What gives?

What gives?                                                                                               

What gives to prompt this rare unclenching

in heart and head, nebulous soul of its fierce

and vigilant regard for the vulnerable self?

What clicks into place or jumps out of gear,

what wobbles in an untoward fashion

to override our chronic and ubiquitous fear

and allow magnanimity and mercy to emerge

from equanimity’s usual, hard-shelled nub? 

What gives, unravels and dismantles

a bit more of the structural integrity of the self,

bringing us all the nearer to collapse?

Everyone should ask, until the need for such

inquiries atrophies, our giving made at last innocent

and inherent  as the instinctual, self-protective

behavior it has replaced, as our conscious obedience

evolves incrementally into complete surrender.

O child of God, how you prattle about the path

you are being inexorably swept along.

Slice of life

Slice of life

Impossibly brief and thin the slice
in which moment to moment resides the self.

Existence being persistence -
nothing incontinuous exists,

the self completely wedged in, unable
to invade or inhabit either past or future -

(each sparked only in the vital present).
The self lives (so to speak) at all times

with the evidence of its non-existence,
the great truth our veils are meant to hide,

of which the self is ultimately and utterly terrified,
bluffing its way through each successive lifetime.

Existence exists and that Existence,
when we get religion, we call God.

Yet to think, speak or act with God in mind
is to gain the false perspective,

to lose God yet again in the labyrinths
of time, duality and our own self-fixated illusions.

O child of God, slice your life so thin
it becomes transparent and imperceptible.