Poetics.......
Lifting horn to freshly cleared mind
Cold metal pressed to battered lips
Ears making involuntary adjustments
Air sending sounds to every corner of the room
Sweat streaming down, blinding eyes
Vibrant colors emerge from behind closed lids
Breathing, anticipating
Raising horn in jubilation
Arms moving fast
Thinking, not thinking
In a key, out of a key
Tongue, teeth, lungs, all coordinating to reach new
parameters of communication
Connecting with strangers sitting in darkness
Yelps of encouragement
Applause
Exhaustion
Refuge
Sept. 3, 2000
Hoarding shards of perceptionless vibrations,
Smiling down tirelessly suffocating fears,
Crossing rivers on the backs of formless jealousies,
Climbing over the last dead, rotting insecurity.
There and then, the Now appears
Opening arms so as not to take them up,
Lifting the front end of strollers up subway stairs,
Listening to the silence of the void, before the first note touches the air,
Gazing on the endless power and possibilities of the present.
Witness this harvest of the Now from which such sweet fruit is bared
Glint of night retreating from newly sown seeds of breath,
From behind glass walls, fragile self-esteem steps aside
As soul reaches out, knocking it all away --
Free to connect to the world again,
Sending isolation to its lonely grave
Yet staying vigilant, listening for the next crowding in of thoughts, Unwittingly ready to erect new enclosures.
What's it like to live in the past or future of your mind, I've mostly forgot, Confusing the Now with the fantasy of some other place and time,
Some other experience, never resembling mine.
Maybe seeing where I am right now is not where I'd hoped to be,
But being able to BE that NOW in THIS time and space and KNOW
The transitoriness of a situation and NOT let it determine who I am,
But to know the wholeness of it all
And not be swept away, lost, somehow, in the cluttered musings of some illusion.
This is the lucidity of the immediate,
The arrival of living.
No more prisons of the mind, body or spirit,
No more how-it-is-your-supposed-to-be police,
Rambling, ramble
Slowing, slow
Center, centering
Now, now
The five skandas, both simultaneously present and destroyed,
This is the challenge.
The rich, the poor,
The shuckster, the hustler,
The businessman, the homeless,
Those most proud of being gas guzzlers.
All in need of this Now,
Not simply a bunch of words,
But something once found,
The beauty of which paves a lush path to the infinite,
Transforming the victims of the swamp into the Poets of the Now.
July, 2002
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November Black Goat Tour Poems 2003
1.
Get to the essence,
Resident essence
Flowering on the
celestial byway
of here, there
whatever, wherever
Whenever the Northeast
Corridor recognizes
Its time to reboot
The roofing of the other
2.
Reasons and doubts
Never hurt everybody.
Next rest stop:
Never. Write the
Yesterdays everyday
Academy of higher
sobbing washes out
In the clearing of
The workshop of
the fire of
Tomorrow
3.
Caution, voyager
Bridge the Bristol
River
Blue
With Bebop,
and Jersey City
and too much
time on your
hands to
know this is not
right and that
might be worse
but never knowing
the lesser of
two evils equals
The hot, Biblical Hell
of alternating spaces of
someone else's making
Forgetting the business
of here.
4.
More people are
Buying Fords.
Glittering longhorns
and ferocious
Bucks traversing
The tired ground
of your unrecognizable orb,
Determined to fulfill
their destiny,
Rest assured.
5.
Tower,
Sprockets of unreal
Isotopes short-circuited
By the change
In the electro-molecular
Constraints imposed
By the government of
The people magnetically,
By the fed politicians
Who never seem to
Have enough of
What they don’t know
Enough
About.
Enough.
Tower,
I live in your shadow
Starving for what others
feel entitled to
gorging themselves on,
without knowing,
innocently assuming
the “others” have
the same rights and
all is just within
their reach if they
Work hard, pull themselves up by
their bootstraps
If only. Liberals, new agers too.
Tower,
Your shadow envelops
me,
Saying you are right there
with me,
Until the emergency road
says exit quickly.
And with good reason, too