The river's flux

The river’s flux                                                                                          

We build our life as a settlement on the rocks

praying to be not uprooted and swept away.

Later, it’s more like a drenching in the river’s flux,

attached to our various buoyant debris

until comes the prompting to hold onto nothing

but the river running through our fingers,

abandoning the vestigial illusions of our sedentariness.

Ultimately letting go the idea entirely

of river life as we get a whiff    

of the beyond-conception, shoreless sea.

O child of God, your bread has been cast  

with little time left for its returning. 

Who in the world I am

Who in the world I am                                                                            

The veneer is peeling away,

the finish worn bare,

the glue stiffened into ineffectuality –

I’m coming apart at the seams.

Existence is running everywhere ahead

of my disheartened imagination,  

never for the life of me accepting the idea

of a truth forever beyond my grasp;

an ignorance that not only belongs to me

but which is inescapably who in the world I am.

O child of God, pray that such an imposed humility

might somehow lead to a deeper encounter.

Stage struck

Stage struck                                                                                             

We lifelong bear the terrible onus

of guilt and regret rather than let go

the egocentric notion of autonomy.

Enamored of the gallant figure we portray

to ourselves, living out the pleasure and triumph

of our fictional performances, we dutifully suffer

our roles also in their inevitable tragedies,

unwilling to entertain the notion of true vulnerability,

concede any of our imagined power

to the drama’s author and director.

Not when we have the starring role

and our stage name is at the top of the marquee.

O child of God, step off the footlight edge

and tumble into oblivion.

Your only chance

Your only chance                                                                                     

We crave choice having not asked

for birth or death; choosing not the realm

into which we are tossed

and must so inelegantly depart.

Left out of the big choices

we covet the petty ones,

gather them to our breasts,

refuse to share power

real or imagined and rankle

under the yoke of necessity.

Only self chooses, if choices are made,

choosing itself over and over

while all the genuine Masters

point to renunciation and surrender.

O child of God, your only chance at freedom

is the unremitting commitment to become a slave.

Apple-cheeked son

Apple-cheeked son                                                                                  

Perfect is the poem until the book is cracked,

meaning, structure and value imposed from without;

shut even for a moment and it returns

to its original apple-bright perfection –

unassailable unity, aptness and utility, 

where it has no value; doesn’t mean a thing. 

But seized and probed, quoted and exploited,

read assiduously between the lines,

its meaningless perfection is (only) seemingly

destroyed by the critical reader’s

inherent self-serving needs and fantasies,

leaving the poem then to wither like fruit

carelessly  tossed aside in the pristine, original

garden state of non-attachment.

O child of God, you are also the long lost

apple-cheeked son of Adam and Eve.

The land of Nod

The land of Nod                                                                                       

When the umbilical cord is cut --

our original attachment, not just to mother

but also Father, to any other --

the wound is so deep and great,

rarely does it heal over a lifetime.

Wandering the land of Nod

in hope of a poultice,

a concoction of ultimate remedy.

Over the aeons, we have gotten plastered

by every voodoo cure, herb and root,

mustard seed and devil’s club;

chased the old wives’ tales

around every bend and corner

and come up empty and hurting,

none the wiser and further

impaired deeper in the core

where it all begins and never leaves,

where the world’s cataplasm cannot reach.

So the dog chases its tail, the tale of human history,

unable it seems, to turn and face the truth

of our permanently attached oneness

and our hidden-in-plain-view non-existence.

O child of God, you and I are not we but One

means the notion of you must be abandoned.

Portrait

Portrait                                                                                                     

A charcoal portrait which represents me

as much as apparently anything else,

all down on paper in black and white;

stationary lines arc and wriggle,

twist and flow, crafting brows,

hairlines and facial features.

I’m the empty space, I suppose,

sketchy, binary, insinuated;

formed and shaped

by shades of black and gray.

The black is my ignorance – 

overwhelming; peripheral; defining.

The white is my emptiness

at center stage, the light’s facsimile.

I become visible where there is nothing,

allowing the backdrop to seep through.

Having mislocated myself, I cleave desperately

to the ignorance that appears to define me.

O child of God, why not lose yourself

in the vast benevolence of God?

(drawing by Rich Panico)

Of Thy peace

Of Thy peace                                                                                           

Make me an instrument of Thy peace,

o Lord, Saint Francis requested.

I often feel like an instrument.  Not of peace, 

but chaos, incongruity, surreality, 

like a delicate, precision instrument

wrongly calibrated from the start;

a faulty circuit, perhaps, a cracked cog;

a sprung spring, a warped wheel

throwing me chronically awry;

failing to read and measure correctly

the world around me; out of balance,

forever teetering, up and down, up and down.

Hard to be happy with constant failures;

hard not to worry, to be peaceful

with the invariably failed readings

of my inadequate, roughly self-adjusting equipment.

O child of God, if it was easy, what a lazy,

complacent scoundrel you would be!

I came across Christ

I came across Christ                                                                                

I came across Christ stripped of scriptural restraints;

uplifted in outstretched, agonized triumph.

I came across Christ as He double-crossed

the stone sepulcher; came across death,

across Truth in a walkabout that led to Jesus in India,

thousands of years from the sophistry,

the accumulated errors, the calcified ruins.  

I came across Christ, the palpable flesh and blood

hanged from a cross of the Carpenter’s own making,

His silent returning, His timely, masterful, merciful

descent, the ethereal made extant in the milieu

of our latest, chronic human lunacy and despair.

O child of God, follow the ancient thread that runs

from Zoroaster’s kushti to the sadra of Meher.

It's your bird

It’s your bird                                                                                              

A sailor somewhere taught the bird to curse.

Now there is nothing to be done,

profanity and earthiness

an integral stain on its vocabulary.

It can’t be unlearned

though it knows not a single definition.

No changing of feathers now;

no silencing cover up

or wringing it’s pretty green neck.

It’s your bird.  You can’t disown it.

But unhitch its tether; stop feeding it. 

The best you can, live with it

until the day it undertakes

through an open window

its flight long forgotten and among the heights

renounces its acquired, artificial ability to speak.

O child of God, neither parrot nor songbird

bears even the slightest resemblance to truth.