Beyond faith

Beyond faith                                                                                              
 
No man sees My face and lives, God told Moses.
No wonder I can’t see myself in the Infinite One,
 
Who I’ve been told (and accept by faith) I truly am.
To get to the truth, I must move beyond faith (and self) –
 
death a requirement, a divestiture
of who I have ever in this lifetime
 
taken myself to be, every drop and whit,
wont and whim, every ache and fancy
 
of the pretender who bears my name and history.
To look then into the eyes of my Beloved,
 
hand Him myself the sword
of which I have been so long afraid.
 
O child of God, make use of every holy word
and image to spur you on toward the precipice.

Ghost of a chance

Ghost of a chance                                                                         
 
I’m trapped in the paws of a Lion,
both plaything and prey,
 
desperate to learn His every
whim and idiosyncrasy.
 
I’ve fallen into a raging river;
don’t expect me home for dinner tonight!
 
Under Your fire, the red sands
of my heart have turned to glass.
 
Set it down roughly in this world of stone.
I haven’t the ghost of a chance.
 
Before I’m shattered, fill me with light –
let purity and clarity define my shape.
 
O child of God, trust not the vagaries of intellect;
view Him through the wine-red lens of your heart.

The truth of the mirror

The truth of the mirror                                                                              
 
The crooked shall be made straight
and the rough ways made smooth – scripture
 
of great comfort to one twisted and coarse,
pent within a shell I’ve been unable
 
to peck my way through. 
Made straight and smooth –
 
but only after facing entirely
the degree of my crooked roughness.
 
Standing up to the truth of the mirror,
releasing one-by-one the makeshift
 
sticks and stems, fig leaves and rags
which conceal me from no one but my trembling self.
 
O child of God, take heart in your every pang.
New birth requires a long, doleful labor.

Lofty and forlorn

Lofty and forlorn                                                                            
 
I’m utterly lost.  Why am I still looking for shortcuts?
I don’t know where I’m going or where I’ve been,
 
but You’ve walked out to greet me,
leaving the gate unlatched.
 
These roads are lofty and forlorn;
the way to Your gate, narrow and winding.
 
I quake and quaver when I hear only my voice
echoing through these empty hills.
 
You are my sole confidant.  Where I end up;
what happens along the way, is Your responsibility now.
 
Perhaps, this is where love begins –
on the side of a mountain –
 
or accumulates along the way,
as we ascend, my Beloved and I.
 
O child of God, the path unfolds directly before you.
Be concerned only where you next place your foot.

                                    (from A Jewel in the Dust, 2011)

This lucidity

This lucidity                                                                                                        
 
Comes a point where you see yourself
much as God sees you,
 
as others feel you, roughly
rubbing up against them;
 
how your ego has played you for a fool
all your days, how blind you have been
 
(in over your head) to your own faults
and ruinous behavior and it doesn’t end there,
 
this lucidity – it comes and goes,
as you awaken and nod off again,
 
in this lifelong, ages-old habit and dream of self. 
Praising your Lord for His revelations and solace,
 
bearing the shame of your insufficiency, 
getting on with your life solely for His sake,
 
more aware each day of the difficulty of liberation
and how utterly undeserving of it you are.
 
O child of God, everyone, said Meher,
(including you), is destined for the supreme goal.

(drawing by Rich Panico)

Shoebox

Shoebox                                                                                         
 
What straightforward thing, square and true,
ever comes from a crooked man in a crooked house?
 
I’m innocent of only one thing – my attraction to You.
That was Your doing.
 
I left my apartment for a pack of cigarettes
          and never went back.
I rounded the corner and was gone!
 
Turning corner after corner, thoroughly bewildered.
I left my valuables in a shoebox on the top shelf,
 
but I’ve lost the street address.
Randomly knocking on doors
 
while You wait in the back of a Nash Rambler.
Only You hold the key.
 
O child of God, lost your bearings?
Everywhere you go the Beloved is there.

                                  (from A Jewel in the Dust, 2011)

The lowdown

The lowdown                                                                                               
 
I’m being dragged off my high horse,
to get the lowdown – estrangement from God is not
 
just this tender ill-fitting within the human skin,
not just a death sentence, or the mind’s torment,
 
not just a shuttered, malformed heart
strapped to this one hapless soul
 
but a corruption and a contagion
sowing its seeds of anguish everywhere I go.
 
O child of God, you are in the Master’s hands.
Some disclosures hurt worse than others.

drawing by Rich Panico

Butcher's block

Butcher’s block                                                                              
 
Early each morning Your Tomb is wiped down
like a butcher’s block; sanskaras removed
 
from the surfaces and crevices, residue
of shattered hearts, splintered egos, broken minds
 
cleared for the new day’s filth and muck
laid at Your feet, hefted onto Your shoulders,
 
returned to the nothingness which they are
and from which they came.
 
O child of God, you sense the mystery of His Samadhi,
but the work that occurs there daily, you can never comprehend. 

                                     (from A Jewel in the Dust, 2011)

My heart

My heart                                                                                                    
 
My heart is a dust-laden bell,
long time silent, ensconced in a tower
 
of a snowed-in chapel at the woods’ edge,
ashes cold in the hearth,
 
no footprints leading to or from.
My heart is an unused muscle
 
aching at the least exertion and stretch –
tender, quaking, ineffectual.
 
My heart is keen for the spring breeze
this winter to break its immobile silence.
 
God is nearing my house and I want that bell
to swing, shine and sing at His arrival;
 
a roar in the hearth; my limber, compliant heart
stretched out in the warmth like a doormat at His feet.
 
O child of God, it’s a painful journey
from head to heart, from fear to love.

Human clot

Human clot                                                                                               
 
I offered my begging bowl.
You filled it with wine.
 
I remain poor, but no longer care,
drunk on the richness of Your wine.
 
Deep in my bowl, for the first time –
a glimmer of hope.
 
This intoxication is the gateway to a vineyard
where the Spirit soars, the human clot left in the dust.
 
I know to Whom this vineyard belongs!
I will sing drunkenly under the heavens
 
His holy name, near its narrow gate,
until He appears to lead me inside.
 
O child of God, abandon yourself in this beggar’s bowl
to one day wander His holy vineyard.

                                (from A Jewel in the Dust, 2011)
 

Making a living

Making a living                                                                                          
 
I was once a working man, hands strong,
calloused from the rub of making a living.
 
Also grown thick, toughened up –
my heartskin within its cavern and cage,
 
leathery from the world’s rough handling.
My hands today are soft as a baby’s –
 
clean, idle, while my heart is daily
more tender and sore as it emerges
 
from its enclosure, more willing
to take in the ache of flesh and world
 
as it suits my Lord’s will – a blessed penance
and the required estrangement from self
 
on the long journey through and beyond
this clamorous Illusion to that hidden Sanctuary.
 
O child of God, retire from the world
and open your heart to the eternal.

Unspent coins

Unspent coins                           

                                                       

You unlatched my change purse;
poured its contents onto the table between us.
 
‘It must be empty’, You explained.
‘How can a slave own a heart full of hope?’
 
Unspent coins of solace and fantasy;
disappointment and envy.
 
When I began to surrender these coins
I discovered them to be counterfeit,
 
imprinted with an imposter’s face,
their taste bitter between my teeth.  
 
Empty my purse, Lord;
fill it as You please.
 
O child of God, hope is spent on false comfort.
In Illusion’s reign, it’s the coin of the realm.

                                   (from A Jewel in the Dust, 2011)

Through the moves

Through the moves                                                                                    
 
You’ve chosen this dance for us,
out on a darkened floor where
 
no one knows my body language
but the One Who brought me here,
 
the One I so desperately want to leave with.
You’ve become a long shot.
 
In our clinched intimacy, I readily confess
my perplexity, my fear, my faith.
 
If there was any possible escape
I might try to slip through an exit
 
but You, in Your mercy, have sealed my fate
as we face the music in a loose embrace –
 
Your features lost in the shadows;
I, inelegantly, trying to follow Your lead.
 
O child of God, hold tightly to your Beloved
as He takes you through the moves.

Your dharmashala

Your dharmashala                                                                         
 
How narrow this path has become!
Adjusting to it, I also am narrower.
 
I tend to the world’s business,
but my heart’s no longer in it.
 
My heart is with You
in a Tomb on the Deccan Plain.
 
Lord, let me rest
in Your dharmashala. 
 
Let me lie in that Tomb
until I am carried to my own.
 
O child of God, become smaller and smaller
to one day disappear within the vastness of God.

                                (from A Jewel in the Dust, 2011)

The book of the heart

The book of the heart                                                                                  
 
You thumb through my heart on occasion,
never bothering to read it, not from disinterest
 
but because You know so well the story,
written there even before its pages
 
had formed into flesh and blood –
ruffling my emotions, upending my complacency,
 
stirring more vigorously my longing.
One day You promise to let me read it –
 
my own heart-book – when it’s wide open enough
to reveal (by Your promise) the mystery of life.
 
O child of God, Meher came to retrieve (for your study)
that ancient, hidden book of the heart.

Seclusion Hill

Seclusion Hill                                                                                 
 
I climbed alone Seclusion Hill,
leaning into the strong winds
 
where You accomplished
Your Manonash work
                                                                                                     
in that little asbestos hut.
Annihilation of the Mind –
 
throne and root of all these problems.
O Beloved, it's Your strong winds
 
supporting me now.  They call out:
‘Climb the Hill within your chest.
 
Pare down from the Mind’s duplicity
to your one True Self.’   
 
O child of God, in deep seclusion He labored
that we might rise to true solitude.
 

                                    (from A Jewel in the Dust, 2011)

Moondust

Moondust                                                                                                  
 
I can make out the lunar mares –
the Sea of Tranquility just there, composed
 
of moondust rather than saltwater,
human bootprints now in the blue-gray tint
 
of its basaltic soil.  There’s a sea also inside of me 
made of the bitter, accumulated dust
 
of my past lives, which Maya may arouse
at any possible moment into a blinding storm,
 
dust borne on its almost irresistible winds –
the cause of my straying off course
 
from His (and even my own) will.
But with faith and His grace
 
of patience and insight, I might instead
let it gather and lie at the bottom of my heart,
 
tranquilly undisturbed, enough for my bootprints
to spell out legibly my Redeemer’s holy name.
 
O child of God, seek the mighty hand
of the One who hung the moon.

Desultory search

Desultory search                                                                                        
 
I’ve discovered the pilgrim’s path
offers a more-than-adequate opportunity
 
for running away from God.  Sufficient license
and elbow room out on that open road.
 
The pilgrim might settle unobtrusively
into a rhythm which affords some semblance
 
of diligence, some identity, some tattered ideal
of love and devotion in which to wrap oneself
 
but it rarely includes bowing down
in that oft-neglected, deeply-buried heart-shrine
 
with no room for anyone else but the Beloved –
a tomb where the pilgrim comes to a dead halt,
 
forsaking the hypocrisy and faux freedom
of his lifelong, rambling, desultory search.
 
O child of God, how studiously you avoid that tomb,
that cloister, that intimacy that would lead you to God.

This field of dust

This field of dust                                                                                       
 
People are solidifying their positions.
I’m being broken up like ground for planting.
 
The smell of seeds on the breeze, rust, roots
and soil; the song of yin and yang, gee and haw. 
 
I’m no longer able to live with myself
yet here I am still breathing.  Such is my dilemma.
 
Others are getting brittle over their little plots of truth,
taking up arms to preserve their sovereignty.
 
I’m walking the narrow lane between two furrows,
heading for that shade tree at the far end of the fence line.
 
We are all less than the wind that buffets us,
blusters and dies, shifts to a new tack.
 
We’ve no abiding substance.  There is no me
to live with or die for, no life to surrender to my Lord;
 
nothing in this whirlwind to hold onto,
nothing to fight over in this field of dust. 
 
O child of God, to enter the new life, first
note the improbability of your own existence.

The Sun of God

The Sun of God                                                                                         
 
I had a revelation on the path to God;
standing transfixed at the crest of a hill – 
 
I don’t know where I am, where I’m going
or how I might get there.  
 
Now, perhaps, the real journey might begin
with my clutching blindly the hem of my Lord’s skirt.
 
Though I’m ashamed of being late to the party,
He (apparently) hasn’t been waiting for me.
 
There’s no sooner or later in Oneness,  
no unexpected delays from His end of the game. 
 
There is only the Whim, only the Whim
playing Itself out the way It must
 
and we are swept along with It –
bits of semi-consciousness –
 
for what seems like forever
(from our mortal, moment-to-moment perspectives),
 
until we flower, burst into flames and merge
into the awakened, eternal Sun of God.
 
O child of God, let your heart-truth overwhelm
the mind’s quibbling need for security.

 

God-given

God-given                                                                                                  
 
The mind fades – I’m learning to put forth
the heart, a small warmth, a candle
 
flickering in the dark of my cell,
not flame enough yet to burn away the dross
 
but a relief to my chronic solitude –
a glow sufficiently humble to draw my Beloved.
 
He absorbs our tormenting sins to the exact extent
we open our wounds to His mercy,
 
His benevolence annulling
our every clinging indulgence,
 
allowing expansiveness to bloom –
an assured and expressive love setting up a house
 
of which we seem inherently unfamiliar,
a peace from which we’ve been too long estranged
 
but which is apparently our Self, our essence –
the seeds, pith and components of our true being.
 
O child of God, the flame within is the dhuni
burning away all your imagined deficiencies.

Kneel and marvel

Kneel and marvel                                                                                       
 
At times in the ashram Baba would clean
the harijans’ latrine (much to the mandali’s agony).
 
My Beloved provides.  His grace is sufficient. 
He serves lifelong; His hand always clutching ours;
 
His abode within our hearts.  Nothing He gives
has ever fallen short, has ever been late,
 
every sin, guilt, suffering a perfect necessity
with nothing for us to do but kneel and marvel,
 
praise as He labors, His intricacy and intimacy
on exhibit, astir within us
 
and surrender to Him that ignoble shame
and self-indulgence we identify as ourselves.
 
Our Lord having descended and assented
to be our Servant, the Slave of the love of His lovers,
 
His majesty infinite in His mastery as He serves
and services the awakening of our latent divinity.
 
O child of God, trust His silent grace
to compensate for the inadequacy of your words.

 

Somehow by love

Somehow by love                                                                                      
 
My prayers have dwindled
into a tongue-tied silence,
 
knowing nothing of this world’s
(or my own soul’s) needs
 
while all praise of the Perfect One
seems a risible blandishment.
 
And what good is professing my love,
when I suffer it not nor can I discern what it is
 
and not knowing (with any intimacy or accuracy)
to Whom my love is directed?
 
There is a cloud of unknowing
(a mystic once wrote)
 
between the contemplative and God
which might only be pierced by love –
 
somehow by an effortless love, radiating
wordlessly from the human heart.
 
At some point, a hopeless effrontery it is
to approach Him in any other way.
 
O child of God, word upon word you pile up
to describe what you do not know.

This handful of words

This handful of words                                                                               
 
One day I’ll forfeit these numberless lifetimes
(You say) for an abrupt end to my human adventure,
 
obliterate myself and all of Creation as I have known it,
but today I cling (instead) to this sad world,
 
this handful of words,
head teeming with worthless ideas,
 
a heart empty of courage and will,
the authority and sincerity
 
to shape the one-syllabled cry that would
awaken within me the sleeping God –
 
exchange this timeworn, familiar realm  
for the glory-promised, new Unknown.
 
O child of God, your obsessive talk of liberation
is part of God’s readying you to receive it.

The shard of a mirror

The shard of a mirror                                                                       
 
It’s not God you’ve been chasing all these years
but, one by one, your own hallucinatory thoughts.
 
Time to quit the path where you stand.
Not another step.  Enter a cave, a closet,
 
a monk’s cell and find there an intimacy
you never knew out on that lost highway.
 
Time to cold-shoulder the multifarious
and concentrate upon the One; 
 
eschew the flitting and elusive for the changeless eternal;
spaciousness for the cramped quarters of just God and you.
 
A thick darkness is settling in now, so you might see
only God shining – not at the far end of a tunnel
 
but in the shard of a mirror 
tacked to the back wall of your cell.
 
O child of God, so many years go by before
the significance of His everyday words begin to emerge.

 

A relationship of One

A relationship of One                                                                                
 
If there is an every moment Companion
(and my information comes from the highest Source),
 
with us prior to the body and after, and countless
other bodies before and beyond, by what criteria
 
might you in any real or imagined way separate
that Companion from your very own soul and Self?
 
What could ever cleave a bond of that fidelity
and duration; break the eternal One into two?
 
The truth requires you to realize
the reality of that Companion
 
Who you have imagined in your private communion
to have always been with you but not of you.
 
It’s a relationship of One, o lover, to be fostered,
as best you might, to the exclusion of every other
 
until all seeming disparities are dispelled,
melding into God’s eternal, non-dual truth. 
 
O child of God, it is the non-comprehension
of Oneness that creates all the mischief in the world.

The quandary of life itself

The quandary of life itself                                                                          
 
You must move on from regret
for the life you’ve lived
 
(wrote an medieval mystic)
to regret that you were ever born
 
(while conceding it to be God’s will).
Feel deeply the sorrow not just for what you are,
 
but that you are (and so many lifetimes have been) –
a creature incapable of Love.  You must feel
 
and know sorrow for the quandary of life itself,
not merely for the role you play in it,
 
not because you question God’s game
but to fix in your heart all the more
 
the wish never to be born again;
to allow the light of grace and favor
 
to remove forever this shadow which is you
and in which you have been for ages dwelling.
 
O child of God, illusion is a realm
where not one thing is good and true.

The adventure of being human

The adventure of being human                                                                            
 
A young Arangaon boy, years ago,
would come for morning Arti,
 
feet bare, dressed each time
in the same ragged clothes,
 
waiting patiently in the queue,
taking darshan, receiving prasad.
 
Befriended by a few Western pilgrims
who would joke and jostle, teach him
 
bits of English; occasionally offering him
fruit, laddoos, a trinket or a rupee.
 
But it was not what they gave him unwittingly
but what was taken from him inevitably –
 
for he no longer came up the Hill
solely for the Godman’s darshan and prasad
 
but for the adventure of being human,
introduced outside the glow of the Tomb
 
to the enticements of pleasure, self and world,
their irresistible seduction and subversion.
 
O child of God, to witness worldly corruption
look no farther than your own heart.

The Real Word

The Real Word                                                                                          
 
When the word of My love (said Meher)
speaks in your heart, you will know
 
it is the Real Word you have been
forever longing to hear.
 
I can’t remember such a Word, such a Reality,
such a distant Love ever having been
 
whispered into my heart; yet I must have
heard it somewhere before –
 
to have ever since longed for it;
certain to know it when I hear it once more.
 
Perhaps, not the import of it but the intimacy –
faintly, the intimacy – in numberless ages past,
 
to which yet I cling, longing for the return
of its liberating, whispered, love-drenched eloquence.
 
O child of God, your innate loneliness
is the evidence of your original attachment to God. 

The path of your soul

The path of your soul                                                                                
 
Catholic mystics through the centuries 
wrote of past life sanskaras and karmic law,
 
of soul-evolutionary tendencies and impressions
that clamor in the present life to be spent. 
 
They did not use Hindu/Buddhist terminology.
They spoke scripturally of Original Sin
 
as the primordial source of ungodly impulses,
manifesting fresh desires and temptations.
 
The Sufis refer to these latent impulses as the nafs.
Taoists use yet another sociolect. 
 
Numerous descriptions of the same quandary
and endeavor down the various paths
 
leading to the one Goal,
as many as there are the souls of men.
 
O child of God, cling tightly to Baba’s damaan.
You are treading the path of your soul.

 

Suspect death

Suspect death                                                                                            
 
When you begin to suspect death
is not an exit but a roundabout
 
and you feel your ribs as bars of a cage;
your loneliness ghostly – chronic and eternal,
 
then the God within you begins
to elbow His way to the surface. 
 
You think it’s a quest but it’s a dismantling.
It’s not life eternal you’re after, but permanent death,
 
finding out later it must come to you
(like deaths of the body) of its own accord,
 
a predestined step toward resurrection;
the last one-and-only-true death to undergo
 
before (by Meher’s promise) you cease to exist entirely
within His everlasting Oneness.
 
O child of God, let your imagination soar
but only to aid you in the matters at hand.

The world turned off

The world turned off                                                                                 
 
Pare down, my intuition tells me;
beardless, short hair, plain clothes, simple fare;
 
the world turned off; a narrow agenda –
the exterior reflecting the interior.
 
Reading and writing, contemplation,
prayer and meditation – the gift of a life
 
chosen for me, suitable for no one else.
I keep saying – to worries, disappointments, regrets
 
and other odd things (God knows how and why) 
brought to mind – it doesn’t matter,
 
it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter.
Unspoken, yet heartening, within that mantra
 
is the assurance of Meher:  Nothing matters,
o pilgrim, but love for God. 
 
O child, pray that Thank You, Lord, becomes
Yes, my Lord – everything His, nothing yours.

  

Love and dust

Love and dust                                                                                            
 
Such a lost cause, I must believe
You’ve taken me up, perhaps,
 
for another lifetime’s sake,
though I still entertain romantic thoughts,
 
even at this late date, of my flesh becoming
love and dust at Your feet.
 
A bloodless scarecrow, foreign in the field;
where a spine should be, a rough-timbered rood,
 
a weathered, rummaged exterior,
heart of straw, whose dream is to become
 
a torch visible for miles but unseen now
where I am braced in the autumn chill,
 
late-night, lonely vale; my essence
then wind-scattered, such as it is,
 
blending ash with dust, to cling lightly
to Your striding, clean, golden-threaded hem
 
as You make Your way home
from the fields of Your labor.
 
O child of God, may your romanticism
lure you into the arms of His Reality.

The End of Days

The End of Days                                                                                       
 
Some pitch this era as the End of Days.
Perhaps, we should rejoice then
 
for our impending liberation and Union.
God’s consciousness (of Himself)
 
is only able to come full flower 
with the end of human existence –
 
not one bubble left of the ignorance
that encases each drop soul;
 
our sole purpose fulfilled
by the culmination of the Original Whim.
 
The End of Days is forever day –
the end of nights breaking up
 
into illusory intervals of darkness
the One continuous Light.
 
O child of God, the end of the world
is the threshold of the Infinite-eternal.

Adapting the words of Shunryu Suzuki

Adapting the words of Shunryu Suzuki –                                                       
 
God is not something to find.
God is something you are.
 
The Way is not something to figure out.
The Way is something to express.
 
Let’s sit down here in the cypress shade.
In this quiet dust take up our instruments.
 
And we will ask no questions;
take no measurements
 
but learn to play and sing –
not to express ourselves but to express God.
 
O child of God, Meher said you are looking
for something you have never lost.

Only for love

Only for love                                                                                               

When your life’s journey is revealed 
as endurance unto death,
 
no goal to attain nor puzzle to solve,
no authority to exert; no means
 
of varying the process, then you come
to the right understanding –
 
you are forever at the mercy of God’s Whim
with no reason to exist
 
except as a transitional, sacrificial medium
for God’s holy awakening to Himself.
 
No choice for you, o lover,
but to keep on living, enduring,
 
until you are able to gladly,
lovingly die forever for God.
 
O child of God, the truth of yourself
requires you to live only for love.

 

Turned on the same lathe

Turned on the same lathe                                                                                    
 
Jesus died to show us how.
Died for God’s sake as well as ours. 
 
His sacrifice was to God’s awakening.
His death was the gift of example.
   
Our death and sacrifice is turned
on the same lathe and for the same purpose
 
(the Mystics and scriptures avow) –
so that God may be made manifest.
 
Jesus endured the cross to show us how
the death of ourselves as creatures
 
is our gift to God and a prelude
to our resurrection into eternality.
 
O child of God, Meher said,
we must live and die for God.

Deathbed

Deathbed                                                                                                 
 
Sort of poetry by then, her juxtapositions
sans sequences, contexts, continuums,
 
sans tenses, pertinence, conventional wisdom;
a dark, intuitive truth, 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 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?

Your infinite unknowing

Your infinite unknowing                                                                                     
 
Written with a crook’d finger, this poem
in the dust of the earth.  Perhaps, you’ll read it
 
before wind and rain, foot traffic
render it illegible (as if it never existed).
 
What you read will become a part
of the vast illusion of your knowledge;
 
something you need to hear, though it’s not quite true.
If you pass it by unread, it will become
 
a vital component of your infinite unknowing –
of your karma and just who in illusion you are.
 
I keep writing these poems as if I know what to say;
they’ve become a lockstep part of my gait,
 
my own illusory knowledge,
but I feel I’m being pulled slowly to a halt,
 
my small, urgent utterings a non-voice
joining the great silence of Meher.
 
O child of God, everything you say
is inherently false, yet it’s all part of God’s game.

The wages of sin

The wages of sin                                                                                        
 
There is no creature not destined
for the supreme goal, said my Lord.
 
What then of the wages of sin –
if each sequential death leads merely
 
to yet another roll of the dice, a foothold
and a hand up (until we wear out death itself)?
 
The wages of sin is apparently
and always has been death-in-life –
 
an aeons-length estrangement
from the Living Water until we develop
 
enough thirst and world-weariness
to prompt and enable renunciation.
 
Sin (and its wages) being the nothingness
we trade in for the Everything.
 
O child of God, the wages of sin are a necessary
imbursement toward the Self’s eventual revelation.

A life of pretense

A life of pretense                                                                                       
 
I have begun a life of pretense,
knowing now that I do not know,
 
can never know anything outside myself,
walking the tightrope of another kind of truth,
 
the One where there is nothing to hold onto.
Emerging from one dream only to find the elephant
 
as a whole is as false as its severed parts. 
A crucial life of pretense – any surmised
 
firsthand knowledge a deeper plunge into darkness,
a separation from the Essence.
 
Any whiff of certainty a sort of enemy
but not the real enemy
 
there being no real enemy.
O how words fail the poor poet!
 
O child of God, Meher was silent –
not for Himself but for his lovers.

A thoughtless prayer

A thoughtless prayer                                                                                 
 
Every prayer reaches God (we are told)
but rarely is God moved by mere thought
 
and words to descend upon a lover
and make a meeting place within the heart.     
 
Yet, a thoughtless prayer might be proffered,
not in a closet but perhaps in a blind spot,
 
where the mind’s enticements simply echo
emptily – deep in the heart-cave
 
where there’s no outside reception,
a soft spot in the stone, within a cloud
 
of unknowing, where the one-pointed
silence of non-existence reigns
 
and there, may a soul pray without words
for a descent, an interfusion (by His grace),
 
a cry to God that arrives where no thought
can reach, only love, only love, only love.
 
O child of God, the most effective prayer
is inexpressible longing.

Still you dance

Still you dance                                                                                           
 
I live like a lover of God,
having emulated those who came before –
 
sat with the mandali, read the teachings,
studied the lives of saints, the advents of the Christ.
 
I say the reverent, right things,
practice the approved methods, yet, still,
 
I withhold myself from Truth;
seeking always outwardly, outwardly –
 
to others, to others – to show me how to live,
unwilling to hear the Truth of my own soul,
 
told in God’s voice; afraid of His intentions;
afraid to be found wanting, then lost
 
as any human soul ever has been,
estranged from the Source, abandoned
 
to this bleak and terrifying world,
beyond His authority; insufficient to His Will.
 
O child of God, boxed into a corner,
still you dance around the truth.