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.
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.]
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.
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
sun shimmer,
flashing off the waves,
summer drifts
tall grass,
from green to tawny,
summer’s span
shady creek
between pines and pasture:
sun escape
desolate:
bare soil in clumps and clods;
sun gone mean
far thunder,
rumbling skies and rain scent:
summer storm
There’s an electrical storm in my brain.
You would think it feels of fire and fury,
but it’s cloud flash without thunder or rain.
A winter blizzard of silent flurry.
shore wash:
chasing, and chased by,
tiny feet
crab sand art
alien beach language
’til high tide
dark clouds.
fishing boats race
churning seas
spiked urchin
wedged amid the rocks,
step wisely
low tide
glass sea stretches to
the breakers
Seeing the world through a window,
feels like from a rooftop.
And I cannot help but wonder,
what if the walls went pop?
Most people turn a spigot to control the flow of the informational self. Opening the valve at will, and adjusting the flow as the pipe diameter allows. I have a hammer and a dam. Slamming the hammer into the dam yeilds nothing the first knock, and only a few droplets seep through over next several frantic smashings. Then spews a deluge of stone and water. Fortunately (or unfortunately,) by the time the flood crests, everybody has found safe ground elsewhere — usually.
“One-track mind” is a pejorative label, a criticism of an obsession. But the best one can aspire to is a two-track mind. Track One is what you are aware of, and Track Two is being aware of what you’re aware of it — metacognition. [Some Buddhas may be able to mirror it out to a third level, but not me.] Sure, one can juggle things in and out of Track One like a spastic circus worker, but it’s still a one-track mind. And dialing in Track Two is like tuning into one of those cross-country super-stations back in the radio days. The ones that only came in clearly in the stillness of the dead of night, and, otherwise, tipped into static with the slightest provocation on this spinning, orbital world.
My point is that I require a track for actions that usually take place down below the waterline, in the engine room — i.e. eye contact, smiling, etc. So when my one-track mind is occupied with information flows, I’m staring off who knows where — looking like the person who peers over your shoulder at a clock or at the prettier person he wishes he was talking to — but without recovery, because I’m oblivious to what my eyes are taking in. Worse, sometimes I remember to juggle “make eye-contact and smile” into Track One, and then I realize after the fact that I stared down an interlocutor with a maniacal grin until he excused himself, worrying I might have been sizing him up to make a coat of his skin.
Lest you think me wallowing in the mire, there’s a sweet upside. Under the right conditions, I gobble up and manage information like one of those giant harvesters that chews through a 200 acre cornfield in a day — separating grain and chaff — and stowing it away neatly. And, putting my body in motion, I can dive a mile inside, losing my Self and becoming blissfully enamored with this electric life.
Then there’s that aspect of me that I used to feel a curse, but have come to embrace: my inability to give two fucks about things that drive “the normals” to frenetic lunacy, such as:
I’ve been thought many things:
