Peeking over the edge

Peeking over the edge

I light a tea candle
before a photograph of the Tomb

adorned with dried Samadhi roses
and assorted other gleaned icons

relevant almost exclusively to me
in a round red shallow, bowl-shaped

votive vase, the flame at once
strong, high, bright; shadows

thrown about the room.  I lower
my eyes and gently invite

truth, surrender, Oneness, God
into my prayer chamber.

I raise them again, prepare
to rise upon my muscles.

The flame is low, meek by then,
barely peeking over the edge,

floating humbly, improbably
in the spent fuel of limpid wax.

My room again is dark; vast,
intimate, evidentially divine.

O child of God, to experience the Everything
allow yourself to be reduced to nothing.

My shop is not yet sold

My shop is not yet sold                                                                                     

Ramjoo came to You hobbling

upon the crutch of propriety

for liberation and wholeness.

You ordered him to anyone and everyone

say before a greeting or conversation,

my shop is not yet sold.

You gave him a choice he could not evade

and when relatives and neighbors knocked,

the floodgates opened upon shame,

ridicule and ostracism.

Such was Your kindness and his deliverance

from putting any solace ahead of You and God –

the same demand You make of me.

I bolt my door and do not answer;

pretend no one is at home.

(My shop is not yet sold).

O child of God, you reach for God

while tenaciously holding to other investments.

I can't begin to tell you

I can’t begin to tell you                                                                                      

A peace symbol on a faded day-glo poster

tacked to the old shed’s raw interior wall,

thorns worming through the cracks;

baby food jars, lids screwed

to the underside of a shelf,

holding rusted bolts, nails, screws,

gaskets and washers

someone once had faith

would one day fasten and secure

something of value, utility

like the bucket hanging high from a winch,

pooled water in the well’s bottom,

twisted by the breeze at rope’s end.

Peace at last.  Peace at last.  Peace at last.

I get it wrong implying simple abandonment,

disuse, a quelling, thwarting but not quite

and words are all I have

even as I have lost faith in words. 

I can’t begin to tell you, nor could you hear,

how misguided I’ve come to believe

are all our various quests

and human endeavors.

O child of God, you cry out for peace

while unwilling to walk the necessary path.

Anomaly

Anomaly

One day I'll make an anomaly of myself,
rise from the cross-legged mat

pick my way through the crowd,
up the crooked mountain.

Strait is the gate and lonely
is the narrow way, one slipping

through at a time and in my wake
loved ones for love's sake;

no one to follow or nod approval,
my nourishing community shaking

their heads, if not their fists,
at my peculiarity, infidelity.

God is jealous and the heart indeed
empty of strangers must be laid

upon the altar and how strange
are we all, human creatures; how very.

One day I'll be made
an anomaly of myself;

led to traipse solitarily into the wild,
surrounding forest and hills.

O child of God, you have an appointment
with your one true Friend.

Deathbed

Deathbed                                                                                                  

Sort of poetry by then, her juxtapositions

sans contexts, tenses, pertinence;

a dark, intuitive truth,

a poetically incoherent beauty

plumbing a deeper level if (loved) one

only knew how to listen, but one never does.   

Wrapped up in who she thought she was

and should have been, tried earnestly to be

or not to be, exhausting after a while the listener,

telling her last minute truth from the bed

of a murmuring brook

and really what is there left to say or hear

after a lifetime of chatter and love,

dutiful endeavor, compulsive volatility?

That was her poetry, too, largely incoherent

to everyone around even to herself

and yet, as I have suggested,

strangely brave, beautiful and worthy.

O child of God, how better to greet the mystery

than with humble bewilderment and incoherence?

Original surface

Original surface

To practice this effacement, I'm told
is to return to the garden; to wisdom

from the calculated infrastructure
of discriminating consciousness;

a return to purity but for the knot
of my sullied appearance.

Without solid footing or a roof over my head
how long before I am worn down by the elements,

Godspeed, to my original surface?
To disappear on the first fragrant breeze,

my parents apparently
doing me a grave disservice

carving from the great Oneness
another sorrowful niche, giving me a name

on which to hang the onus
of every opinion and desire,

leaving me only this tentative paradisiacal foothold
until grace, perseverance and resolve return me

completely to the evanescent purity I barely
remember yet have never entirely left behind.

O child of God, you talk too much,
disturbing the garden's tranquility.

The antonym for compare

The antonym for compare                                                                      

There is no antonym for compare

exactly.  Not even close.  Imagine! 

This unremarkable verb     

striking at the heart of the mystery. 

Oneness ever essentially intact,

apprehended only originally

and left thereafter immaculate

while the self is constructed

of comparisons amidst the aptness,

carving out a niche, divvying up the Oneness.

There is but one antonym for compare

when purely grasped, approximated,

roughly worded beyond the self,

outside the covers of any Thesaurus,

alluded to faithfully, often non-verbally,

by the mystics, one difficult, elusive,

though not quite unattainable antonym

for compare – non-existence.  

O child of God, get back to the garden,

to that pristine original, incomparable view.

drawing by Rich Panico

Ephemera

Ephemera                                                                                                           

Paper products primarily, made for short-term use,

then thrown away – tickets, paper cups,

posters, flyers, tissue, confetti.

We are that, apparently, our bodies,

personalities, our immediate human histories;

utility and sacrifice the purpose

of our very existence,

the execution and fulfillment

of some long-term ineffable

goal of the soul

with no opinions worthy of a listen

from a crushed paper cup

or complaint from a torn ticket stub –

the temporal, the discardable

in the face of the Eternal;

the creature as opposed to Creator.

O child of God, escape to a realm where time

and space, weight and gauge do not exist.

Nothing doing

Nothing doing                                                                                          

When the linear becomes circular,

poles kiss, spark and blend;

you lean so heavily to the left it becomes right;

journey eastward, arrive in the west;

the world turns upside down.

Discovering the one bad apple is you

tainting everything you touch,

you begin assiduously to unhand –

nothing doing – at the same time

attempting fraternization

with the perfection that existed

before the original, disconcerting scratch;

attempt worldly non-participation

while in the thick of it, attending to

the sacred duty of subjugation, abdication

vital to and inclusive of

all the other duties earnestly

entrusted to your care.

O child of God, to serve others might simply be

searching your own pockets for the missing key.

Inhabit your tomb

Inhabit your tomb                                                                                    

Above the world, an empty tomb

where I stretch out on the soft stone,

deathly afraid at first, alone,

hurrying soon back down

to the lively accustomed city.

But later returning irresistibly

to that interior space where thoughts

dissipate, eyes discern; hearing grows acute.

Understanding everything better now

from the hollow of my tomb.

The world become fearsome below,

raucous and ensnaring, 

to the crypt’s refuge I often repair,

listening for God’s approach.

He’s arranged our meeting there

when He comes to take me home.

O child of God, inhabit your tomb, like Meher,

long before you take your final rest.