Rocky stumps jut from cold, mute seas.
Land’s jagged defenders.
From craggy pits gnarled bonsai sprout,
show of nature’s splendors.
Did land break up, thrust from the sea,
or sea eat away land?
And how’d its jolie laide charm bloom?
Rugged and unplanned.
Taken at the Temple of Divine Light, Badachu Park in the Summer of 2008
time may flow
but i’m tethered to now —
one feeling
masterless
puppet of infinite strings,
tied to all
music plays
and I ebb and swell
with no mind
calm & storm
harmoniously layered
in one space
chase it, and
it’s gone forever
be, and it is
I’m told The Kool-Aid Man was seen busting through this wall moments before my arrival, but I can neither confirm nor deny it.
They say, “Don’t drink the Kool-Aid!”
It’s because the 919 people at Jonestown who did so died of cyanide poisoning.
Except they didn’t.
Well, they definitely died, but they didn’t drink Kool-Aid.
They drank “Flavor Aid.”
You see, Jim Jones has been accused of many things,
but not being frugal in the conduct of mass murder isn’t one of them.
Why use the name-brand when everyone is going to keel over by cup’s end?
Now, Ken Kesey did use genuine Kool-Aid in his acid tests —
dubbed “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Tests” by Tom Wolfe —
because he knew the people he was feeding LSD would live,
if, perhaps, zoinked out of their ever-loving Fahrvergnügen,
and he wanted them to have a quality simulated fruit flavor experience.
I’ve been told many times not to drink the Kool-Aid,
but I can’t say that I’ve been given Kool-Aid with anything in it —
well, other than water, a crap-ton of sugar, and whatever Kool-Aid is made of —
which I assume is similar to the non-liquid ingredients in spray paint.
[And no fatalities have ever been proven in building collapses involving The Kool-Aid Man.]
Taken at Reynolds Nature Preserve in Morrow, Georgia in July of 2012
The Buddha became enlightened
under an old fig tree
Jesus prayed in Gethsemane
under an olive tree
Isaac Newton’s epiphany came
under an apple tree
If you can’t figure out how to change your world,
seems to me
you should find a tree and put your back into it.
Taken in 2009 in Tikal, Guatemala
Brightly colored bougainvillea,
topping the stuccoed walls.
A sea breeze blows in from the Bay,
and through the market stalls
From Auroville down to the back-
waters where ships are docked,
Lighthouse beams shone out to sea —
now they’re beacon-topped.
The old churches and the temples,
the stacks of libraries,
Past written in six languages
in the obituaries
Taken on the road from Cuzco to Puno; July 2010
