Hail Goddess

The flower doesn’t grow itself. 

It takes a seed to raise the stem. 

Without the sovereign ground, 

how would the root appear? 

Water, water, everywhere, 

and who will taste its truth? 

Sunshine is our superwoman, 

fear our only kryptonite. 

All history belongs to her 

despite a battle’s latest lie. 

She’ll always win the war 

because she never has to fight. 

Hail Mary! Hail Parvati! 

All are always hailing love! 

Every flower in the floral 

circle of this wondrous world 

is singing in her laurels.

Ouroboric Samadhi

The yin and yang of snow coats the crazy 

wisdom of ten thousand branches 

and I feel the trees are energetic 

natural appendages of myself. 

This is revelation of a native kind. 

Verily the universe is my body 

and I am the eye of the universe. 

These words are what I see. 

The sky is lit. 

The space around me is a waterfall. 

The ground is opening to unveil 

a fearless dragon swallowing its tail. 

Yes, I am the eye of all 

and all is my intent to see myself. 

Holy alchemy of realization, 

with this poem, all disappears.

Nursery Instructions

Welcome to Conditionland!

Take your face and state your view;

Rather let us form them for you.

Never try to understand;

Fill that void instead with other

Substitutes that give you pleasure,

Never using thought to measure

Thought itself as its own mother.

Always fight for your belief

Even though it isn’t yours.

Close your windows! Close your doors!

Truth is nothing but a thief.

What remains when it takes all?

Who is left to smart and die?

Never question who am I!

Always fall for our free fall.

Being born in thought is being

Dead to being, blind to seeing

That you’re only guaranteeing

Never freeing your own being.

Thoughts like these will stop your thinking;

Stop them now and start your drinking.

Another Pleasant Valley Sunday

I am the leafless river. 

I am the fountain on the brink. 

And when the wind is breathless 

and night has dropped the day 

and all its industry and play, 

I am the eagle eye reflecting 

deepness of the quiet moon. 

Awaken to this revelation! 

See its prophecy alight 

the water into soundless flames. 

Feel its photovoltaic inspiration 

wash against a thoughtless shore. 

And love the intuition of the trees 

dancing in the breeze of being 

all and nevermore.

School Time Images

I was shy at school and during recess stood alone, standing up against a chain link fence, while I watched the schoolyard buzzing with its games of tag or jumping rope or shouting, chanting, laughing, crying, talking. Inside I knew I didn’t have to be that way.

One day, weeks after classroom pictures had been taken, we received a captivating envelope. Inside, besides our five-by-sevens, eight-by-tens, and wallet sized individuals, there shone a wondrous sheet with all the separate photos of my classmates smiling through.

My mother cut the universal glossy into personal existent images and I played with them while sitting on the floor, pretending we were in that busy schoolyard and I was nothing but the center of attention, playing childhood games and being infinitely happy.

Although, there were those times just two of us, me and Joanne Kerry, secreted ourselves away and climbed the coffee table, hand-in-hand, or rather edge-to-edge, and rested by a plastic apple in an emerald crystal bowl, whispering chromatics of our love for love.

In that moment, I would disappear, both physically and descriptively. What remained is now transmitting clouded memories some fifty-four years later—as if I never aged. In truth I see that consciousness was never born, and life is just this lesson trying to be learned.

Resting in Haiku

see through thought

let That do

yeah! yeah! yeah!

An Open Sonnet to the Perfect Future

The polar vortex visited last week. 

It downed three winter lagers while discussing 

consciousness with a Chinese atheist 

who worshipped at the feet of a perfect future. 

She shall have disbelieved her universe! 

Channeling deep sleep, the Weather Channel 

had woken us up to a constellation far 

below our tender surface. Her fame is unknown. 

I will have changed my name if I were her. 

All were grateful that Thanksgiving passes 

once a year. To see that science rests 

within the omnipotence of being is 

distressing to the system. Everything 

beclouded will have been always open sky.

Nisargadatta on Words

Questioner: As I listen to you I find that it is useless to ask you questions. Whatever the question, you invariably turn it upon itself and bring me to the basic fact that I am living in an illusion of my own making and that reality is inexpressible in words. Words merely add to the confusion and the only wise course is the silent search within.

Maharaj: After all, it is the mind that creates illusion and it is the mind that gets free of it. Words may aggravate illusion, words may also help dispel it. There is nothing wrong in repeating the same truth again and again until it becomes reality. Mother's work is not over with the birth of the child. She feeds it day after day, year after year until it needs her no longer. People need hearing words, until facts speak to them louder than words.

Q: So we are children to be fed on words?

M: As long as you give importance to words, you are children.

Q: All right, then be our mother.

M: Where was the child before it was born? Was it not with the mother? Because it was already with the mother it could be born.

Q: Surely, the mother did not carry the child when she was a child herself.

M: Potentially, she was the mother. Go beyond the illusion of time.

Q: Your answer is always the same. A kind of clockwork which strikes the same hours again and again.

M: It can not be helped. Just like the one sun is reflected in a billion dew drops, so is the timeless endlessly repeated. When l repeat: 'I am, I am', I merely assert and reassert an ever-present fact. You get tired of my words because you do not see the living truth behind them. Contact it and you will find the full meaning of words and of silence—both.

Turning to Be

The forms awareness deems to take 

appear to me in space and time 

but that’s a prevalent mistake, 

ridiculous, when my sublime 

nature is seen as here and now 

and all of me I disavow 

as immaterial to one 

spontaneous intent to know 

myself. It is as if the sun 

shone down upon itself to grow 

an oak which turns a leaf to see 

inside the sun it is to be.

Air

division is the air

the world inhales—

violence is the air

the world exhales—

the wisdom of love is the air

that leaves the world

breathless

Baptism of Love

We weren’t religious.

But drinking downstairs all alone one Friday night,

I started thinking who am I to not baptize our daughter,

sleeping upstairs, two years old,

dreaming new identities she could be like Lego characters

assembled thought by thought until

the ever-present inimitable magic of one’s being is covered up

by something old and borrowed.

Every beer was turning me more blue.

And so I tip-toed up the staircase,

passing prints of Andrew Wyeth’s artless landscapes

opening around an empty house,

until I stood above her sleeping peaceful form,

and felt the consciousness we shared as breathtaking love.

Then I touched my finger to my tongue

and prayed she’d always know she is that light of being

that had come into our disillusioned lives

to teach us what we always are.

I placed that finger on her forehead

feeling fourteen billion years as building to this second.

Suffering Through

The world is like an incubator 

growing wisdom in its fervor 

slowly. Some will never see 

through confines of that world because—

there’s not an object to that final 

preposition. There’s no objective 

in the world at all. Such is 

its insight being seen outright. 

There’s only the absolute subjective.

Christine: an Appreciation

She drove that orange Volkswagen like freedom itself. No one would ever know where to find her. That didn’t mean she wasn’t quite striking when around, but only that she could disappear before you knew it.

And her style, beneath it all, was traditional. She had no misgivings about the American Dream other than it should exclude no one, especially women. So it was inevitable that we would slowly drift apart. She veered toward that dream, driven, and I was always swerving away from it, searching.

The only reason we lasted as long as we did was the initial nuclear fusion-like strength of our love those first years. In time, it took the form of our beautiful daughter, to whom she sacrificed much to be a loving mother. Not too long ago, I told her ours was an epic history. She questioned that, and I countered maybe it was more mythological: the marriage of Sea and Sky and the birth of Venus.

Chris passed away on Friday. Imagine the loss of an ocean. And the depth of its absence.

unthinkable pseutra

today's art is tomorrow’s cliché, but truth is no time.

fear of transformation fuels the status quo. imagine what love does to it?

love isn't your all-time favorite default state? what are you thinking?

there's nothing when self-awareness isn't love. isn't That something?

i’m sorry it took me so long to see there’s never anything to forgive.

acting can never keep up with the play.

why, my dear, shall we dare to imagine following the truth. how lovely that would be!

the self intends countless ever-transforming perspectives on itself. should it be anything less?

if non-dual wisdom isn't the alien, what is?

set the alarm for now.

wake up. it's now.

one chooses one. it's only the choosing that appears duplicitous.

it's not rocket science. although it's also rocket science.

one never knows the extent of what the other gives in their relationship because one never knows the limits of what the other thinks it is.

relax. surrender. only the heart knows. and only the heart does.

in the self-awareness universe, it's all about the aperture.

what is an eye? who am i ? two sides of the headless coin.

how many facets in diamond awareness?

what is your original facet?

if an answer can't be seen as a question, it isn't an answer.

what is your relationship with the non-dual?

in other words, try thinking the unthinkable.

life isn't fair. it is and it isn't.

asking who i am is love without question.

Ballyhoo

Black lights above a psychedelic 

roller coaster returning to 

the sea of soy—beneath its rails 

the barker builds banana splits 

and on the midway middlemen 

delight in dukkering amusements. 

The carnival is burning down the town. 

Come see the doubleheader being 

played in three-dimensional 

illusion! Come hear the organ grinders! 

Smell the neon; feel its pain. 

And while you wait in a line to die for, 

taste the floss that’s spun from rain. 

Genealogical Self-analysis

The fear of death 

is just the fear of that 

which one 

essentially has always been. 

My genealogy, 

if traced in truth, 

descends 

the evolutionary scale 

on earth, continuing 

to comets, stars, 

and all 

dark matter coming from that burst 

of light emerging from 

the great unknown. 

Unborn— 

that is my only family name.

Tempest in a Teapot

Imagine all the world is inside-out 

and what you thought was hard reality 

is pure imagination resting in 

a headless head. That picture window is 

an opening within this consciousness. 

Look, chickadees are feeding on themselves. 

Their cerebellum is this space of sky 

and eyes are everywhere it touches. Ground 

is just the edges of a deepest sleep 

from which the branches of some scientific 

playground spread until I see myself. 

My leaves are falling everywhere. My river 

runs through sure-footed galaxies. My ocean 

waves at countless years of soundless notions. 

None of this is what I really am.

On the Reflexive Universe

The pure subjective doesn’t know 

itself—as there is no it 

to know. There is no Mars or Venus, 

no Earth or Moon or Sun, no Big Bang 

to speak about, no words at all. 

This universe of names exists 

within intent of that subjective 

self to know that self. That’s all. 

The light becomes material; 

material evolves to see 

it is the light. And what we call 

this world of suffering is just 

the last throes of an object in 

its education there’s no object. 

This is the point of space and time, 

all necessary for one rhyme.

I Am the Light

The shadow knows it doesn’t know

the light. The light is well aware

there is no shadow in the light—

and all is light. The light proclaims

I am the light of self-awareness!

There is no dark division in

my light; there are no violent nights

within a world of gloom and fear.

Without the shadow of a thought

there’s only light and not some knot

that needs to be untied in fright—

the light is one and all is light.

Proclamation of the Victorious Revolution

ordinary metaphors associate one concept with another: oh! — metaphorical pointers associate one concept with the non-conceptual: ah!

the u.s. constitution was created to establish a corporate structure for, by, and of the oligarchy—the bill of rights was just the sweetener

a strict constructionist is a defender of the oligarchy—anything else needs to work to amend the constitution. that's the way the u.s. works

true libertarians push the limits of the bill of rights

so the entire fdr-lbj-obama care system could be seen as the usurpation of the oligarchic corporate structure by a populist socialist cadre

thus it's not a civil war—it's revolution and counter-revolution

if you don't know there was a victorious revolution, you won't know there's something to proclaim

as deconstruction happens, the glory of emerging light proclaims itself

proclaim the light! that is all.