I
yellow flowers,
along the trailside,
wave in the breeze;
butterflies flit
with random purpose
II
grazing livestock
trim the trail corridor
golf course neat;
not even the steepest
parts grow out shaggy
III
hear the burble
of the flowing water
where’s the creek?
it’s marsh-like in the grass,
awaiting a naïve boot
They say that every story begins
with an intolerable status quo.
Who it’s intolerable for is an open question.
Maybe it’s the protagonist…
&
Maybe not.
[Some protagonists spend the whole story
trying to get back to that status quo.]
Maybe it’s the antagonist…
&
Maybe not.
Sometimes, the status quo is intolerable to the universe —
(as every status quo must become.)
And every non-blissful moment of living
is an intolerable status quo —
a state in search of [or hope for]
a better state to come.
There was an old woman from Thailand
who lived on a teeny tiny island.
As she increased in age,
she was ever more engaged
in recalling which tiny island of Thailand.
When I was a young boy, earlier than I can remember, I caught hyperqueryitis — a permanent affliction denoted by a propensity to ask “too many damned questions” — or so it was explained to me.
The condition can become exacerbated by certain common treatments — all of which are popular replies of the adult human being, such as:
-“… because it just is, that’s why!”
-“… because it’s always been that way!”
-“… we’ll get there when we get there and not a moment sooner!”
Side-effects may include: the use of words such as: propensity, affliction, and exacerbate; as well as a marked tendency to make up one’s own words.
I
a brass bell clangs
in the old temple yard,
tuning my mind
II
at river’s edge,
entranced by water’s flow —
roused by a chirp
III
noisy forest —
a sudden silence,
roused by a hush
cobble stones & lonely roads
built before I was born
i walk them —
not seeing the ghosts,
and thus feeling that I’m the ghost —
a hot-future injected menace
pumped into a world in which I have no business,
a world whose pace & peace I disturb
i am the ghost of winters future,
and I don’t know how I got here,
but I know there’s no return
Mikey stole a motorbike, a high-revving rice rocket, weaving through traffic, leaning this way and that, quickly dodging the slow and the still, riding toward an inevitable fate, rapidly surpassing any chance for a destiny other than a beastly crash, a tumbling and fiery maniacal kind of crash, one resulting in screaming vehicles and flashing lights, punching their blunt red noses onto the scene, disgorging fast moving men and women with hoses and bandages, pretending the hoses were for the burning machine and the bandages were for the rider, but knowing that the hoses would be all they’d need on this run.
If you want to rewire your brain
nothing beats an arch foe.
If you can drop the stone between
the thought and when you throw,
then you can learn to keep the stones
from forming in your mind —
stop fearing being blindsided,
and love being “side” blind —
maybe jettison the moral
superiority
and all the clambering for a
rank of seniority.
To change your brain, just find your bane,
and learn what causes its fear & pain.
There was a clever salesman from Sri Lanka
who tried to decide on a corporate lingua franca.
“Not Tamil,” Helas said…
“No Sinhala,” Tamil’s pled…
“English? – the tongue of imperial propaganda?”
I washed up on the same shore from
which I had tried to swim.
I breathed so hard, but couldn’t recoup
a face that wasn’t grim.
The currents toyed with me, but then
spit me back on the shore
just down the river from that place
I’d been moments before.
With Einsteinian insanity,
I tried again-and-again.
For every river must change its
ways, every now and then.
