Walking the ruins
of some old Buddhist
university,
I entered a chamber,
and found myself
confronting a Buddha,
its head obscured by
a bolt of sunlight.
I thought it might be like
one of those Angkor Wat
crop tops from when Pol Pot
had the heads chopped off
all the Buddhas to make
some quick cash.
But the head was intact,
just blotted out by blinding light,
and I blinked my way into sight
of that serene face.
Sun, Rain, Wind,
& other agents of wear
that tear down ancient stones
one grain at a time,
eroding symbolic rocks
carved with symbols
that meant something
to people in days of yore.
And they mean something
to people today,
but whether those meanings
match is another question...
Because our understanding
of past perspectives
is ever eroding:
just like those rocks,
but - unlike rock -
thoughts and beliefs
were wisps writ in a
malleable art: language.
We cling to traditions & lineages,
but everything is erased.
The forest is parted by a line of asphalt. Speeding cars send leaves fluttering. Everything that crosses that road is imperiled by someone's need to get nowhere quickly.
brain numb. voice dumb. a wicked harmonic builds in the core - tuned to volcanically vibrant skies. flash fires of feeling riffle through the body. the tone dials into a whine that bursts into a scream.
sole to cold earth: it's the only way i know the limits of this world. feet pressing into this globe are my tether to reality. any other way, and the world could stretch forever. the feel of my weight, popping to heel or ball: pronating & supinating, rolling & reaching, in dance or destruction -- feet leaving the cold earth always reorient to the planet.
Nietzsche said:
“And if thou gaze long
into an abyss,
the abyss will also
gaze into thee.”
I must admit
the first several times
that I read this quote,
I couldn’t tell if it was wise,
or just had the patina of
wisdom that comes from
parallel sentence structure.
Crisscrossing subject and object
lends a ring of sagacity.
“If you can’t take
Mohammad to the mountain,
the mountain must come to
Mohammad.”
“Ask not what your country
can do for you,
but what you can do
for your country.”
“If you can’t get the carrots
out of the refrigerator,
get the refrigerator
out of the carrots.”
Yes, that last one is nonsense,
but it’s not nonsense like:
“The banana pirouetted fuchsia
all over the underside of
an A-sharp chord.”
The carrot quote probably took
your mind some time —
if only milliseconds —
to relegate to the
trash heap.
That’s why this sentence structure
is beloved by godmen &
politicians: because you can
sound wise even if you’re
kind of an idiot.
So, I was ready to classify Nietzsche’s
quote pseudo-wisdom when I realized
that my smartphone was the Abyss,
and it was certainly staring back at me.
It stared through all the data collection &
neuroscientific and psychological
research designed to keep
a person scrolling.
Maybe Nietzsche was on to something
that even he didn't fully understand.
From a hilltop,
farmland stretches
to the horizon:
parceled into rectangles
of brown, beige, and oh
so many shades of green.
It must be the tropics,
for ripe grain to
coexist with verdant
& fallow patches.
So different from the farmland
of my youth
where all the rectangles
were one of two colors -
because everyone had to
pack into the same tight
growing season.
PREMISE: Princess Takiyasha summoned a skeleton to kill a samurai. MORAL?: "Don't bring swords to a giant skeleton-ghost fight!" CONCLUSION: Yet, in settled dust, the world was less one Princess-witch.
Oh, I've been in that dream:
door upon door to nowhere,
inexplicable nudity,
elements that seem fine
from a distance, but -
from up close - make no sense.
And then I saw the creature at her feet,
and knew I'd never been in that dream.
I can't fathom the genetic cocktail
that would need to be cooked up
to create such a monstrous pet.
And then it hit me that the winged badger-mutt
is not nearly the most disturbing aspect...
What are they looking at?
Upon the ocean shore,
there is a rock:
hard,
black,
porous,
volcanic.
Gentle seas send ripples
against its base.
Stormy seas send waves
to relentlessly batter it,
crashing over its top.
Both the lapping waves
and the crashing waves
cart away parts of the rock --
one unit of grit at a time.
The lapping waves need patience;
the crashing waves need energy,
but they both insist a tax be paid
for their labors.
Just looking at the rock,
one can tell it was once different:
bigger,
its pores filled
with other rock -- softer rock,
rock that the sea long ago turned
into sandy bottoms and beaches.
The rock is dissolving like an ice cube,
except in geologic time.
Tiger Riding for Beginners 