Limestone lumps
Karst columns
Dot the waters,
Like ancient wreckage --
Wrack & ruin
Slung near & far
From coastal homelands;
A landscape torn asunder
And littered about,
But beloved for the beauty
Of its scraggy, weedy
Weathered rock.
A learned man came to me once.
He said, "I know the way, -- come."
And I was overjoyed at this.
Together we hastened.
Soon, too soon, were we
Where my eyes were useless,
And I knew not the ways of my feet.
I clung to the hand of my friend;
But at last he cried, "I am lost."
Being thirsty,
I filled a cup with water,
And, behold! -- Fuji-yama lay upon the water,
Like a dropped leaf!
A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and
nothing strange a single hurt color and an
arrangement in a system to pointing. All
this and not ordinary, not unordered in not
resembling. The difference is spreading.
Lying back on the water,
Peering into a cloud,
I shift like driftwood --
rocking and rising,
rolling and dipping.
As I stare at the cloud,
It seems to stare back.
It drifts - suspiciously -
Or maybe I'm drifting
And it is still --
In truth, we're both drifting,
And neither of us has
The mental energy to be
Suspicious.
Boulders, precariously perched
on the edge of a precipice.
Do the residents
of the huts
down the mountain
ever think of that boulder?
Maybe they thought not being
directly under it would keep
them safe, but what bounce
might a boulder take --
freefalling, tumbling, hitting
outcrops, sliding on scree,
cracking to fragments,
being not spherical in the least,
and so on?
My guess is that they never think
about it... or think about it
every minute.
And in some moment when
they aren't thinking of it...
SPLAT!
Kipling called prostitution
The world's oldest profession.
Now, I'm pretty sure that it
Will be the last, as well:
The last professional endeavor --
The last profitable activity --
That humans do better than
Machines.
Whores will be the last holdouts
To shift from being workers
To being Artists of Humanity. . .
Or - maybe - they will be
The first in that, as well.
He is carved as an
amorphous stone,
Suggesting he stared
into the rock until
any distinction between
himself and the rock
vanished. . .
But the sculptor couldn't
help but add a face.
That's what misery is,
Nothing to have at heart.
It is to have or nothing.
It is a thing to have,
A lion, an ox in his breast,
To feel it breathing there.
Corazón, stout dog,
Young ox, bow-legged bear,
He tastes its blood, not spit.
He is like a man
In the body of a violent beast.
Its muscles are his own. . .
The lion sleeps in the sun.
Its nose is on its paws.
It can kill a man.
liquid hours poured forth,
rolling over rock
& into the sea.
Tiger Riding for Beginners 