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About B Gourley

Bernie Gourley is a writer living in Bangalore, India. His poetry collection, Poems of the Introverted Yogi is now available on Amazon. He teaches yoga, with a specialization in pranayama, and holds a RYT500 certification. For most of his adult life, he practiced martial arts, including: Kobudo, Muay Thai, Kalaripayattu, and Taiji. He is a world traveler, having visited more than 40 countries around the globe.

POEM: The Tao of Being

Dance that mad head-on collision
into that which spins like a top.
Let it roll; but don’t make it stop.
Cleave, but don’t create the division.

Don’t strike out for fields, Elysian;
find Eden in being unaffected.
Be none; be all, & thus connected.

Sometimes, there’s might in precision,
but, sometimes, it kills through indecision.

Heed the Way more than the result.

No one ‘s converted by insult.
Stifle the urge to spew derision.

Moral superiority won’t keep you warm;
it’s just illusion of another form.

 

DAILY PHOTO: Animal Style Kung Fu, Haw Par Villa

Taken in Haw Par Villa, Singapore in October of 2016.

POEM: Harvest on the Farm [Ottava Rima]

My memories of autumn are clearest —
the harvest time, when fields had turned amber,
with desiccated stalks – devoid of spirits.
And in the grain, we children would clamber,
’cause cleaning out wagons was time cherished.
Those short days are now brighter and grander.
It was an age of colossal machines,
and kernels of corn and tiny soybeans.

POEM: Figure

little nubs in a rounded spine,
subtle hollows between muscles;

we lazily build with sharp corners —
corners that don’t exist
in the backbones of beauty
as we know it

graceful curves and subtle transitions
are beyond our capacity to build
but are the only shapeless shapes
that we can truly appreciate

DAILY PHOTO: Inside Namdroling Nyingmapa Monastery, Bylakuppe

Taken in 2014 at Namdroling Nyingmapa Monastery in Bylakuppe.

POEM: Epistemic Hungry Ghost

blocks of knowledge
sit in rubble piles,
having been coveted, hunted, and horded,
they sit in rubble piles

the Epistemic Hungry Ghost
is too busy gathering blocks
to shove and nudge
them into load-bearing
structural integrity

that takes patience & a plan
&
there are too many blocks,
so many blocks —
ripe for the picking —
so many blocks

Who’d have thought learning could be a drug —
a crack-rock addition
with a prettier face
and prettier fidgets?

Spring Blossom Tanka

blossoms fall,

tumbling in a stiff breeze;

on the ground

they form a purple shadow,

ignoring the sunlight

 

DAILY PHOTO: Wasa Aktie Bank Building, Helsinki

Taken in Helsinki in the summer of 2011.

POEM: Visiting Dystopia [Triolet]

I opened up a book to a strange land.
A storied portal let me travel through,
and I looked down an unknown city’s strand.
I’d opened up a book to a strange land.
Here, ironically, all great books were banned
to keep the locals home and quite subdued.
I opened up a book to a strange land;
a storied portal let me travel through.

POEM: Ballistic Art

Nothing redraws itself like a desert.
From day to day, the dunes are ever changed.
Those shifting sands won’t ever revert;
they wander without aim, as if deranged,
needing novel airs as much as the flirt.
It shifts -n- cascades, but is never arranged.
It’s ballistic Art, ever self-sustained.