S4 — Breaking Up Is Hard Nondoing Too

It was early in the process of discovery

I knew the two of us would lose each other.

Paradox is not unknown in love.

At first our paths continued, one upon the other,

but soon we found ourselves in the yellow wood.

It didn’t happen overnight and all our efforts

to maintain separating ways together met

with personal effects like alcohol on my behalf

and a drier kind of melancholy in yours.

You finally had the nerve to call it quits

but even that was met with one more year of trying.

It’s over now; surrendering to that which is

can really be a bitch. But that’s the price.

You said that day you liked the middle class

and I was always making light of it.

That’s forever been the case with me.

It’s just my form of self-assessment.

Even though I’m living now without

the greater luxuries I once afforded,

I’m not exactly third-world poor—

thank my daughter and her Major.

This is the present empire after all.

So I know these fears about security,

but I’ve seen you lately follow them

and then convince yourself you hadn’t.

That’s the way of people though, divided.

The path I’ve taken teaches seeing this,

to recognize such separation for what it is,

to know the false as false. That leaves pure being,

not being this or that. And being tells one all that is—

and That which absolutely isn’t takes one back.

Song-stream 3 — Incident on Sky Mountain

There’s a mountain lofty enough

it takes two days to make the peak.

It rises in the heart of a desert

where nomads pray to any passing mirage.

They’re satisfied to dine on scorpions

while downing barrel cactus juice.

They hallucinate of cubicles

floating in a glass of cabbages and ginger

looking at the rain streak the skylight

hoping they’ve secured the windows

in their newly-leased Honda Civics.

One of them flies out the door to check

but strikes the mountain there instead.

Soon she’s in a globe of berries.

The air is fragrant with exacting freshness.

She sees above the ripples of heat;

there’s not an office in her eye.

Half-way up she finds a halfway house.

It’s an edifice she’s yet to dream.

She’s genially greeted at the door

and welcomed with the latest reality

of living rooms and large flat screens

with twenty-four hour interruptions.

Exhausted with the climb, she wants to stay.

Twenty years later, she’s out to catch a breather

and meets a mad man coming down the mountain.

Maybe it’s a mad woman. He raves or she raves,

“You’ve stopped believing in a personal god,

but you’re still believing in the personal!”

and then turns to return to the sky.