Wednesday, January 30, 2013

The Rake

The world is overcrowded, but the dream world
will never be overcrowded. Drag this world again and again,
and no ecological floor will be harmed.
     The epic battles have all been fought.
     There is no need to finish them.
The rake has been sifting through the decomposition for eons now.
Your players grow scales over their eyes until they drag
their fingers over the hewn stone of ancient fantasies.
I will turn your half eaten swords into ploughshares.
I throw dice with the neck of a philosopher.
The dice tumble into the valley of my soul.
The ocean pulls me between a language and a word.

Tuesday, January 29, 2013

Ring Upon Ring

The muscles of my face relax as I contemplate
the next few feet of the climb.
History is a picture of an event between two other events,
a climb between two other climbs. The mountain is a mandala.
Ring upon ring, our path reaches for our relation to nature.
Place the setting in the wild. I'll prove to you that it needs
to be portrayed.
The doorframe is close to a cabin open to all beginnings.
The preparation, the days spent making lists are personal history.
The natural world is forever shaped by human hands
     Once there was a perfect idea, but it had gates.
Our making of the world is only a wish to remove those gates.
A point doesn't really exist. Neither does a line for that matter.
They are only concepts. Ideas are not here to serve us.
In fact, we sometimes serve them. They have many lives
and often change their names. They are stoplights
changing on a dark, rainy night when no other traffic is around.

Wednesday, January 23, 2013

You Are Born

I'm eager to meet you. I hear you're about to materialize.
You don't have a name yet, but that will come in time.
See all these colors. They have names. I will teach them to you.
You are born knowing how to walk.
You are born knowing how to ride a bike.
You will come alive to the names of earth, fire, air,
and water because these are the four classical elements.

You will fill a pair of shoes, and they will take you places.
Look at the sign over there. It says you are about to fall
into a body that was once stardust. In a far land,
you will feel heat and cold for the first time.
You are not that far from the center of the earth.
The sunbeams giving you Vitamin D traveled two minutes
from your closest star. Tonight the stars will rise.
Look at the Big Dipper. That is how it looked more than
two minutes ago.

Every hair on your head is numbered. If you had a twin somewhere
in the world, he might be writing the very same poem.
Did you know that the concept of zero had to be invented?
Did you know that people only started walking for pleasure
in the past two centuries? It's called rambling.
William Wordsworth was the first. The garden of the world
was his office. He was the last poet to speak the language
of the common man.

Language and matter are born teachers. You may want to be
as tall as a tree. You may want to be as unyielding as stone
if that is where your heart leads you. Even grunting and groaning
have a tradition. The singing Neanderthals talked this way.
They put their vocabulary to song to make things more pleasant.
Everything is beautiful. No worries.
     You can feel the presence of a flower or a mountain.
Matter can neither be created or destroyed.

Your thoughts are actually energy from the sun.
Your ideas are making things that can change the appearance
of the world. Doesn't it feel motionless when you're riding
on a train traveling parallel to the freeway.
The best place to walk barefoot is on the beach.
Things wash up on the beach from all over the world.
A sand castle will last if you carry wet sand to build on dry sand.
     Reality is like a film.

There are no continuous actions, only frames.
The few who have traveled the roads of the mind report there
is a point and then another point, but nothing is connected.
These masters leave no footprints behind them,
but what about a novelist like Jim Harrison who creates characters
and listens to their stories. What if you didn't have a body,
but were only a character in fiction? Could you move things?
Could you smell a home cooked meal?
Would you have to eat and drink water to stay alive?