Confessions of a Metaphysician

I wrestled the moon matrix all night long

As the sea swept away the places I’ve been

To the space of pure mind at the end

Of that container we call the cosmos,

Which is only where imagination fails.

Do we see the same people lifetime

After lifetime because they are family

Or because we dream them, again and again?

Imagination has its limits too,

It needs something to cry to,

Like the moon, that silver serving dish

That spares us all the spoiling meal,

Left to devices all our own, because

Cultivated by beings unknown

Who turn out, in the end, to be us.

What a mind fuck that one, to unpeel

The onion one tear at a time

To find it’s all the same in

The higher realms, just cleared

Like an etch-a-sketch of judgment.

Yet all is seen. That’s the purpose of the thing,

The sealing of the echo off, for identity loop

Reverberation. The holy spheres are yours,

They require only your permission

For admission

But only, it seems, to feel it in

And learn something of what you are,

Not the actual, multi-dimensional host

But the bug in the lining, trying

To bore a hole into the black,

In endless expanse of mind as it discovers itself

In what … it makes up! Not recalled exactly

But called: The power to desire,

That thing control-freak plutocrats

With the compassion of a snake had.

The Human Music

Arcturians know all the pain there is on Earth,

How impossible it is to hold harmonies in form

More than provisionally, how much knowledge lies

Outside the broadcasted frequencies

But their tones are all conflict and resolution,

Like medieval organ music, not a trace of

What it feels like to be here,

Eyes wide and hands full of light.

The perverse comes natural to us.

We find the impossible paths in

To hope amid the forlorn, to dream

Across the concrete, to give birth through grief.

Repentance as Nirvana

At the moment I recognized the scent

Of a need to find an adequate

Symbol the great white bird

Passed from meaning and my roof.

When the spell of others is broken

The residues, of past lives and

Tribes you gave your soul to

Become malleable enough to move.

Still there's the stick

The master hits you with

That removes more than it inflicts

As he raps the marble floor

To scatter the karma

And conjure the benevolent wind

And the breastplates of the terracotta 

Warriors' harmonized with dharma

Although we cringe, at how the outside

Bears down upon the house

And wrap our Easter crucifix in red 

To repent for repentance, dust for dust.

The mercy is seeing how we went off course,

Seeing who we are by what is taken away,

All but the inner quiet 

Has always been empty.

It is holy to let go, that's how

We become clean, repent for all 

By tolerating everything, by believing

They receive enough love

And we notice we are noticing

And can exist that way without a prompt, 

Until the stick no longer comes down fiercely

And we can tell what exists and what does not

And so we transcend the cycle of life

And death, because we have the proof

In a hand that no longer needs to act

And has nothing to prove.

Spiritual Illumination

My eyes are lanterns.

The only responsibility of the light

Is to see.

Form only exists to be created

To share, to merge, to learn the internal:

As outside, so below.

Reflection is not mere resemblance;

I become what I perceive,

Why not God?

I am more non-local than local anyway.

I'm not being kept from truth, simply

Unaware of my true nature.

Light can "be" anything it sees.

What purpose does form serve

Is the question.

Form is more fun than the formless,

That's why you chose it -- it bends to

Your nature: Every barking dog is universal.

Seeing is the same, in truth, as creation.

Form is transient, not the soul. This is the hidden 

Teaching that's been over-explained.

It's time to acknowledge the unreality

Of everything but yourself -- the only thing

You know: Descartes was a female.

Spirit comes through form easily

And does so to communicate who you are

From a higher place you can't, in this form, reach.

So it, too, is a tool to see, 

For light is, as said, 

Only what is seen.

A Moment Before Meditation

All disappointments move to the light

In purifying flame. You just have to let them,

These gnats that you paw, which won't be stricken.

They float in the sun, visible because

They will be taken.

                                     It won't be long 

For the flame to take on something new,

To remind you, how the spiritual infests these weeds

As these weeds inform the spiritual. But there are no

Weeds. Those are only words, for what you choose

Not to be.

                     Isn't strict impartiality 

The one thing you're supposed to be learning?

The Unoverse

Our field is wide

As wide sometimes

As the universe.

Yet it's only me

And my verse

In convergence 

Of how the universe 

Folds like batter

Into one verse.

The grain of sand

Crystal coded

With the all --

It vibrates on the sheet

But cannot harmonize 

The way I do

With tubes of different colored goo.

How can there be difference

When there's the one?

More About Bats

The shaman trains as hanged man in the darkness,
Suspended in a chrysalis of inwardness

To invert what he believed in, about himself,

To learn how the opposite is equally true.

It's not to die the hero's ego death, but know

Who he is, from the other side, sonar, not flight,

The path — before all the bones that crack to the sound.

He's wrapped like a snake Caduceus around the pole

Because he has remembered himself, and he wants

Nothing more than to hold the center that can't hold,

For all is love, at the end of each silver cord.

So the spiral snake wends the needle, to recall

As illusion the error ways, where the not love,

The golden dream, could finally be realized

Via one's chosen hallucinatory loop,

Maelstroms we call them, because it is always fun

To be the victim, suffering is what we choose

Every time. Is it a sin to say we prefer it?

How could we not choose lives of gluttony lust and

Purgatory, for the sheer joy of it, to see 

How far away fair love can appear to be

Like we would compass the stars for a sense of awe.

All the vastness and perfection and cohesion

Love extends, what better vantage point than below?

Exit Ramp on the Van Allen Beltway

The problem with seeing people 

        Is sometimes you see them.

Every eye is a mirror

        And mirrors aren't real

Just a glint of nothingness 

        Retracing the retraction

Back to the eternal subject

        That has no shape or name

In the blind light

                               Where the school of heart knocks

         Tricks you away from dancing free

With a kicked on the way out door

         That can be opened more or less,

Each swing of transactional authenticity

         To learn how you resist one thing 

And the world coils ready to spring

         So say the walking fortune cookies

Who would have you hack the matrix by focusing ...

          How the looking glass magnifies

Before it turns the thing that's seen 

          To dust

Without a stop for popcorn

          Or the nit gnats of judgment

All mystics and Indians know

          Is a crutch.

Gift of the Balsamic Moon

We are limits, not bodies,

Punctured by edits ...

That's the way it has to be;

The thing's not real

Unless seen

In all its glory

By those eyes on every side

Worrying death to infinity.

What we call the real

Mere movie

To a ghost projector 

Who slips the loops

Through dust-mote light.

The proprietor hums

As the audience turns

Stone and blind.

I have always known this,

But now ... now

Its sound is a purr

That soothes the background clouds

To sleep.

The birds wake up,

Try to sound like it,

That is, like me.

Confessions of a Short Attention Span

I'm a shapeshifter 

Of 

The frequencies ...

Now I wear 

A mustard 70's 

Velour

And am observed 

By those I've noticed,

Looked at by eyes

I can't see through,

Unlike the moment 

Before ...

But a moment further

I have Billie 

Holiday from the Black Trumpet PA

And I have her 

3 AM voice,

Always someone else ...

And now the Hell's Angels 

Have taken over 

The pool ...

And Aung San 

Has gone

To jail!

Each thought is a leaf 

I pick and exist

Inside of

If I have 

A place

At all -- 

The all must always 

Be nothing, 

Must even close its apertures

To send tiny packets 

Of universe

Kaleidoscopic with light,

A light that imprints its thoughts 

On the sky 

As time lapses,

The shutter closes,

And the bulb of lived experience

Flashes in a wink

That captures

The afterburn 

Of what is natural:

Everything indistinguishable,

Compressed into some middle

Of a love sangwee,

Not the blessed separation,

That thing we asked for,

Freedom.

The Taste of Sour Grapes

The black ocean

I never knew I desired 

Comes cajoled from a cloud

Of my thoughts in another room

Forever plotting out

What I will do,

How the needle will move,

Always touching true.

The Daily Commute

The guard at the door

     between sleep and waking

Will acknowledge you, if you'll 

     notice

(Though even Google won't 

     give his name),

But it's a hard lock

     at the gate,

Top secret what goes 

     on there,

Save some fragment

     remainders,

Teaching Assignments 

     to chew on

In the waking hours,

     in those moments

When the veil's still

     full of holes.

The moment you pass sleep's

     threshold

What went on there

     is over,

Whatever cities 

    you've toured,

Whatever heights 

    you've scaled,

Whatever plans

    made for you

In waking hours

    to execute

Go through without the glitch

    of your knowing,

They are like sand 

    collapsing instantly 

Except as anamnestic

    toy.

There are no rules up there 

    as rule us here

(The part where I ink

    what disappears).

Too much impossible 

    for the veil 

Not to be kept taut

    by this slave

Who kindly waits

    for my word

To go back to what I know,

   who I am.

Truths of the Half Moon

Forever the black hole 

Forever the eyes

That make it real,

Not because they believe in it

But to experience

What comes next,

The stories they remember

From books long closed, 

The already known

Somehow hidden.

The Divine Humour in Being Wrong

I am not a poet,

That is just some resonance that afflicts

When the Earth gets too much

And people too little ...

But there it goes again,

Breaking that old 4th wall --

I can't escape that I

Or the larger circle of I's

The lack of which

Is the real

Reason I cry.

View from the Stalls

No one cries for freedom

     more than the free

For they only feel the branch

     that holds them to the tree

Not their flight

     against the sky.

She can't see

     the currents that guide her,

How easily they came

     from her mind,

Which is not, of course,

     her mind at all.

That would be the branch,

     stiff and willful,

Despite the bending

     of the laws,

That there is something here,

     anything at all.

Notes from the Internal Debate Society

Did you really think it was just you

     inside your head?

The committee's here too

    just as everywhere else 

And has the same jurisdiction 

    over your will

And when you are gone

    we'll still be together

Arguing, the same ones as now

    from different vantage perches

And different angles of sight

    to argue or decide what's right

With the same fill-in-the-blanks

    that all of us try

To blacken the holes

    of what we don't know

Subtracted out

    from what we think we do.

BPPV at Ascend

Oh those vestibular crystals

That spin in the waves,

Maybe it's Mal de Debarquement 

Or Acoustic Neuroma

This abscission 

Of the wires

With no clear distinction 

Between the senses 

And mind

But the gulf widening 

Between what's perceived 

And what is known,

Like the organs of sense

Can finally admit

They stole it long ago

From the greater brain

As a kind of gift,

An objective world!

But the transducers

In the endocrine 

Are succumbing now 

To the pineal antennae

And the light that drills

Through it;

Times are too large 

For the senses,

The truth too important to risk

To the eyes, the ears, the throat.

Maybe now the visible world

Will be visible.

That Morning Exhalation

The consciousness machine

Adjusts some tuning

At the fork

Where things come to be

But never stay,

As if they won't emerge

Within the conjurer's 

Eye.

It is only our need

To feel

The love

We are.

Response to the Arcturian

It's Family Dysfunction Week

       and everything must go,

How the earth

       appreciates the debris,

The dark tar released

       to the fungal nethers,

The closest thing to brains

       this old earth possesses,

Thoughts fallen like soldiers

       in shame, waste and hubris

Are recycled to new choices

       sprung from the humus,

New choices, is it love, 

       as this jungle will attest,

Or is the darkness

       it's own reward,

The hole too deep

       to climb out of

The only lesson

       of note,

The only one that sings

       "You need to learn."

Juneteenth Observance Day

Free free

     every freed one is their own

                      frequency zone

          the entire world

                            individual

     an old soul

          plays an infantile child

                         an old slave

                 owns gold mines

                                in Ghana

     we're free to create

           everything exists

                                already

           it's only discovery

     the tongue to the ice

                          where each

                 is absorbed

                          in the other

         from desire for itself

     we are every pronoun

                  every astral mite

                             every star

          our life there called light

                  here

                          a brotherhood

                  and I am every ray