waves crash upon the tetrapods
geysers squirt random whack-a-mole
guess the jet with no better odds
than one over the sum on whole
the chaos wave won’t chase the past,
but finds its line so mean and fast
that one can only speculate
Waking up — but uncertain from what…
-awaking from sleep?
-awaking from wakefulness?
-awaking from life?
-awaking from death?
All one knows is that a threshold has been overstepped.
Something inside feels new.
Something else feels ancient.
But nothing feels the same.
The moment when you’re everything
and are, at once, nothing.
Time exists, but is lost to you —
no lagging, nor rushing.
Space is the world that expands and
collapses with each breath —
the infinity through which you
stretch beyond life and death.
And in quiet moments of mind,
when no voices call out,
it becomes still enough to feel
something within you sprout.
I
the mountain
sets my mind on each breath —
thin-air teacher
II
air rushes in,
but the sinuous seedpod
merits no gasp
III
in the stillness,
my body skips breaths —
sometimes I notice…
IV
in balance —
my mind clear and at ease
stomach gliding
V
watching each breath,
none is the same, otherwise,
all of them are
Patches of pink on army green —
the rhododendrons bloom.
In the hills of Himalaya —
gone the sad winter gloom.
Gone the weight of weary sinew —
the soul begins its float.
We feel the fire of shining skies
as we shed pack and coat.
The body, so still and silent —
nonetheless takes to dance.
The hike’s exhaustion falls away
and one tunes in the trance.
A sage, throughout his cave days,
whiles away the summer nights
in a darkness within darkness.
The tomb-like silence fades into
a faint resonance.
Musty earthen scent becomes
the dominant sensation.
A tomb within a tomb within rocky ground.
And — slowly, at first — his mind spills out,
and spirals beyond the bounds of all constraints.
Until it reaches the cave rock,
and then it sets into the stone.
Whether the rock starts vibrating
at the frequency of bone,
or bone oscillates from contact with rock —
I don’t know —
All I know is that this cave
that was empty save some flesh and bone
is now full.
In ancient days, the monsters spoke,
but were no less scary.
We’ve made pitiful things of the
unicorn and fairy.
No proud, strong beast of horn and hoof —
No spinner of magic.
Our monsters turned into creatures
cute, feeble, and tragic.
Our monsters are now neat, orderly
and oh-so obvious —
in swank suits and epaulets with
delusions of godliness.
People die from skin cancer —
freaking out about nuclear power plants —
but not freaked out about the sun
enough to slather on some sunscreen.
A plane crashes,
and many decide it’s safer to drive —
clearly, they must be among the 93%
who are better than average drivers.
Mosquitos kill five orders of magnitude
more people than sharks,
and yet “PROBOSCIS” is not a movie
that will give “JAWS” a run for its money.
People pride themselves on living in the real world,
and yet…
old bamboo
creaks, claps, and rattles
new bamboo…
once bats hung
on swaying bamboo
now cut down
clustered bamboo,
a dark hiding spot
on sunny days
flex like bamboo
and grow like bamboo —
be bamboo
Don’t bother to bury or burn my body —
just let my bones bleach white.
Throw me in a hole in the jungle —
food for wild dogs, worms, and germs.
Nature’s truth —
a truth painful only to humans —
is that in life we are all consumers,
and in death we are all food.
In nature’s view,
big brains put us no closer to the feet of gods
than does the ancient memory of trees,
the octa-ambidexterity of an octopus,
or the network optimization of fungal mycelia.
We are all both consumer & food.
