pack your pack, and travel on
you are but a vagabond
ceaseless wanderer; tempting fates,
searching out unknown city gates
each set you see; how fair they look
til you find them listed in the book
don’t bemoan those past trampled lands
of buildings built or shifting sands,
no place displays itself twice the same
so on your moment, stake your claim
Feeling the steel bridge’s dampened spring underfoot.
Built for a handful of pedestrians,
but currently saddled with 60 —
along with six scooters,
one 125cc motorcycle
and a cow.
The cow is the most capable of insisting that a path
be cleared, and of clearing it.
Yet, in this city of sadhus,
it’s the only one not trying to crawl up anyone’s back.
Though it’s far more intimidating than the sickly, hoarse horn of the motorcycle —
drawn out in the way of terminally ill batteries.
The cow steps when a void opens and stands stoically when there is none.
Time seems to be a different experience for it than for its fellow travelers.
The bovine’s simple cortex knows one rule:
“If you can’t get where you’re going,
the only win is found in being satisfied where you are.”
And now I pray,
“Lord, grant me the patience of a Rishikesh cow.”
The early morning sun warms the silvery shafts of a eucalyptus to a buttery yellow.
That seems a fine bit of grace,
until I see a hawk whose brown cowl is glowing gold in the same light,
as it perches watchfully on the one corner of a dilapidated building
that receives rising rays.
There’s a strange country
tucked away in the mind.
One can stumble into it
without expecting to;
Have you been there?
I remember pounding a drum to echolocate reality.
But the spongy landscape swallowed all sound.
A spastic second of fury and neural fireworks seized me
before I was overcome by the sadness
that terror was my go-to response
in the face of the unfamiliar.
What if I’d decided to be exhilarated?
Could one rise from the dead of living?
And so it came to be that the strange country cracked open,
giving birth to a world anew.
And leaves and rocks glittered with a cleansed glow.
And familiar country was suffused with an aura of novelty.
Whenever I tell anyone that I grew up on a farm,
I get a certain reaction,
“REALLY?”
As if, of all the lies I could tell, that’s the one I’d pick.
You believed me when I told you I’d met the original Hamburglar,
but not that I grew up on a farm?
[Incidentally, I did meet A Hamburglar, but I’m pretty sure it was a sweaty teenager with limited job prospects.]
I don’t really think these people think I’m a liar.
Perhaps they thought farms are like Conestoga wagons and cave paintings,
quaint reflections of simpler bye-gone days.
Maybe they thought their corn chips were grown in petri dishes in a subterranean factory.
[Bad example. Maybe corn chips are manufactured that way, but I’m pretty sure somewhere there is a hose through which good old Hoosier-grown corn is fed in; maybe it’s just defective kernels that weren’t salable to the makers of feed for hulking Angus cattle, but still…]
Anyhow, I suspect they are just excited to come across someone so rare — if in a workaday way.
It’s nothing like meeting Neil Armstrong or Beyoncé,
but rather like meeting the guy who did Neil Armstrong’s tire alignment or who cleans Beyoncé’s fish tanks.
A mundane superstar.
A mythical child of the corn.
“If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” – Emily Dickinson
It’s mean accuracy and angry power that can cleave the top off a head;
neither merely scalping the reader,
nor decapitating him.
Popping the top to blow the mind is samurai surgery.
Some lines tink against the forehead like a dull knife,
while others — with razor-sharpness — succeed only in shearing an unsightly bald spot.
The fabled Taoist butcher could cleanly slice between the bone ends,
never dulling his cleaver,
but that’s not much help for one seeking to take off the top of a head…
or is it?
Will those trawlers haul their nets through the night,
even after darkness has descended?
When clustered stars offer the only light,
and the land-locked day has long since ended?
Are fishing vessels like the dreaded shark,
that swims endlessly when wetted by sea?
No mourning nor merriment owed the dark,
and miles between the hull and the quay.
They persistently glide on ocean tides,
measuring time by space left in the hold.
There’s a secret some sailors will confide,
each outing ends in a death unforetold.
There is the pleasant death of days at rest,
but then there’s becoming Poseidon’s guest.
Public Domain image from Wikipedia
Ninja be nimble,
Ninja be quick,
Ninja knock you on the noggin with a big stick.
***
Ninja be stealthy… healthy… and wise,
Ninja snatch like a snake, pull out your eyes.
***
Biscuit in a basket,
Ninja put you in a casket.
***
Heading home from the archives,
I met this cat who had five lives.
He’d met four ninja in lives past.
One life was lost in a big blast…
two were stabbed,
and the last one gassed.
Reaching home, ninja at his door,
his lives remaining numbered four.
***
Uh, oh, Ninja,
Have you any heads?
Yes, sir, yes, sir,
Three over in the shed.
One for my Lady,
One for my Lord,
One for the practice,
’cause I got a new sword.
***
Eeny, meeny, miny, egg.
Catch the Shogun by his leg.
If he hollers, make him beg.
Eeny, meeny, miny, egg.
***
Hey, Willie Winkie, you’re making too much noise.
Running around town, checking on girls and boys.
If you’d have done your job, and shut the kid up.
I’d not have had to put Ambien in his juice cup.
***
Play it out, like a six-gun Western.
Let the sun hang in the mid-day sky.
Have him search for a cool-water cistern.
Croaking and choking that “the end is nigh.”
Hand him a glimpse of clear, clean water,
but let the mirage vanish into sand.
Trotting up to it as lamb to slaughter,
let him know he’s surely been damned.
Then he’ll succumb to a parched stupor.
The light fades from that cowboy’s eyes.
No spur-jangle of a nearing trooper,
but dark clouds off in the western skies.
A good story would see him wake with droplets on his cheeks.
But this ain’t that kind of story, the desert plays for keeps.
thoughts form & float,
reflections of a gliding bird
over murky pools.
sleeping deeply,
universe? where art thou?
do you rest too?
within my dreams,
i feel the familiar,
but see the strange.
images gel,
but seeking sense in them
sends them hiding.
next car rolls fore,
i yank the parking brake,
halting false back drift.
