES

3 books, by the author, collected in a single volume

with Concise Introduction to Buddhism

Paul Dolinsky
Searing Sun Press Spencertown, NY, USA

The Concise Introduction to Buddhism provides the reader with a philosophical context for the poems. This is followed by two poems, Home Page Home Base, and The Moment Gods Of Desire which comprise our Introduction to Buddhism In Verse. Collected Poems On Buddhist Themes is composed of three book of poems by the author, Reissues, New Issues, (1997), Conceal, Reveal, Anneal, (1998), and Growing Up Is A Cosmic Thing, (1999). The books were copyrighted as a collection in 2000, under the title, Growing Up Is A Cosmic Thing. Slight stylistic revisions have been made here, to several poems.

Copyright 2000 Paul L. Dolinsky 2nd Printing 2011 Searing Sun Press, PO Box 187 Spencertown NY 12165 Printer: Lulu Press (Lulu.com) Raleigh NC 27607 ISBN: 978-0-557-90974-2 All Rights Reserved.
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CONTENTS Concise Introduction To Buddhism Introduction To Buddhism In Verse: Home Page Home Base The Moment Gods Of Desire Vol 1 Reissues, New Issues 1997 poems FALLING UP AND DOWN TIME AT THE TRACK OUR WORK, AND OUR PERSONAL METAPHORS CAMERA WISE, AND CAMERA SHY FRIGHT PATTERNS AND FLIGHT PATTERNS INSTANT LIFE EARNING OUR DEGREE HERE, THERE AND EVERYWHERE IT'S SLEETING, THE ELEMENTS ARE MEETING THE SPIRITUAL WARRIOR'S CODE PAUL, AS POET FIRST CONCEIT PAUL, AS POET SECOND CONCEIT A BANQUET, HUMAN AND DIVINE MOTHER, WHERE ARE YOU? MAKING SPIRIT DANCE AND SING EARTH CHANGING, SOME REARRANGING NEW FORMS EMERGE, AS CONTINENTS ARE SUBMERGED 15 19 22 27 29 30 30 33 36 40 44 44 45 49 51 54 55 7 11 11

POEMS OF MISSHAPEN MATTER 57 NEW RECORDS IN THE MOONLIGHT? 64 TIME AND MATTER TAKE A FISHING TRIP 65 EDUCATING MOMENTS 69 WHAT IS POSSIBLE HERE? 70 SLOWER GAIT,MORE TIME TO WAIT 75 THE DEADLY SINS SERIES GREED 75 THE SPECIALITY OF THE HOUSE 79 IT MATTERS,YET, IT MATTERS NOT 80 THE PHENOMENAL TREE OF LIFE 86 THE WIND OF THE SUBLIME 86 THE TILLER OF TALES 87 THE VANISHING AND BANISHING 90 ATTACK TIME, ATTRACTING TIME 91 A CHARACTER LESSON 94 Vol 2 Conceal, Reveal, Anneal 1998 Poems BEAUTY TAKES A HOLIDAY STARLIGHT, NO FOOL LIGHT DRAGON SEED MARDI GRAS WHAT IS FAIR TENDER? THE WOLF OF BARE BONES IS YOUR STOCK STUCK? THE FAIR AT THE FAIR IS THE MIND A SENSE US TAKER? HOBBLED TO OUR PEAKS
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95 96 98 100 102 104 108 109 110 116

SHOULD OLD ACQUAINTANCE BE NOT FORGOT 119 CLONING SPACE AND TIME 120 A DENSE DRINK, AND THEN A DANCE 123 CHANNELING THE CHANNELS 125 FUNKY TIME IN NO TIME 126 THE IS AND HAS BEENS 128 TO AN ARROGANT POETRY CRITIC 130 FOR BILL, MONICA AND ALL OF US: A DATED POEM 131 BARGAINS IN THE BASEMENT? 132 THE WORK WORLD 135 PAUL MY EPITAPH 138 vol 3- Growing Up Is A Cosmic Thing 1999 :Poems CLICK, CLOCK, TIME HAS COME BACK TIME, IN AND OUT OF SEASON ETRSUCAN BOAR TALE ITS TIME AGAIN LANDSCAPE AND MINDSCAPE NO VESSELS, NO CONTAINMENT, THE BALKANS, 1999FOR THE BALKANS: SUTRAS AND SUTURES THE PURE LAND
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139 140 142 144 146 147 151 153

SPEEDING AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD STORIES THAT TELL ON THEIR LIVES THE LOG ON A TALL TAIL? THE TINDERBOX FULL MOON FILL UP WITH ILLNES LIES OPPORTUNITY A TV SAGA CASTLES IN THE HAND ABOUT THE AUTHOR ASTROLOGICAL CHART READINGS by ELISE LINDAUER

155 158 161 162 162 163 163 165 169 172 173

CONCISE INTRODUCTION TO BUDDHISM The essence of Buddhism is expressed in the Four Noble Truths. The first three involve our understanding of the nature of existence, and could be expressed as follows: (1) all composite substances change (2) if one is attached to things that change, this causes suffering (3) suffering is due to one's ignorance of the nature of existence, which is characterized by this continual transformation of all things. Because they constantly change, Buddhism views phenomena as inherently empty, or having no abiding. form. Modern physics, with its particle analysis, also describes the physical process of the world in much the same way We suffer because we cling to our desires and get caught up in them. Thus, our suffering is not caused by things, but by our reactions to things. This is not unlike the moral teachings of ancient Greek Epicurean and Stoic thinkers. The Buddhist mindfulness teaching (Dharma) is seen as a palliative to this suffering. Through simple mindfulness of where one's mind and body "is" at any given time, one becomes aware that holding on to one's conceptions and fixed attitudes causes suffering. Thus, we overcome attachment and desire by simply becoming mindful of it, and then releasing it, in a non7

judgmental way. Mindfulness of the rise and fall of desire, and the movement of one's own judging mind in meditation and in activity, is then, central to the Buddhist attitude. Awareness of the world as it is, in the here and now, happens when the cognizing mind is at rest, mindful of the play of desire, and not projecting itself on the world. In one sense, this is Nirvana. Nirvana, in Buddhism, is not necessarily other worldly, like a Heaven. Enlightenment, or Awakening, is the experience of things as they are -- a person's direct knowledge of Reality, without the mediation of the mind or the senses. However, there are stages of Nirvana. One's awareness of the rise and fall of phenomena, in and out of meditation, could become increasingly subtle. One's perception could shift, and the person could experience "Awakening" or "Enlightenment" and perceive the realm of Nirvana -- as the ceasing of becoming which is "beyond" this realm of phenomena. The enlightened consciousness becomes aware of the Unconditioned, which exists apart from the world of phenomena, which is characterized by the rising and passing of things. The person would then have the choice of remaining with this personal awareness and attendant state of bliss consciousness, or try to spread Enlightened thinking to other people.

The Wheel of Dharma contains eight spokes which characterize the pre and post Enlightenment consciousness and life style -right views, right aspiration, right speech, right conduct, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness and right contemplation. The wheel of the Dharma is also known as the Eightfold Path. It is also the Fourth of the Four Noble Truths. We have summarized, then, the essence of the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism -Suffering is caused by Desire which is caused by Ignorance. Ignorance is alleviated when a person follows the Eightfold Path of the mindful life, as depicted in the Wheel of Dharma (see Frontispiece and our description, above). The lifestyle of a person who seeks to follow the Buddhist dharma, or teaching, is characterized by awareness, detachment, equanimity and compassion. The poems in this booklet deal with different aspects of Buddhism, as described above. Many of the poems deal with reincarnation, and its energetics, as it were -how desire and suffering could extend past this life into new lives, metaphorically or literally, based on ones belief about reincarnation. Suffering, feeds new desires, and desires, whether they be fulfilled or unfulfilled, could lead to more suffering, and more desire. But this does not mean that the suffering caused by poverty, disease, and warfare
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should be dismissed as just other forms of desire and suffering. When people are well fed and housed, and feel secure, with their basic needs satisfied, they could better elevate their sensitivities toward helping their fellows overcome major physical and spiritual deprivation. The cycle we described earlier of awareness, detachment equanimity and compassion could continue at higher and higher levels, with people overcoming, for instance, material deprivation through correct practice and mindfulness, then overcoming greed for over-abundance of possessions, etc. We might devote whole lifetimes to practicing different forms of mindfulness, and toward overcoming different forms of suffering, while practicing non-attachment toward gain or loss and extending compassion toward all suffering beings, including ourselves. Most people believe that we are here to learn different lifelessons, and help our fellows along the way. May these poems assist our readers in this task. In the words of the Buddhist blessing, and affirmation, May all beings be happy, peaceful and free from suffering.

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INTRODUCTION TO BUDDHISM IN VERSE HOME PAGE HOME BASE Poetry, our sword of discrimination Cuts the hiding places of desire, To reveal a quiet mind, the unblemished mind, The Buddha mind. At home with itself, and with no other place to go, This mind is enlightened.

THE MOMENT GODS OF DESIRE 1. There are poems on desire, desire satisfied, desire denied. Poems of those who ride their desires or try to hide from them.

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Is there a better way than to double up on pain, Or lose yourself in afterglow of gain, letting the dross from things caress you? Events and emotions Will mold you to their nature, if you let them. Does this suit you, Being linked, unthinking, to things that surround you, To those you choose, those you'd rather lose, And to those that choose you, then, chew you up? 2. You need not wait on things, nor wish for them. In the seriality of moments, there is mutuality. If one learns to wait and watch desires rise and fall, And hold no desire through it all, Things may open toward you, as the words "Open to me" freeze on your lips. Each moment is always new, It staggers out to greet you like a child.

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Disclosure cannot be forced, by command or magic spell, But if your mind is still, things may reveal themselves to you. As the mind grows clear, there will be no darkness nor fear, And when there is no darkness, All is light, the light, which is enlightenment. 3. With mindfulness, go acts of kindness toward all living beings. We all wear each other's rings, and listen as each one sings Their songs of rise and fall, pilgrims, all. With the ascent of sentiency, arose millions of beings, With multitudes of senses and awareness, Each species precious, none specious. And there arose humans, With the capacity for responsibility and awareness, Developing over many lifetimes, Each lifetime spacious, precious, none specious,

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Many lifetimes to observe and get things right, With minds that are quiet and filled with insight. Each moment is always new, It staggers out to greet you like a child.

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Vol 1. Reissues, New Issues- 1997 Poems FALLING UP AND DOWN 1. In change we see the range of all experience, in ceaseless sensation, Is there a winding down of motion, loco motion, past commotion into stillness? 2. Motion ceases, yet, motion never was, Does time undulate in space, An antinomy a panoply, we cannot know. I turn down the volume of the world, But filled with trouble, The treble turns up, And my ego shrill, still from its fall,

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Plays out its full range of nuances, nuisances, all. 3. When we throw ourselves into things, We throw ourselves away: immersion, submersion. We play all the time, high and wild, wild and blind, Filled with trying. fed up with crying We sigh, "From the beginning, nothing is. "From nothing, nothing comes." But the house has the advantage here -We are serious in our play, a serious mistake, And the world, well, does it really mutter matter, mother?

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4. At the altar of each moment's seriality, we watch for an opening, no triviality. But if we seek a birth in a place of plenitude, It means we're still in servitude, And that captivity, is our reality. Planetary service is not for tenderloins or pearly loins, Each Buddha to be learns to wait Through many lives, till there arrives a motion picture showing suffering slowing down and the rise of something finer--

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the still life hidden in the flicking pages of a book once alive, then, pressed, now decompressed The butterfly returns to life refreshed refleshed, Motion, has cast off commotion And has learned both to move and to be at rest. This, for matter is best, A state of blessedness.

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TIME AT THE TRACK 1. If the best is yet to be, Can blessings not be? Song cycles wind down till spring less. Can they rebound without song? As with song, so with people. Plainsong is best song, is lost song, Is song declined, and undomiciled. 2. Where do arrows go When they are sent without a quiver into the heart of song? What are these arrows, where do they come from, and where are they going? Time is a recyler and we are borrowers.

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3. Antinomies: Time is a line, the time line, the lion-tamed line. His roars are trained to coincide With the arrival of trains Into the stations of our dreams. This is our lion of choice. When his voice answers our calls, We become as one. But time is also the noose, The slayer of our dreams, A nay-sayer, soothsayer of delights denied, Of joys and instincts unsanctified, A trivializer, a tranquilizer. 4. Time is the church mouse at heaven's gate,

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From heaven sent, yet, to heaven bound. Time is the great wound which washes our smaller wounds. Yet, the final wound of life is in the womb of dying. A spirit sprints, A body spurts, And proceeds to birth. Another birth, muttered words on earth, Muddied trails and tales, entrails, Entreaties, to no avail. Yet, to tell the truth, The tell-tail tracks of life go on, Past blind bends and pitiless amends. And life passes by the slayer of dreams And leaves him in the dust.

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OUR WORK, AND OUR PERSONAL METAPHORS 1. As every person is born unique, special experiences will each one seek. Every person's stock in trade provides a way For them to view the world. Scientists and teachers examine lessons in terms of progression and regression. A factory worker may view things in terms of seriality, A laborer in terms of mass -how much it makes you bust your ass. A stock market analyst Stretches stocks over ropes And examines their price movement under computer scopes. Ten year, five, one year, weekly and daily patterns Are scanned so that trading strategies Can be planned. Under many lenses, The same stock wears many faces.

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2. Imagine the stock as a clock whose hands touch our daily life, Hands with threads of red and gold. Many colors come and go and new ones may appear before our eyes, As we grow older and maybe wiser. Some threads persist throughout one's lifetime, Some for ten years, others for five, Some last maybe for only a week however dim or bright. We weave and tear, Wash and wear, many times this cloth, Wear it, wear it in, Wear it out, Wear it inside out, Do not let life wear you out. Here, amidst the threads let your mind go And you will surely see

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The hidden seeds in all your deeds, Done and undone. On dusty knees we see our destiny, our possibilities. 3. Extend again. Instead of price patterns See food platters, and paint splatters From special interests over the years. We see our dances with our circumstances, How we are bled and blessed. Our crystallized experiences, these crystal lines of interests and joys, Are our lines of force. These lines must not be forced, of course, They are the love lines of our spirit, the lei lines of our bodies.

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Our mode of experience, the way we greet and meet the world, Will we melt it, or place it on the highest pedestal Beyond harm's way? Metaphor is no Mephisto finger. It is a scanning tool for fools and wise ones, A tuning fork, a Turing machine, a joy toy, A dung stick, a dump truck, a dumb terminal, or smart one. Our trades, our jobs, our special toys multiply our joys And are the multipliers of our souls. They are the multiples of tone which our spirits hear to keep us on the path. Every person is a wayfarer, Every wayfarer is a philosopher Who, in their own voice describes their heretofore, Their knowings and their goings

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Speak, then, in your own voice, in your own way, How life waylaid and wasted you, Or how you bested the various pains and tests. For true wayfarers there are no fares or ferries. Our freedom to choose how we perfect ourselves Is beyond the reach of our teachers, Colonizing academics with their piles of papers. No authorities can compromise our autonomy. But we can be bested by our unlearned lessons, 4. What we decide to share about the world about ourselves, Wear like a proud flag.

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But if we see the world in terms of matter molded and made deferent To suit our preferences, That molting and melting May return to torment us, If we do not cement ourselves to the world In love and trust. CAMERA WISE, AND CAMERA SHY The shutter clicks, the daily picks of life go on. The shutter speeds, our life recedes, A few numbered shots remain, before the final pain. We think a new roll of film will feed that shutter To keep it clicking, and our hearts still ticking. Click, click, But look, The new film has been developing all along, What is and what seems, as in our dreams.
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Click, click, The mind's eye opens, And with no word spoken The eye of the beholder, older and bolder, Steps to the picture, steps into the frame. Eyes close, the shutter clicks no more. Shudder, shudder, click, click What is on the horizon? Our songs, so long.

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FRIGHT PATTERNS AND FLIGHT PATTERNS We take off too late And land too soon. We are confused, Afraid to fly beyond our flight patterns, To overreach ourselves, and teach ourselves a lesson. The hanger is like a manger. We hang bat-like, awaiting flight. The flight attendant becomes a fright attendant Afraid to reassure us, knowing there are no guarantees. Afraid to fly, we stall and fall, The gash on our head cashes us in. Our flight insurance goes perhaps, to one less afraid to fly. Or maybe they will take another conveyance,

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Skillful means of a traveler who lives to tell the tale.

INSTANT LIFE Life in an instant, Instant life, Is still Insistent life.

EARNING OUR DEGREE We have swallowed and wallowed in pearls We are as pearls to our eaters, Who get filled with our heartburn, and theirs. There are no benefactors, only alligators, Who eat our entreaties with our entrails.

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Diminished we are, to the size of a meal, ingested, digested, germinated gestated, no digression, only birth death, and birth again. The eagle and scorpion play with profundities. In scaling heaven we sail past truths. Do not assail other seekers. Do not pander to your lowest, Or panhandle from the highest. "But we were mishandled from the start, Hence birth pangs."

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In such lamentations, matter remains stuck in matter. Is there a way out? Our spirit is split between light and our mixed pedigree, If we work on our nobility, and our aspirational mobility, May we not yet earn a degree, a guide us to our immortality?

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HERE, THERE AND EVERYWHERE 1. Death is our mother, and strife our father. From such parents. where can we go, Before we are impaled on our plows, sowing the seeds of the vintage, aged destruction, Toasting death, never far away? If we leave this farm, how far can we travel Before our plows and our pulleys pull us back, Crack, toward the gallows? If we bark up wrong trees, then desire is the whip. We sing of closures, filled and unfilled, Till we croak. We lovingly stroke the flame that heats us in life And cremates us in death Desire beckons badly,

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reckons even worse, With a whisper or a curse. Desire rings around us like a wagon train, Wagons, filled with desires, To take us, willing prisoners, to the land of more desire. We are led, enslaved, by our wishes. Desires denied, and desire fulfilled Are soon wed, in a marriage of convenience. A veil of tears covers a vale of joy, Each moment, like a bale of hay, Sweet smelling is strung out to dry and die, Food for the senses, Each moment's roundness
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is manicured, then mangled, And to it we are manacled, then cut free and left to die. 2. Who can cut us free? Neither God nor Devil, Only the next moment of desire delivers us from the last Till we are seared by the light of insight, We are the guest at this bake fest. We are smothered alive in each moment's joy and pain, like in a spicy sauce. Then we are ready to be served, to our neighbors To each, their own. Everyone places each other's pleasure In their plate, to please their palate. To our fellow servers, also fellow sufferers,

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To observers, we say, Absurder things do not reside on this planet, Desire by day, extinction by night Desire by night, extinction by day. Desire with its fangs and fantasies eats us daily.

IT'S SLEETING, THE ELEMENTS ARE MEETING 1. Seed, seed, Proceed, We want you to succeed. The mating of the elements is a family affair, A mating of solids and less solids.

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In the cylinder of the hourglass, the elements conspire. They are ignited by fire, A voyage made every moment, which keeps matter afloat, A coming together of elemental particles, Like barnacles on the skin of space, Mother and kin, kiln dried, and dyed daily. Matter keeps on getting molded, won't quit, Bites the dust, bites the hand that feeds it, the earth, clear through to the other side of experience, The dream time. 2. In the dream time, The notes of our images are played to the resting brain, Which cannot test their veracity. Is the dream time the down time of the living?

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Is fantasy time the infanticide of sagacity? "Mendacity is the rule. The ruler always breaks, That is the rule." So does the mind play with our flippancies, as we are flipped, skinny dipped, duped, doped, dropped into our dreams, Can the watch cycle wash us clean We, who watch the wash cycle, The witchy-which cycle? Who is the watcher, who watches the creaking of finitudes, with their fortitudes and formulas, Who romances necromancers, Watches movies, (moving memories not their own),
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And who watches dreams, and romances fights, and fears? Is the watcher like a debaucher, Who butchers silence in her prime, Like bare skin stripped, And undressed of its rhyme? 3. The silence before creation is with us still, Silent and still borne, yet bearing us all, baring none, The Golden Om, unarmed, unharmed silencer Begs alms for this poor world, Unavenging, unpossessing, matter, With its milestones and millstones, Matter, who freely gave himself away, and was neither lost nor found, Was found everywhere, in everything.
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THE SPIRITUAL WARRIOR'S CODE 1. Aspiration, in the spiritual warrior's code: Is a windowless cove, overgrown with silence. Where the head and heart each seek a limb To make the truth live, in living human branches. Aspiration waits to be bled of half truths, wed, bedded, And embedded in the deed. The living dead, indebted, dreaded body Lingers at the sepulcher of speculative truth. It sees false sentinels, false selves, whimpering ministers And sitcom miniseries of half truths which linger on the body, Unable to speak but tempting it dearly.
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One half truth -- the world is full of hate, The other half truth -- the world is full of love. He who says this creates worlds apart. We linger on the fall from grace land, Because of the lovely fruits and fine slits to drink from. Slits, sluts, dust, lust, The lifting wafting, life-rafting voice of Inspiration-Aspiration Floats past the rapids of ribaldry and false sentimentality. We race to recreate in rhyme and mime, In words, like yours and mine, The things we liked the best, since faded with all the rest Of all the deeds of all the people, dead and not dead. It is said, "the best is yet to be." But the "yet to be" is no where to be found,

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So we are beside ourselves all the time, with our shadows, Swallowing and wallowing over our fate. Our dawdling gait takes us to the gallows, The gateway from matter to matter. 2. Let us settle into the setting sun, which suns itself in all its colors, Like a person who beams, brimming with their best-their bodies, their booty, We bring bare breasts, barely breasts, and chests, To show to the sun. Catch a spark from the setting sun Before we settle into the night, Test your mettle, Keep your metal bright. Day goes into night, But leaves some sparks bright. So do our acts, and our reveries become memories,

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Let them not become our enemies. Our lips -- the tips of our love lips -Strike tinder, tender, making birth work, Filling it with mirth, worth, miracles, the best and the worst. In tin-pan alleys of rust and trust We lust for the very heavens, But settle for a croon, a cruller, a swoon, A spoonful of something hot and truly wonderful. On such a cold night Is found the spark of Inspiration-Aspiration. Even in the night, even unto the night, We are warriors of the light.

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PAUL, AS POET FIRST CONCEIT Paul, as merchant, Buying and selling the right stock at the right time. Paul, as poet, Picking the right words, the right rhymes, at the right time, Verse sublime? From stock picks into money, from words into honey, Paul, as jeweler, is no fooler. PAUL, AS POET SECOND CONCEIT New poems emerge, even as old ones are submerged. All my poems compete for my time and attention, like my kitties, Can I outlive my body, even badly?

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A BANQUET, HUMAN AND DIVINE 1. Seeking the holy, with baited breaths, barks, and bruised fists, I bang on the walls of my cell, the cell outside my body, the cells inside my body, myself, my skin, The very cell I'm in. In these unscented, uncentered cells, Unheated, unheeded, perhaps unneeded, I lament, repent, beat out words with my pen, again and again. Not being agile, my good, my God, is caught in The grain of my skin, and cannot gain an exit.

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Imprisoned, impassably, impossibly in my own body, I scowl, and howl. There is much unhappiness here. 2. I moan, mourn and howl at my fate. But I've received an invitation from God To attend a banquet. And so, I sit, beside myself At a place setting, And see a face setting, not to my liking, A bright, reflective plate that would reflect my face, my fate. But oh, that face is not for showing or face-saving, Only nay-saying: Feeling deprived of kisses, I gave hisses without number. Here on borrowed time, time I borrowed from others,

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I devoured my past in this and every repast. And so, in this life, my plate is empty. There is no future save this shiny, empty plate. How can I go on? The face I see is always the face of death. I was distracted by fine dinners and my choice of saucy laments for dessert. Desserts, which I deserve, Are custom works of art, costumed hearts, 3. Knaves we all, with our many knives We tried to stave off death, to starve it, really, But only starved ourselves. Have you tried the draught of peace? The updraft is tremendous
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and buoys up anything that is mean in spirit. So, cast your cup upward and be caught In the great drought of wine Drunk by God, who drugged us Like Jonah in the great fish till we saw Him everywhere He saved us for last, the toast, celebrity roast. So, let us celebrate the empowering of man devoured by God. 4. If man can be God intoxicated, Then, in God will man be digested. We are the food of God, the foo foo playthings, Rumi nating on God.

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But we may learn many things between the courses, Growing more ripe with wisdom and good deeds, And ever more delectable to God.

MOTHER, WHERE ARE YOU? My rudder is stuck, My utters are spent, My uttering, full of stuttering. I am the mother of missteps and mistakes. Is mothering for the best When your children do not feel blessed By a larger principle -The world as home. But the world is not a home But a great un-home, homely, unholy humbug, homeless homebody not at home knot at home,

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Rolling, reeling unfeeling, unreeling Mere frontage an affront to living. Doom and gloom end in death, Birth and mirth, pain and gain, end the same. Toys are but temporary ploys for fading joys, Ploy things in ploy land. Shapely world, misshapen mother, Misshapen world shapely mother, Misshapen world, misshapen mother. Shapely world shapely mother: There is no such option You choose, you always lose.

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MAKING SPIRIT DANCE AND SING What sleighing song tonight, what slaying song, indeed, Where does a dragon go when it vanishes from sight, Banished from space into time? "Dragon, go back to your home, and roam in me no more. Take your sounds, confounded sounds, Round them, yes, round them up, and round them out of me, Confound yourself with me no longer. Go back to your source, for only it can only Contain, constrain and entertain you. "Go in peace, And remain with me no more in lack of peace. "Spirit of Peace, take hold of this dragon, Take care of this dragon For it is born from the source of light and dark.

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"Oh, Dragon, let Aspiration camp on your scales, Let it light your way home. To you, the light is darkness. Therefore, you are in darkness. Use your senses to sniff your way back home. "Follow the true scent back home. Be heaven scent again, be heaven sent, and haven bound. "Remember that all true paths lead back to God. You have lingered here in the realm of the senses too long. Error is truth that suffers, Do not be suffocated, be liberated. "Cosmic Suffering, Cosmic Christ Whistling in the darkness, offers no mean jest or test. "The truth that sets you free is always there and always free, "It is the highest, most sonorous sound that you can sing.

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So sing, don't sink, Sing and fly on butterfly or dragon wings "Let Aspiration be your guide, the golden tone that leads back to God. "So, Dragon, speak in song, Round your roar into a Golden Om, Bend the word of your tongue into the plowshare of that sound, "Place evil on that anvil, Stroke the good into being and into beings, Let just a single spark be lit, a signal for humanity "Moan no more, be alone no more "Join the community of beings who share their brightness "Let the Spirits of Aspiration and Wisdom be with us And the Spirit of Peace, with their huge wings. "The dragon is as a butterfly compared to these, And all the wings are gossamer."

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EARTH CHANGING, SOME REARRANGING On the surface circumambulation waits, Ready to go, in an ambulance driven by humans. But under the hood circuits break, There's much commotion, much loco motion. The ocean depths have sprung a leak that reaches all the way to heaven. The earth changes range from mild to wild. Earth, air, wood, metal and fire all conspire To overthrow the infant monster With his nuclear toys ("for boys will be boys") And pesticides-earth wide infanticide. Gaia, dislodge this baby, with his bad water bath water, His lotions that boil the oceans,

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His digs, his play obscure the way Home for too many creatures. The pristine mist is mystery no more. The ocean floor has seen the light of day And said, "This is not good." He tossed, and jostled the earth. On the 7th day There was no rest. NEW FORMS EMERGE, AS CONTINENTS ARE SUBMERGED Volcanoes, tornadoes, hurricanes, crashing through sea lanes, Earthquakes, the planet awakes. Unable to vault pole shifts Present species depart, false start.

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Shaken and forsaken, as their conditions for life expire, Living beings, in living trust and mistrust, Are borne together toward weather-lined sphincters. New centers, new equations for ejaculation. Evacuation and exaltation arise. Exploding earth's stopper caught in that great hopper, New forms emerge even as continents submerge. Gaia, who has slumbered, perhaps, for eons, unnumbered Awakes and remembers that if there should appear A being who is self-aware, then, for other beings Must this one care. Beware, if the caretaker should hunt down the world, Then the world's most restless hunter will become a sitting duck For imbalances gone awry and toxins running amuck.

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This is the price of short-terms gain for planetary pain, A greedy part, chowing down the whole, Gets chewed out then chewed up. Humans, betrayers of planetary trust Are bested, and no more will they be tested. Yet nature and spirit continue to consort, conspire and inspire, For new forms emerge even as continents submerge. POEMS OF MISSHAPEN MATTER 1. What if all the time we think we have To live, to count and to court, Is really the right amount?

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What would we really do before we spin off into dust, With promises kept and broken trusts? Would we herald our ribaldry, or our sobriety and propriety, As our propinquity to earth approaches? Would we mourn and adorn ourselves The way that others would? Did our traits dictate or advise us? Did our treats trick and trap us? Did we perform best alone or in groups? Consider this: What is taken from us by force will break us, if we let it. But the force of our character is with us till the end. What of the forms that attach themselves to us, Can we surprise and surpass them? Now, let the daily show begin. Gut wrenching, belly dancing, Belle of the Ball, Belle de jour, "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" -

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Bleeding hearts, false starts, Wedding veil, vale of tears, vale of joy. All our toys are the riddler's ploys for disappearing joys. Every person is starched and staring, yet, a star, Shooting through life, Shot from the start, Shot staccato like a shooting star From the great cannon in the sky, Shooting yourself, Overshooting the mark, and overstaying your welcome. There is much understating and underrating of your excellence here. Much shooting and looting of loony life. We check our gear, we check our air, we check our hair, We check with our mate, checkmate.

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2. Consciousness is burdensome. It wakes us from sleep, Bends us out of shape, and returns us to our body for mending. Too much sleep, too little life, Too much life, too little sleep. When tired, we yearn for sleep. When asleep, do we yearn to be awake? Can we learn to be awake, or are we only remote receivers, remotely receiving, promoting, emoting nothing. At the end of the day the light does out, Leaving us wined and dined by the day, And wired for the night. The light suits us, and outfits us just fine, But for what purpose? Everything sleeps

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till circumstances are completed. Every day we hear tunes not to our liking, Ribald and wobbling, slapstick, sharp stick, stuck in the mud. Growling with full impatience, trying to stay awake for a while We listen for A valedictory note, (no promissory note). But it was miss addressed, miss tamped, Sent by mistake, opened in error By Pandora Pandemonium, no blame anywhere, For Blame is everywhere. Madcap matter mad hatter matter, Always the matter, that's what's the matter,

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the world, sunk in disrepair, the moment it was made. Humans, in the "greatest show on earth" Seek the glue of rules In subatomic zoos, But find, instead, The skins of snakes discarded, and sins, always more moltings, and revoltings, Always too much pushing and shoving. Swallow hard, shallows up ahead, Filled up with the shadows of many beings, many allegiances and belligerences. 3. Legerdemain, the show stops, new beings new beginnings old endings.

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Did God toy with our affections? We made us out of matter Matter sleeps till circumstances are completed. When awake and aware, past repair and thinning hair We walk off the stage, moving on the wheel Toward the center Where we are staged and upstaged no more, aged no more, caged no more Unstaged, unstuck Peace, peace, peace Awakens Awareness blinks We think Another play with a new factor, Awakened actors

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No pre-writ script no ad-libs, no big hits Only humans with thinning hair And bodies in disrepair, But so clear and aware that a role cannot stick on them. As they are themselves so can we be ourselves, If we are not frozen in fear, life struck upon losing stage stuck life stuck upon losing stage struck.

NEW RECORDS IN THE MOONLIGHT? It's sleeting, the elements are meeting, mating, Are they waiting, for old records to be broken?

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Can they match the breakers in the twilight, in the limelight in the nightlight of the moon?

TIME AND MATTER TAKE A FISHING TRIP 1. The world calls to us carefully, yet, carefree, But we arrive too late and leave too soon. We see no morning sun, no evening moon. Wounded, We, the botchers, butchers, boxers, The master blasters, masturbators, un self-masters of the planet,

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Apply patches. patches fall off. Like soiled sequins, we are each sequestered in our skins, Suggested glues are tested, but cannot restore us to the world. Torn in our seams, broken in our dreams, we are still born. But as we paste, so are we waylaid and wasted by the world, Like Lot, of old, we are cast out of sin Into time, hard as rock salt, Babbling, we fall from the tower, That teems with intransigence, and inconsequence, Bedlam is our bedrock.

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2. Our tellers, our tillers fall into their tales with a final trill. Each teller signs their hand, The hands are different, but the tales, are always the same. Space requires time to be bountiful. Every generation tries to retire time, But time knows no time-outs, no false starts, no photo finishes. But we photo finish to our finishing school, Where we are fleshed out by matter, Then fished out, and washed out, By time, who comes with the tide and says, "Care for me now, it's my turn to be your child."

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But time c r o s s e s u e us in strange and strangled ways, Misery wastes us daily. Do I speak in paradox, black box speech pox? Time is octogenarian, contrarian, Nay-sayer, incontinent robber baron of dreams. Time is creator and cremator. Time is golden, and a gold digger, Giver of delights and frights, unbreakable fights, implacable foes, Endless woes. Time fills the earth with stowaways, Scurvy starlings, rendered badly by the earth,

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mended even worse, Filled with fears and frailtyDo we ask to be born? Whether expected or accepted We appear. We are here.

EDUCATING MOMENTS Straining out what is to be saved, We seek substance finer than subsistence, Living products of insistence We make ourselves anew with everything we do.

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WHAT IS POSSIBLE HERE? 1. We create ourselves anew with everything we do, Fearlessly accepting and declining Our possibilities, like verbs, And pondering our missteps. At the end lies ruin or maybe a libation, And toast to liberation. We sink steadily to the bottom. Bottom fishing is not so bad. You have a fish's eye view of what is good to eat. "Am I large enough to get eaten? If digested I would digress and regress past this life, Past the spectacle of separate bodies, Of what is yours and mine." So silly, really, that matter is not informed Informed matter is indispensable. Is matter alone defensible, if it has no form for company?

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2. Who lives in this body lives badly, Not succinct enough, and there are all these Regressions, and losses of direction, Mangled periods floating free, Sly reminders of lost causes, And our sentences, our sentient-cies. our false ascendencies. Living in time, always on the edge of dying, We try not to lie to ourselves. 3. The sin of separateness is the first cause Of the universe, first cause, first curse. God's sin made us all sinners And spinners of threads lost in sunshine To sunshine's sweet self, And so we serve the secret mistress, Sorrow,

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Sew her garments So she will mend Time's wounds unending With sweet tending, Ever mindful of bending rhymes to their necessary yoke, The joke of living is dying. Or is the joke on dying Since life persists despite personal mortality. 4. Is reality our wound? Is that our only gift? The wedding blessings on time and matter Trickle down the wounded leg of time, Time fortified Time forgotten Children of time and matter Forever divide the world, the void, Into yours and mine, No obligation or reason to rhyme. 5. Karma, slick and dapper carries no scales, But tarries, wears a suit of mail, Carries a club with nails,

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Nailing us, wailing us, Not shading us, Muttering no mothering words, Except "incessant, insistent mortality." 6. Humans, forever floored by desire, Are pressed down to the floor. flooding accelerant everywhere. Desire stuck runs amuck. Running out of luck, we are run out of this life Into the next. Each moment wears us out. In new lives there are new bodies, New games of gain and pain, Tiny molestation's of space and time, Our advances wear us out.

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7. Our advocate, the Sun, Also a son of time, slides down the horizon Again and again Provokes a race, Gains on eternity, spits out moments again and again, Splinters galaxies with the force of desire Always the big boy wins. The stride of eternity is immense. Time is but a spec, And language are but words. All languages arise and are forgotten. All plans, all planets All manner of creepy crawly thinking and non thinking things, All forms that arise and exhaust the possible, And the sum of what is possible Forever, like Achilles' arrow, do not reach the target, Eternity, who can wait forever, Forever wins the race.

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SLOWER GAIT, MORE TIME TO WAIT Those in the know, who want their speech to quickly flow, use prose. Those of slow gait, with more time to wait, Use poetry and rhyme. Less time to hurry, Means more time to watch things go through their paces, As we bend our faces close to them.

THE DEADLY SINS SERIES GREED 1. I buy low, I sell high, I buy high, and sell higher I buy, therefore I am. My toys have power, they rev my rooftop higher.

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That trill of power, fills and thrills me, Shakes me to my root. I buy more expensively, extensively, More expansively, copiously, Hopelessly in love with them. I preen, therefore I beam. Higher rises the roof beam of my self-esteem, Higher, Oh, what a handsome ransom I would command. 2. Now, luxury is now the ordinary, No adversary can stand against me. But time, who, owes me nothing Owns me, with all my assistants to slow age down, Facials, pills, chemicals, And exercises designed to slow the wrinkles, Not to make me wise.
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I'd have time crawl before me, if I could, And then, I'd have her rise. In her lap I would lie, Time, my bride, and I, Like coins, golden coins, struck together, Stuck together. Finally, fixed and fused into a single golden fixture, Solid and sold To each other, We would spend and extend ourselves, We would lie and lie together, Time and matter, fused into explosion Would be no more. 3. But the flow of goods seems eternal, Like desire. Prices rise, my prizes too. My interest, piqued, Pulls on me, fills me full. On this plenum,
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I am weaned and wed, Like to my own body. Growing old, I abandon time. The lap of luxury overwhelms me, I mount her daily till I die.

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THE SPECIALTY OF THE HOUSE Determining what is special is the specialty of the house. The mind seeks specials all the time, Blue plate specials filled with money And liars for hire, Multi-talent talons and red, red lips. The mayhem changes daily and is always fresh. We wet our appetite and sometimes wet ourselves, For desire can be overwhelming. What is the specialty of the house? The house special is the daily special. For all the staring, starving ones, For the old and young ones, for darlings, and starlings, For all people The special is Live life daily, dearly and deeply. Accept no substitutes, no artifice, no artificial ingredients, no false expedients, Dessert is what we deserve.

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IT MATTERS, YET IT MATTERS NOT One. IT MATTERS, YET IT MATTERS NOT 1. We come from the grasslands, the heartlands, The torn lands filled with tears, The badlands with their headstones. Our lives are like leaves blown apart, and rotting at the seams. Oh, were I a seamstress of men I would sew their souls to their soles, I would make them whole-- holy & happy Oh, I would be caretaker, a taker on of cares and cures, An undertaker who would take humanity under my wing, And let them eat the nectar of fruit. The soul of the world would be their soul, and each would buy joy for their fellows In every marketplace on earth. 2. Now, the caretaker is corrupt, an interloper, In terror gator, inquisitor.

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Sub specie aeternitatis is bound and brought to the tribunal The inquisitor speaks: "What is your name, wench?' tell us what you please, For we will torture you as we please, and you will learn to love it, For the essence of sorrow is joy forgotten. "We just speed up the process of becoming, As we break your bones and tear out your tongue. Why speak anyway? there is no need for confession, For we know that you are guilty of all the things we choose, So there is no need for confession or compassion." 3. The inquisitor continues, "Yet, I beat my skin, As I beat yours, For the sins of the world are endless, an endless reproach to being born. "I approach and reproach you, oh God, For mankind's blemishes are yours made manifest. Every sin is your every whisper made audible.
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We are the manifest effluvia of every dead sea That washes itself, and wishes itself undead. "So, we hail you, Oh God, Lord of Life, Who is also Lord of Death, with the still living mouths of the dying You are dying too, oh God, with every breath we take, And every breath we don't." Death and Life are brothers, twins from the womb of time, Slow and tremulous, life always ends in death. Eternal life is the still beckoning eye of the apple core, Filled with bickering, like worms. Our playhouse is soiled, and we are overripe and spoiled. We die, we rise, we eat again. We are always bumping into the very core of the world, That old whore, whose name is duality, division, Diversity, diversion, perversion, Prayer is no way out. And so, we prepare to enter the vault where time has hung us out to dry

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Time, in so many guises, entices matter to mate, Watches it, makes it happen. Matter, drugged by desire Submits again and again. Time's advances were re-buffed by matter, Till they sparkled, then sparked. A new species emerges, into the grave it goes, Again and again. The fancy man takes a shine to himself, And takes all he can. The cone, the goat's horn, cornucopia, is created and filled Again and again, with seasons and rhymes. There is a whirl, a whip of angels wings, A flight, a fancy, A fight of light and night. time and matter are pushed back Into the womb of eternity. God is free to sleep again. But He's promised to dream no more of matter. For all matter departs from the eternal Forms. Matter, even if taken from the stars,

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is broken from the start. Yes, the word made flesh, the world made fresh every day, Always spoils. Two. It Matters Not, Yet It Matters With fierce determinism atoms freely rebuild themselves Again and again they suffer. the whole subatomic zoo yearns for freedom. Stillness is shallow but filling. Here, swallow some whole The essence of joy is sorrow forgotten. The unmanifest enters the departure lounge, But the arrival date is never set, and so, departure never comes. Stillness, stillness, stillness is the unconquerable essence of all beings. Die into that stillness, for it is your eternal source, Like a sauce with the subtlest of fragrances. Mystery, mystery, mystery Master of life, Master of death, Master of eternal life,
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The must be master of all becoming is peace. Matter feels the final involutionary spasm of life, The last turn of the inward spiral, The final gasp of desire, The last lost truth, before there is neither truth nor falsity, is Slip back into the slow starlight of your birth, Abandoning all thoughts of delight, abandoning all thoughts, never mind Sentencing the day to night, entering the night Iis there life after death? A better question, "Is there light after death?" The color of peace is your color of choice. Matter, mute and silent Crumbles into dust which wafts In the last golden dusk Toward the sleepy God who has promised to dream no more.
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THE PHENOMENAL TREE OF LIFE The tree of our life is a tree of traits, Tricks and treats, Treaties and entreaties, meats And hearts of lettuce, Threats and bets, With all bets off. THE WIND OF THE SUBLIME We must mind the wind, not the wind of our feelings, But the wind that winds through feelings, Graciously wining and dining, Purifying and pacifying them, unwinding, unminding them. The wind of the Sublime is filled with nourishment and rhyme, And is the singer and stringer of all the single strands of time. This wind is your most neglected friend. When you meet her, Your senses are exalted, and your mind is still.

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THE TILLER OF TALES The soil of the imagination enters the fall, After the fall of summer, and before the fall of winter. The fall is before, After, and in between All things. everything everywhere imitates the fall. The fall is a tiller of tales, Is this not the way with us, and with all beings? We feel the tenses of our rhymes, The tension of the future, We feel the unity of the one and the many, Like the tension between scarcity and plenty. We are muskets breathing fire and power, Breathing in and out gives us such vehicles. We birth, berth, breathe, yearn, For the freedom which comes

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With birth and death and the spaces in between. This covers all things in all their ways. Everything lies everywhere, everything everywhere imitates the fall. Between the leaves, between the leaves and the sun The world accelerates and slows, Never settles down for an interview. Everything is measured and immaculate, The pain of birth ceases to be not at all, Our sins are ours alone But ou r skins belong to everyone the fall connects and dis connects us Everywhere we fall into skin Seeking to be one again with all.

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This would free us from birth from that fro lick, In freeform madness, follicles piling in with their Dust and lust, asking all their friends to join. no connubial blues, no mourning coat for you. Seize the fall, fall into the fall, Death, eternally lost and found, Can be reclaimed, refurbished. The Lord of Death dangles death before us. least we decline To be born to be borne again Into life, The fall connects and dis connects us Everywhere. On the banner of life is writ "hurling unto death" On the banner of death is writ "unfurling into life"

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Under the surface Death bubbles and babbles everywhere Everything waits, charged with change, Charged and changed. THE VANISHING AND BANISHING We banish ourselves from the life of the spirit. We vanish into the everyday, and varnish the vanished. We berate ourselves As unlearned, unleavened, unsyncopated Walkers and goose stepped talkers, As overachievers, under believers, money makers and launderers of time. We pace ourselves and race ourselves with the wrist watch, That watcher on the wrist, who twists and trysts with us, As we listen to the band play "Desacralized Time" Out of step and out of rhyme.

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ATTACK TIME, ATTRACTING TIME Divinity prematurely comes and numbs the centers in my body and brain, What pain! Distortions raise a voice and swear. The body, troubled, does not want Such divinity. The lower mind is not a jewel for the higher, But tries to feed off the higher and increase its power. The higher mind does not feel or feed, But senses the suffering of the lower mind And the body. The higher mind does not seek to best the lower But rather to help it be blessed, And to perfect and inspire it. In the tryst, Truth always wins Temptation is a mysterious meditation, Attractive for the duration of a rhyme.

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The outcome is always a loss of time, And unsettled questions. Our lives are boxcars, filled with the hard core Cares of the world, yet, Filled with cures, if we dare to listen. Use me, oh, God, What are my wiles compared to yours, My will is like a dull file. You are uniform, yet multiform, multiplexed, Bursting, ready Reaching a multitude of beings. My head and mouth can barely keep still, For all this bounding energy. When the lower vehicle Is not ready for the onslaught of the higher, There can be much commotion and disturbance. But in "disturbance," "balance" likes within, Waiting, listening for the "la", the "tralala,"
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A trill, a thrill, of divine emotion To harmonize our motion. Divine notes, soothe the spots Where the body does not hear the melody, Migration of delight from site to site Is the way life ought to be. But if we don't get it right, Reincarnation exists, to give our soul insight. No foreign notion, in our core Lie the passages to the possible. Imagine many worlds with many beings With many lives, A logistic nightmare of flight and fight In this life. after many reprieves We give a final sneeze, our spirit is free, And the body goes back to the earth, Free and fancy, prancy,

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We can go anywhere, and Millicent Millisecond Has no more power over our minutes and hours. We go first to the tried and true bowers To relive the tired old hours before the new arrivals. For a while, we rest in the wheelbarrow From which all the worlds take a spill, Spinning out filling infinite space With innumerable rhymes.

A CHARACTER LESSON What is taken from us by force will break us, if we let it. But the force of our character is with us till the end.

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Vol 2 Conceal, Reveal, Anneal 1998 Poems BEAUTY TAKES A HOLIDAY 1. What can beauty do if there are no takers, But only lookers and onlookers, hooked on the gaze. When taken, beauty awakens, As a pocket park in the city displays more beauty, For the gray around it, and the cares within. 2. Take beauty on a holiday every day but payday. Pay her, on that day, with the bounty of a touch. And call back the eternal form from its vacation in a milder clime. Then lay your hands down, lower your gaze, quiet your mind, watch beauty recede, to the size of a dime. slip to where all forms sleep,

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Keep watch, If beauty awakens, tell her to sleep, If you awaken remember, There are no place to go, or appointments to keep. When there is no thinking or dreaming, The form world ceases, and formlessness streams in, no more masters, disasters, misanthropy, philanthropy, only a brush stroke, a blush, finally, a hush.

STARLIGHT starlight, nightlight, lamplight Old jewel light, no fool light, taciturn,
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Above the hill Sees dead star bones, sky watchers, and vultures, Sees matter running out, timed out and fading fast. Where are the butchers, bakers and candlestick makers? Watching reruns in the starlight. Past old films and the making of films, Past the cameras spinning cadences, Past the purgatory of lost stories, Past guilded endings and unguided endings, With characters all in each others fates and faces, plates and palettes. All stories, when purged, Merge into the peerless whiteness that precedes the telling of stories. Glory, glory be After the gore
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And fracture of all delivery systems, Matter, benumbed, benighted, Matter forgot, matter bummed out, Matter, mangled and barely alive Still manages a smile. starlight, nightlight, lamplight lovelight DRAGON SEED Dragon seed bites the dust again and again, Thrown seed, sown seed, dissolved sun seed. What are the seed thoughts of moments brought home to roost, That roast us now, that hunt us down? seeming, preening, dreaming
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As things seem to us, So we seem to things, As we preen before each other. Life sees us suffer, The same geometries In new nurseries and anniversaries seeming, preening, dreaming Each seed thought, fraught with deed, Seeks a firmer body, Grows bolder, presumes flesh, Then assumes flesh like a fresh coat of paint seeming, preening, dreaming When we see the same ink drops on us all, That we are of the same ilke,

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Then will malice melt. and Higher Will sprout up, As our shoots of kinship and shouts of friendship Rise toward the sun and settle toward the earth seeming, preening, dreaming and being MARDI GRAS I sip on my days with nights robusta, And watch bare bosoms burst out, and boundaries laid bare. No neglect of the senses here, just regrets for so few penances, There is much elaboration and ornamentation. We thrive on our basic drive to show off our bounty, Our booty, our body, our beauty with strangers strange no more. Single moments of rapture rupture the everyday,

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Singed singularities of meaning, like songs, Break through the distance. The body, naked and unbound, Shows boundless capacity for joy. Unrepentant senses, like resplendent jewels, Dazzle our distance to others. Spoken words are only token, incomplete and broken, Images are more complete. With munificent gesture, arms and breasts raised to the day, She asks "Will the sun come and play? "Will death go away?" But only the carousal of days comes to stay, As it spins off accompaniment and merriment, Our friend to the end, when our boundaries cease And we belong again to everything else.

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What remains after death? Our fancy for flight takes us past all ravines and raptures, To the darkroom where pictures are made. We enter a birthroom, a humidor, a corridor, We leave as troubadours. We live as long as life will have us. It trusts and thrusts us, singing and stinging, Into the light of night and day. WHAT IS FAIR TENDER? Dasein is mitsein (Being-there is being-with) Martin Heidegger On the station, I watch the trains crisscross and move away. Where is the tender?

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What is tender in this life? Is it near or far? What is fair tender? My gains feed my pains like coal feeds fire, Like Josephs fat cows feed the lean. We feed on our dreams as they feed on us. Dreamer and dreamed We are each others most tender morsels. Is it fair tender to direct our dreams? No, that is conscious dreaming, We seek conscious living. But we shoot at each others, Shooting stars, shouting, barely missing ourselves, messing up our cells, Would we rather sing, not singe each other? Let our moral inventory be the repository of all we hold dear, As we throw our brotherhood tow lines to our neighbors, Of different climes and customs.

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Held captive by life, May we captivate the best of our dreaming, Charm it into being, and ourselves into living. The most human expression of reality is through our morality.

THE WOLF OF BARE BONES I. This was how it was The wolf was sent back, no howls, To shadow box in a shallow box, His chatterboxed, ramshacking room, Where he chased his tail. Again and again, he remembers his reining in, Till, sitting on his haunches He howls at was unallowed.
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Unhallowed, this stifling of his growth, To be made still, was his adversary. His friends were named melancholia, cornucopia misericordia. Now grown up, His coat has tatters of old sensations, and intimations, That prick him now, wear him down, Wear y his coat from the inside out. His life does not suit him, He wishes to be weaned toward something finer, And leave the melancholy of his body behind. But his movements grow chilled, till frozen, he stops, A gargoyle grimace on his face. His pain has a name now, i m m o b i l i t y.

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He is like a star not risen that appears still, But is filled with motion, A star not risen, nor driven, But with its motor running. The only place to go is down, And so the star falls down below the horizon of its actualities, To live amidst its possibilities. Its lights dim, over the town, It has no nights out to take its blessings for a spin. II. The Spirit of Inspiration speaks to the wolf: "Transform immobility into tranquility, And rescue your body from its assault Of debris from the past, from anti-personnel bombs, time delayed, That explode and lace your flesh and delay your growth. "Let noble intention seep into the detention centers
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"That hold your body fast. Let your body neither detour nor deter you, And do not detest your body with its pain. "Deepen your resolve to lift these pinprick points of pain To the stars of day and night. Let all debts be done, detonated with no malice, "And cast into those great suns, Now your source of strength, And transmitters of light and right resolve. "Let pinpricks of pain be points that spread light everywhere, And cleanse the air, like electric hyacinths. "These pinpricks, let needles be, To sew the starlight in, to cleanse and set you free. May new flesh form from right resolve.

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"Watch now, how cuneiform crucifixes of light form circuses of delight from the circuits of the stars." IS YOUR STOCK STUCK? Old soul stock, beaten down blue-chip, Sad story, old story stuck. To get unstuck, sing new stanza Or old stanza with new strings. Strike the cord of the song most dear to you, Slow at first, then raise your voice, Dare to touch a trill, and feel the thrill Of something new and dear, Or old and clear.

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THE FAIR AT THE FAIR So fair, these young women, Bare arms, the breeze in their hair. For the day, my cares go away, To window shop at the beauty boutique And see the feminine mystique, on permanent display. To watch beauty rise, from her archetypal bath is on my path. I am a voyager, a voyeur, a forager Of joys that slip through the cracks of heavens door. I shall be lonely again no more.

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IS THE MIND A SENSE US TAKER? The mind without the senses is dumb... The senses without the mind are blind. Immanuel Kant, (from his Critique of Pure Reason) 1. When the Senses Conquer the Mind The mind is rung, then stung, then strung out and abandoned. It is the last outpost of light, and the first harbinger of night Whose glow lights the way for time and space To enter our place. The senses can ring the mind, and blind and bind her In a wilderness gone wild, from a to z. The senses may urge the mind to atavistically, blindly, crave disaster, escapades, folly, galloping horrifically, insatiably,

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jealously, killing leeringly, maniacally, nauseating, outrageously plundering, restlessly, sadistically, truculent, uniformly, whipping yearlings zealously. Matters muck can get stuck on the senses, Who track it onto the mind and grind it in. Matter, will you return to the jac-olantern Jack of all trades, habitat penitentiary, Potentate of possibility? The mind, who fast forwards and freezes frames Sees, at the end of the reel, the final frazzle of the senses, Which choke the mind with dazzle, and yoke it to desire. And so the mind retreats to its lair to lick itself to sleep, And we continue to track it.

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2. When The Mind and Senses Play Together Like Happy Children The mind is the last outpost of light, And the first harbinger of night whose glow lights to way For time and space to enter our place. The senses can ring the mind and offer her A bounty of plenitude to boost her amplitude In ways that fortify and elevate, from a to z, Letting the mind feel abundance, bounty, color, delight, exuberance, fecundity, graciousness, holy, ingratiating joy, kingly, lovely, ministries, loveliness, operas, pageants, quintessential reccessitivos, stately , timely verse, welcoming yearly zinnias. The mind, perfectly poised on such a trampoline of strung pearls Is given ears to hear and eyes to see All the ways it can entertain and distract itself

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From its true nature. Should the mind, now sense-aware, Deny this sensory repast like Adam and Eve, And forsake the realm of the senses for the realm of the mind? Will the mind say, "I have no senses and I must scream," or will it say, "I have no senses and I am free." 3. The Silent Mind Following the inward stroke, The silent mind shuts the door to the senses, Shuts the outer orbs, the shutters of the mind. The mind shudders while closing its doors, foreclosing on itself. Senseless, the mind feels homeless with no place to go, Like a brilliant star, compressed, depressed And weary of itself. Empty of possibility the mind is full of emptiness,

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Beneath the surface, there are neither thrusts nor parries. In the silent mind, moments march off to war, no more, And they are no longer prisoners of space and time, nor cosmic impersonators. The silent mind is phosphorescent, with no place to go The silent mind wears the glove of silence, And is the beloved of silence. Theirs is the fruit of no possibility The silent mind is one with its horizon. The silent mind is the shibboleth of night. The silent mind is an empty mind. The empty mind is radiant, A redolent riddle spinning on a stick, Good enough to eat, were appetite to exist.

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The empty mind is an infinite monad, windowless, vexless, sexless directionless knowing itself as everywhere and as everyone. The empty mind is the universal mind. The universal mind is the fiercesome fulcrum spigot of pleasure and pain. The universal mind piles up the miles While the odometer remains at zero. It does 0 to 60 in nothing flat (and nothing is felt) The universal mind cohabits with infinite silence, Light-giving and life-giving they lend a hand to the outside world By offering this insight: Hell is not other people
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nor other stars, nor broken stars, nor broken people. Hell is heaven turned Down side Up People can make things better or worse, By offering their neighbors a blessing or a curse. The silent mind is the empty mind is the full mind is the universal mind They litter with the letters of their names, spilling their spelling everywhere. HOBBLED TO OUR PEAKS We rise to the peaks of our dreams, Till we are worn down, and subdued, Made as tranquil as an interlude before we fire the next flare.

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We seek peaks and ranges with our ropes, There to plant our hopes. But our peaks plow us down and mow us under, We, who would lasso the heights Are rounded up, Laced up with our fondest hopes And set out to pasture, Hobbled and humbled, Like a prize pet goat of the mountain peaks. We hear our dreams, But they herd us, and hunt us down. Impaled on our expectations we expire. Will we seek new births, new home fires To fire us up again, To raise up hunters to become the hunted? What is and what seems swing and sway with us, They play with us. Yet, it is better to dance with these two coquettes, Than to march off to wars of conquest.
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If we lie with truth, who trails her veils everywhere, If we entwine the tendencies to deceive and to believe, Then, the truth of that tryst, the twist of being and seeming Is being seen, as in a dream. Ask Thumbulina on the trampolina. Does she tempt you? Get it? get it on, and get off, Or get off and be begetter and begotten no more, Be forgotten no more. The dead are still in debt. But who is not? For unborn, undying one The trampoline is silent. They wear the beads of what is and what seems, They chant the sagas of birth and death from ancient ragas,

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Compassion brings them back, undomiciled and deathless, Self forgot, selfless in the marketplace, They wear their wares, What is and what seems are the pearls of delight For the gods of day and night We are all beings of light. SHOULD OLD ACQUAINTANCE BE NOT FORGOT I see his picture, as from afar, As I see his changes, I see mine. But now, part of the earth, I float above it, not attached. I am free to partake, to forsake, to pine, Or think thoughts sublime. I have left my celebrity roast and offer my own toast, "Here, I am at my post."
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CLONING SPACE AND TIME 1. Events and memories come and go, Will they ever meet again? Seekers search in vain, under old trains, In circuits of the brain, In circuses of the mind. Are there records under old wrecking balls, With new news in old glues? (psst: from the moment of birth each thing cries, and starts to die.) 2. What if scientists move consciousness through new bodies, Or clone the old to make them grow into the new. Things will groan, stay for a while, then grow stale. Will death rest If old minds take new bodies,
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Or play tag with space and time in new multi-dimensional rhyme, Or unravel ancient mysteries, and rewrite histories? The universe has played this game, placing consciousness in new bodies. For reincarnation is an old invention. Life may feel like detox or detention, Before there is retention Of our aliases, our alibis, our ailments, that seem to nail us, (wailing us !) and walled us in, inside and out. But desirelessness must be learned As insight and self-forgiveness is earned, Least successes spoil us, and detachment take a recess. We are bound till we are by Spirit found, Who simply says, "What is is what seems as in a dream."
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We are lost and found, But only if we find ourselves, By keeping vigils with our rhymes, By playing glass bead games neither gladly nor gamely, But not at all. For we play too seriously or deliriously, Ever peering into the universe, Or preening before it In euphoria, holding the latest formula. Better to make old repasts into new composts, And old composts into new crops. Better to make, break and forsake records Than to get stuck on them, as time is stuck on us all. Memories, children of time, live in our minds, And in the light outside our window blinds. If we do not care to wear this fabric Of wash and wear, warp and weave, weave and leave,

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Then this other fabric will we wear, Of fabric ation worn through millennia, Made soft and irresistibly reversible, On one side, the label reads "All is vanity!" On the other side, "Vanity is all." We choose a vanity, and in it, dress most nattily. We sun ourselves in our stunning looks, But touch each other with hands like hooks. (psst: In reality there is no vanity, there is no hell. All is well.) A DENSE DRINK, AND THEN A DANCE Alcohol can make you dense To familiar protocols, And dance gamely or ungainly,
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With new partners -untried parricides, matricides, homicides, even genocide's. The night gets ripe, overripe, over ready then un steady. "Set then up again, Tony, enough of this baloney. I take it on my chin, and it runs down my chin, Sometimes I do good, sometimes I sin, Sometimes I win sometimes not." With density there is a propensity To delve into things obliquely, obsessively, Irresistibly drawn by your deficiencies or delinquencies, To mono cycle spin out of control "I'll kick you or the tires whatever comes near first,

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What bursts from me that is not me, Was maybe there before me. Calcium like, recalcitrant unaccountable, Is it insurmountable? Is there a negative principle, reprehensible, Perhaps defensible, but not invincible? If I fail to see, it may yet draw And quarter me. CHANNELING THE CHANNELS My wife channels the stars, But she also channels the channels, Surfing remotely through the night screen sky. Network stars answer her call, And nightly alight on her drinking cup and her thinking cap.
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From outside the house, I see colors ascend from the screen, And blend with the colors that descend from the moon and stars. What lovely lights surround us in the night. And then, she wonders, "Where will the UFO alight?

FUNKY TIME IN NO TIME 1. It's funky time on Broadway, Gettin' down with the music, Tied up in rhythms without limit, Rhymes without lines. Tied up with no remonstrance, Blind to all circumstance, eyes closed, Traversing the kingdom of the blind, With senses pressed tight against the mind. Neither injurious nor insidious, The libidinous makes us rise To where the music swells,
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And bursts us open wide, Till the song veers off and dies. 2. We are weaned on earth and that is our bed. Our bed may rot and warp us, Or we may wipe it clean. The lyrical is no interloper, But an interlude, Or perhaps a prelude to something finer. At the peak of the song, the notes stand still, And silence manifests, in its manifest destiny, Which is to be, Before notes exploding into big bangs by day, And imploding singularities by night. In silence, There is no clenching of fists, nor fisticuffs, Maybe fractals, Maybe ideas spewing out, forming worlds,
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Maybe ideas alone, bare thoughts, baring none, If the worlds have a mother There is no other Than silence, Who is the ground, to be found When all things are wound down, Urgrund, Ein Soph, Brahman. In dormancy, the enormity of things await. THE IS AND HAS BINS In simultaneity we play. Each thing with its string of happenings Persists, with or without Our permission or insistence. There is no clear order to things. Our histories are of sterility, Though we're smitten by their apparent mystery. And the would have been's, could have been's,
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should have been's Have their own bins, with sharp projections toward the future. There is the bin of happenings that persists in our mind; There is the bin of what never happened That persists in our mind. Where is the bin of what is? Language has its own life, with our watch words -Our wished and fished for words. We are the food for our thoughts. Though we may repent, History does not relent It repeats, its drum beat Beats on us. It can make our old wounds smart like new, But we can make them smaller if we grow smarter. We can barely stand the woe beneath our feet, This gives us hope to say woe be gone.
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We have no other place to go, Our store ies all close at midnight. TO AN ARROGANT POETRY CRITIC His heart and mind conspire To produce a wicked hand, A hand that overplays itself at the expense of those Whose litanies may be cacophonies -textual truths obscured by errant Expressions and failed gesture. But the jester jests in vain With those of lesser gait Who lie in wait With their obscure verse, and obfuscated truths. These cannot obscure their temerity, sincerity And courage for trying To make verse work for them. In an age of spectator sports, spectral truths, dueling competitors everywhere, Decision comes from on high, from Mt. Hollywood in Corporate Logo land.
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We are targeted to consume And to create, so that others may consume. This critic should be chivalrous, not frivolous, And help weak voice along, Help them to grow strong, And turn his maledictions into benedictions.

FOR BILL, MONICA & ALL OF US -A DATED POEM Time can seal us up, Shut us up, Drop us in a cup of skin, Track us through thick and thin, Minimize our virtues and victories, Maximize our deficiencies, And discrepancies with our selves to be, And publicize our deals for dollars. Lolling here at the dalliance party, We are taken in by our has been's, would have been's, should have been's, And we scream as skin off the top
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gets cropped, And fed to others as mythology, or flies to the sky To become new mindscape in a nation's eye. BARGAINS IN THE BASEMENT? In my retirement There should be a refinement of my sense of living, As my tired body Guards my glands from atrophy. My senses diminish. My potencies have become latencies, And my body a penitentiary For senses imprisoned, pressed, depressed, Down to the cellular level. Living in such cells insults us, But what can we do? Whether we lived too well, or hardly at all, Now, the will be's thrill us less, The wannabees little more, Though desire's throttle can still push us to the floor. Things flop and don't flip back. Once we were the potentates of our possibilities.
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Now we inspect the border crossings in our draws To keep them clean. Our hands are clumsy, like paws, Rapprochement with our selves grows finer and finer Till these cease to be studies in clarity. Nothing can be held within our flimsy shelter. Old films collapse, Then, sleepwalker scenes of our old victories, Before the present maladies Caused these to cease to be. Being diminished, We are finished off gradually, with our declining powers. Such winding down Can wear us out. But death is hard to come by, For we lack the skill to die when we close our eyes. So, each gaze seems like the last, And so each is like the first. Our amazement fills us like the glazing on a cake.

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Our borders shrink from the world, Then shrink too. What we thought we had resolved, Instead dissolves before our eyes. What was accessible has now become inscrutable. Our moral inventory is unclear, And has turned away from us. We brought ourselves, throughout the years, Busloads of joys and fears To this great reckoning, Our winding down party. But along the way, We got winded and wounded. Then our lives rescinded, And death descended, Higher Will split us open And we were gone. AFTERWARD: Shopping In The Bargain Basement We miss spent ourselves in bargain basements. Where there were no refunds, only refurbished desire. Besides ourselves, We became sidekicks to ourselves.
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We gave kickbacks to ourselves for self-deception. Our designer clothes became second hand The moment we left the store, And began the stories of our lives. Then, we compromised with truth and lies, Till, by and by, we died. Is this not suicide? What is borne is born again Into the next birth, the next body as berth, But with each breath we take... We make yet Awake... THE WORK WORLD The young ones are like sponges who soak up the sun. Will this spoil them for lesser things? The work world can wear you down, when you've just begun. And you may find, when you are old,
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That it has molded you to its contour, Your vigor to its rigor mortis. Your payday may be the world's pay back time, And it can pierce your play time, even your wed and bed time. The work world May pursue you, woo you, Wound you, wow you over, mow you down, Hound you, pound on you, Plough you under, Rip you asunder, Plunder you, take your thunder. Your youth is like a fancy vest you wear. It flares in your roundabouts in town, And deflates as these missions cease. When your life does not deplete you, When your moments come out to greet you, You will know you have arrived. When you can thrive in any clime,
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or with misshapen rhyme, And see debilitation as in invitation To stretch your mind, And throw your rhyming skills Over valleys and hills, In times of plenitude or servitude, Then, you are the master of your mind. You may muddle through, if you choose. And, if you let them, Your regrets and frets may fracture you, Or chase you, chasten you, Lay you to waste, or chalk you up As a casualty of mankind's war with time. But there is no need to fight If you can find delight in all the things That fling themselves, or find their way to you.

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PAUL MY EPITAPH From the sublime to the ridiculous, From the ridiculous to the sublime He took it all, he tried to make it rhyme.

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Vol 3, Growing Up Is A Cosmic Thing 1999 Poems

CLICK, CLICK, TIME HAS COME BACK If we could turn time back like a computer clock, Each second, unclocked, Would frolic frock free And dance free form, Freed of form, Dance right through the dawn, from form to formlessness And back again from formlessness to form And each second would fall again Into the clock who waits with open hands And the slow ticking of its heart.

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TIME IN AND OUT OF SEASON Time imprints us, impresses us. We touch time everywhere, but time touches us nowhere. Inviolate, with its fantasies intact, Time infuses possibilities with mobility, Gives worlds wheels, and holds stasis back. Time savors the movement from possibility to actuality, And hovers over new discoveries. Whole worlds arise, Like miniseries filled with miseries and mirth, With multitudes of beings who give birth To their perceptions of reality. Each cycle of invention bursts forth, as if from detention camps, Past all hesitations or fears. The years will mount, if we are filled with tears, But if we are spry, the years will fly from us,
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And watch us from the highest perch. What we surmount will touch the earth Like a cock who crows at dawn. I am here, I am one, I am the thought of distant stars. I visit this world as a missionary, as a visionary, I flagellate the old till it free itself Flies away, to heal itself anew. Then, to another world I go. I am here, I am one. another cycle has begun

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ETRUSCAN BOAR TALE Gored by an Etruscan boar, while stranded on a foreign shore, I was no more. Spirit energy takes delight in flight From fantasy to reality, and from temporality to eternity. Can we blessed by what weve done, not done, or wished undone? How many vices can our virtues bear Before they bury us? Synchronicity we may not know with certainty. Our train ride here is short, No round trip through our incarnations To round us out. Instead, while wound up with life, or maybe wounded, We are rounded up,

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And fed to our dreams who graze on us, As they gaze right past us, From this life into the next, We seek the mystery of each souls destiny, And to see past the missed opportunities Of each life. What we wind up with, we always choose. Let us jump Wisely into the mystery Of each souls history. Gored by an Etruscan boar, while stranded on a foreign shore, I was no more.

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IT'S TIME AGAIN Failing, the ravages of age fills me with flailing bits of rage, These fall on the surface of things, Like arms, once slender and fair. Now, the skin has fallen down, like a field of fallen stars. With rebirth, nature tries again. A new particle of humanity, A new vessel for vehicular traffic, And for flight. When the cylinders of life wind down, We fly toward the universal mind, Whose mission is to remand us, and remind us Of the place from which we came, For we play each life, like a game, Too strenuously, And, for real, Foreshortening the rules of the game, till they have changed, Or been forgotten.
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Using technological power, We seek to forestall times progression, And keep the milestones of our lives, From the millstones of death and rebirth, That grind us, as our souls choose, Into shapes we shape ourselves. Cock a doodle do. One life ends, another has begun. In the place of rebirth, there is rupture, rapture and peace. First, there is a swirl, then a swell, A snip , and all is well. One life ends, another has begun, All is well, all is well, all is well.

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LANDSCAPE AND MINDSCAPE 1. Trains to and from the future Pass years like numbered stations unnumbered times. But the doors fly open at will. Tyrannies, victories, infirmaries all pass by, Our seconds, baring none, Leapfrog other seconds onto that landscape, And they push us toward where weve been, The looking glass where we see ourselves, With our shackles on. The broken bones of defeat pile up, like precious booty In plenitudes penitentiary, that sad storehouse of plenty. 2. But if we place our mindscape on that landscape, With a focused will, There will be no devastation, or wars of liberation,
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But mutual admiration, Forest and forager will be as one, We will be at peace with our past, Our parts will find each other, We will find repose from the past, And repast in the present.

NO VESSELS, NO CONTAINMENT : THE BALKANS - 1999 1. In the winding down of the cycle that binds us, In our fiercesome jockeying for position, Promises are but filled plugs for profit, And our munificence is but the manacles of success. For here, all success manuals are buried with their owners. In galleries of plows and ploys we play, Toast each others lives, and share our boasts. Encrypted, we encounter each other, and counter each others
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Philanthropies and misanthropies. We watch this all, mesmerized by hope That a day might exist, that persists without times incessant beat and bleating. 2. Our finitude is filled with decrepitude and ineptitude. Is the icing on our cake but the lining of our graves, Just a place for dreams and fears to play? The new graves that migrate toward human resorts Are filled with these spectral retorts. Let us follow our longings through alchemical beakers That bleach us of truth and lies, And follow our travails into past lives. We trace reluctant saps back to older vessels, To when all was permissible and malleable, like ripe pomegranates hanging everywhere.

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Here we lie before truth and lies circumscribed our lives. Entwined are we in all these possibilities. 3. But the sparkle in dead mans eyes, Is that we survive past what we revere and revile, And simply die. He listens for free will to percolate Through the denser substance of the grave Into the subtleties of our lives. Our choice is always to heal or hurt, To glorify or besmirch each others lives. 4. Is peace but a bitter pill For those who await the start of war once more? Or is peace the ultimate reward for the winding down of strife, Where what is gone stays gone, And whys and wherefores but adorn the pinafores of peace?
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Karma, quiet and dapper, Wears no coat of mail to nail us, or make us wail. Karma rests, and is not sedated. The spirit of peace is elated to see this new human alloy arise, Free of ploys and lies, Heading toward no rebirth, Yearning for nothing, Free of fears and threats of death. This being is destructible and truly free, And is clad in cut of spinners threads, The last threads of the shut down ancient shuttle. Our ribbons of joy and rivulets of tears Now yield to the years and curl themselves around us. And malingerers and Bodhisattvas return no more.

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FOR THE BALKANS: SUTRAS AND SUTURES 1. May we transmute higher mystery from each peoples history and fractures These fortify but do not heal. make us wail and moan, Our backs against the wall. May we keep higher mystery from being mired In what we tried to retire from ourselves, But which tantalized, then tied us up. Will bleeding sutures seal our fate, Or can we teach our fates to wait for us, As we play catch up, Wearied and confused By our victories and falls, triumphs, all. We are the masters of what our masters ask of us. Is there a finer film for our souls?
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2. We are the guardians who learn to guard the good. In this fortress too, are the recesses of our natures, False nurturings, misshapen nursery rhymes, Told my tellers long grown old, their vengeances untold. But here too, are our hopes, however hackneyed and old. Can we seek wisdom in our frivolity and in small daily victories? Can each person be a well digger for their species, A dweller in those pipelined depths, an unrequited air breather, Transmitter through all the depths, and brother to all the deaths in us? May our melodies mollify the beast in us, And help our best to modify our worst. This bursts from the depths, From what on high hides in us, Beyond our pale imaginings.

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THE PURE LAND Is this for me, To be reborn in the Pure Land, for all eternity? My seed thoughts of desire are unexplored and unexported. My baggage is intact, and remains unwrapped, For it has no place to go . The world has exploded, and my desires have imploded. Samsaric realms, without their coverings, are bare, Stripped of the colors they bear. Only the candy stripe of form and formlessness remains To explain it all, Like seasonal moves, from fall to winter, And how winter always finds its spring.

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Samsaric delights abound. Can we push past this palette To see eternity as the sum of what comes, Then ceases to be, and then some, And as a watchful sun who sees it all Who is all things in our minds, and then some, Who is like the sound in our ears that resounds past them. We sign to the source, we sigh, We offer rhymes, We break our silence, and then we die.

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SPEEDING AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD 1. At the wheel of the machine, Humans press the throttle down. They race to dismantlement speed, speed off, then start again, A new machine faster, spews old specs into the dust, As the waste of discarded hastes mount, Human create parts that leapfrog other parts, To become the whole. Human brains, working overtime, Overload the planet with toys and ploys. Wonder is wounded, Then wooed. with broken trusts and thrusts. 2. Elemental beings are weighed down by human wagers And vagaries of action.

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Inventions become detention camps, forced labor for the elements. Nature, detached and detained, becomes mans entertainer. Electrons, eroticized and homogenized, Lead us toward new speed easies. Metals collide in forms more fierce than before, And produce new engines to maximize power. Our brains are on fire. The hardware of the world can hardly constrain us. We cast our desires as far as we can see. Our breath is heavy from forcing hemispheres To do our work. Heaving makes us heavy, weighs us down. So, we lie where we rocked and rolled whole mountains down, Preening the clouds with our desires. Does such merriment fatten us, and flatter us into thinking

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That we are the most resourceful species on a planet, Where the flair for survival is everywhere? This species knows no limits and shows no mercy. Planetary dominance, weighs like a curse on this being, Who would devour all others with insatiable thirst Self enclosed, Self-imposing missionary, He partitions the light of the planet, Till shadows, like swamps, remain.

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STORIES THAT TELL ON THEIR LIVES 1. Events in time float in the mind of beholders Who have grown bolder, seeking truth through millennia. They see speedsters, shysters, oldsters, youngsters, Stuck in old rituals of servitude, Repeating after death their lives, Old resentments, as their accompaniment. These watchers see other beings, once ticketed for speed, Speed past their lives toward the next. Who is right, The repeaters, or the non-heeders? Life now takes a break and waits, As recollection and learning transpire In the intervals between the lives, in the schools of light. Then comes the wake up call, to wake up in the next life.
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And the soul seed proceeds toward birth. Around it whiz its scattered lives, Moments foreshortened by age, or forgotten in youth. Lives and moments, all momentary, Watch each other. Harmonies and discords wait their turn To tell their tale. Trills, trailing their lives, Sound, and each sound Is like a shofar call, Calling forth births and deaths, In their turn, Till it is my turn, this time. Each life, full of wishes, Is like a window dressing, that is wound down At closing time. And so, we die into the interval between lives, Into the schools of light.
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2. Like cars in traffic, our story lives crisscross. Can the highway bear this merging traffic? Past, present, future, Are but temporary lanes for temporal traffic, Till lives pass, And merge again into the traffic swell. Is there cause for alarm, or violation, here, Or an invitation to ride the traffic to its home. Beings midst other beings maintain their circles and cycles, And hold in their vortices votary candles. They wait to see who will speed and who will stall, Who will be waved past it all, Who is the waver, and is there a waiver? Some beings, pushing off their gains,
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Firing up their cylinders, Try for more, or less, Siddhartha as king? Siddhartha as Buddha? Until the off ramp is taken, there will be watchers on this highway, Highwaymen, pedestrians, motorists, equestrians, Some will find found a way, past passing lanes, stalls, and highway squalls, They will enter onto the Peace Bridge, That Bridge of Peace, With light flares, to light the way, For those who seek light in their lives. THE LOG ON Logging on, Seeing the logo, Trying to access the Logos. No response. Is their server down?

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A TALL TAIL? The wife of my life transformed overnight Into my Sweetie cat. Is this misinformation, or was there a transformation? Could the cylinders of life misfire, so deep in the night? The moral of this tale: Love is so divine, It has no abiding place, And finds no dividing place to hide. THE TINDERBOX Youre not a help mate, but a hinder mate, So the relationship is not tender, But a tinderbox. We spar like two boxers Who aim for each other weakest spot. We are like two tiny cyclones on top of two mole hills.
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FULL MOON FILL UP The tyranny of your gluttony, The real ruler is your lack of self mastery. Your spiritual is stuck in your hungry place. You need a star-filled tune-up, But choose a full-moon fill up.

WITH ILLNESS LIES OPPORTUNITY If we do not use our time well, we may be used up before our time, Our rhyme spent on rich merchandise Pulled by rickshaw moments, Whose sum expends, but does not extend or expand us. Let us stretch beyond our aptitudes and lesser appetites, And experience with our higher minds. Let missiles of attainment rain down on us, Become our raiment.

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Let our misses hit us but once, then miss us for good, May we mollify our lower minds with bare bites, Bottom fishing for small pickins, While heaping insights on our plates, May our forebodings not leave us in the lurch, So higher mind will have no need To search for us there, No longer barking up wrong trees, Or confused by ignominies, In place, not uptight, Holding our basket of insights, Our senses are enthralled, then enabled With a scent that blooms Past sentiency toward new ascendencies, Small encumbrances Are but spare change, the tips we leave, For new lives and new births.

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A TV SAGA 1. The TV rules her mind, Roosts on her mind, antenna -like, Feeds her, feeds on her, Then pecks and blinds her. Blindsided, she follows it everywhere, like a new chicks mother. She is not here, and when we speak, she does she hear. She has sprung into an eternal spring of empathy, and fantasy. Like electricity flying off the grid, she is everywhere. Envy, with its fangs Eats her daily. Beaten, will she dare to turn it off? What will she miss? This enter tainment confounds her spirit, And confines it to the space of a gaseous cylinder.

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Silence needs to nurture her, but she turns it off, And turns up the volume of events That require no head phones, and little headroom. 2. The scripts lift us like calipers, then, strip us down, Unsanitized. Our desires are desiccated, Then dissected, wafer thin, And fed to us like corn chips To spice up what weve missed. So, we munch on our dreams, and sip on our lives through silicon wafers. Programs and commercials are rehearsals Of unlived lives, They are other peoples shinings and shadows. Will they swallow us whole, or shadow box with us, Swatches of electrons slashing us

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Through all of selves, programming us Till were everything and everyone, with nothing left undone. 3. Better to get our moorings through glad tidings and tithings in the world, To be a single being, a symphony In synchrony with itself, To see birthing areas everywhere, not living in arrears, Or filled with other peoples fears, To be the star and most sterling attraction, Is to be a stellar being, A source of electrons that revs things up, Or guns them down. The face you face each day, Is the sum of what is fair to you, and of what you fear. Its always yours, always etched into the screen,

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Yet, each day, is always new, A daily special, unforgettable, The winner of all awards, This face is your fate.

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CASTLES IN THE HAND 1. I carry my castles in my hand and work on them the best I can. Can I work through them, Or will I arrive at the other side in pieces, Patched, and barely breathing? I serve at the incubator of dreams, Where I wear my bondage like a tight chemise. I built the life that made me what I am. But it split me open, and then was gone. I have the freedom to do, and the freedom to fail. This travail leads me on to seek new lives. With the master of ceremonies I shoot the breeze, "Who is this being, if you please?" If the Lords of Karma
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can find steeds to please them, So I can win a rhyming game with time, This one time, and claim this life as truly mine. But here are my trademarks, which I have neither traded nor unmarked. They announce themselves in the storehouse of the planets, And crack like fractals everywhere, Like eggs, within the womb of time. 2. An alchemy of gluttony and debauchery may await me. Will I have the temper to weather my impulses, Or will they wear me out? I will choose the proper planets and signs, To best align my possibilities within the new houses of my life. Will my lessons tempt me, or will they mend me? Will my memory desert me past this life?

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Will I collapse my many lives into this one, And seek to balance a fortress upon a single reed, Which will shred into its threads, Each a strand of a life that was? In this life, we may lose ourselves In the hall of mirrors, But we may find ourselves Where we least expect to be, see it all, And seize it all, the secret alchemy Of our destiny.

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Paul Dolinsky is a poet, writer and editor. He holds a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Buffalo, (SUNY at Buffalo, NY) and taught Eastern and Western philosophy for nine years, in a number of colleges, including the New School in NYC. Living in that city, he became concerned with the plight of homeless persons, substance abusers, and persons with Aids, and worked as a counselor for several years. In the course of this work he met Elise, another helper, who is a talented astrologer, and metaphysician, and they married. Paul has also studied psychotherapy, and the healing arts of macrobiotics, shiatsu and reflexology. To these, he adds Buddhism, as a life-form of thinking and being, which heals people by helping them to perfect their attitudes towards themselves and the world. For the last 17 years, Paul and Elise have lived in a quiet rural area, in upstate NY with varying numbers of formerly stray cats. Paul also does free lance writing and editing. He is the long-time editor of The Golden Lantern.com, an online poetry submission site. His websites include Buddhist Poems.com, and HistoryofPhilosophy.org . His email address is pdolan@fairpoint.net.

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ASTROLOGICAL CHART READINGS by Elise Lindauer Elise believes that astrology provides people with insight, as art of a healing process, that involves the mind, body and spirit. She is a talented and experienced astrologer with over 30 years of experience. If you desire. she can incorporate several modalities in her healing work. Elise also has long-term experience using flower essences in natural healing. She practices Reiki, a healing art that uses subtle energies and symbols for healing, which can include hands-on and also long distance work. At no additional charge, as part of the astrology reading, she will share information on flower essences that could help you. The astrology chart reading by Elise is not an impersonal computer printout. It is a personalized reading, based on your date, time and place of birth. This provides the basis of a computer generated chart which she interprets. Readings are done in person, or by phone, depending on your geographical location. A downloadable file of the phone reading from Elises end of the conversation, is available in a widely used MP3 compatible format, soon after the reading is completed, at no additional cost.

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Readings also make perfect gifts, any time of the year, particularly when people are making transitions in their lives, or are experiencing unexpected events. Many types of comparative chart readings can be done too -- between persons, and between persons and towns or cities in which they are living, or to which they are thinking of moving. Readings are also helpful if you are thinking about starting a new job or a business. The charts will help you understand the dynamic of the energies involved, and thus to make more informed choices, like tennis players who adjust their games to the courts and conditions around them. Another way of putting this is to say that charts are no deterministic. Rather, like maps, they help us to understand the terrain in which we find ourselves and the terrain of our own personalities and potentialities. When we understand ourselves, and the ground on which we stand , Right action is nothing special. Astrology can help us gain those insights For more information, or to schedule a personal chart reading, please visit Elises web site, www.astrologyreadings.org .

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