Freshly Cut Light

February 9, 2015
by Michael
comments 16
Poetry

I was a diamond
on the ride in today,
a precisely cut sentience
whisking across
the frozen tar,
a conscious particle
accepting every direction,
every possibility,
into its center.

Breathing.

Zooming.

Flooding
the radio silence
with unformed memories.

Remembering
forty years from now.

Embracing
the horizon’s glow.
Letting that fire
reflect
inside of me
from every angle
before being released.

Calling every misgiving home
from the wild.
Setting out food.
Becoming the rookery
while it’s needed.

Breathing.

Zooming.

Unending-ing.

Seeing
sheltered by
warm machinery,
leaving behind
a plume
of icy dust.

So much of it
but seems to happen.
Our presence alone
is enough
to stir up
the whole world.

Later,
in the evening,
remembering
how we all meet one day,
I stopped for tulips
and coffee.

Any Way They Can

February 5, 2015
by Michael
comments 17
Poetry

I can’t work like this,
I muttered.

(I get emotional sometimes
around beings of the most radiant candor–
the ones who tell you like it is
without even moving their lips,
who shatter whole lifetimes
of log-jammed feelings
with a kind of glimmering eye thing
and an emanating peace
that sneaks up on you
like a heated seat,
a peace that feels as though it’s backstopped
by a battalion of compassionate mountain lions
who keep space-time free of scurrying misperceptions
with their lightning reflexes and svelte divinity,
and who happen to like wearing little helmets.)

I can’t work like this, I spat,
squeezing my loving
in between damage control sessions
with the morality inspectors–
(we’re always kowtowing to those ding dongs)–
forked down microwaved dinners,
and twenty minute engagements
every other day
with the minimum physical activity
proven statistically to prolong life,
bouncing on a rubber carpet
while keeping current on last year’s literature.
Also, just today alone:
a broken toilet,
a fork with a bent tine that nearly
decapitated a molar,
no coins for the tolls,
and ice in the wheel well that causes
vibrations at highway speeds
and threatens discomfort
for an hour straight.
There’s a moment for reflection
at 2:46 PM, while the coffee brews,
then a call and a text message fighting for supremacy
in my pants pocket,
and three people with the sum total
communication skills of a tennis racket
trying to establish who fucked up first.
I just can’t work like this.

My words disappeared
into the silence
like replica foam golf balls
placed wantonly
into a hurricane.

Hafiz did this glimmering eye thing.
“Well what are you going to do then?”
The mountain lions
in their little helmets
licked their paws
and washed their faces,
producing a beautiful sea of furry mits,
hidden talons,
and happy, squinting eyes–
as if I wasn’t hurting over here,
stretched tight as a rhinoceros tendon.

Then we started laughing so hard,
just a little at first, but then with the urgency
of a stomach flu.
Oh my God, we really let it out,
Hafiz and I.
Rolling on the floor,
fighting for oxygen,
begging for relief,
tears streaming down our faces.
My abs were burning hot in no time,
my lungs transformed into futile appendages.
My spleen ascended into
the fifth dimension
and my head burst open
into a tesseract full of white dahlias.
Then one of those mountain lions
hooked a dainty claw into my nose,
a little nonplussed with our ruckus,
and I sobbed with exquisite release.

Everything was much better after that.
Some things just need to get out
any way they can.

Clouds, Shaken

February 2, 2015
by Michael
comments 23
Poetry

The distance,
receding.
The sky so full
of feathers,
it’s obvious
the gods tore
open the clouds,
shook them out
over the land,
and tossed their
empty skins in a pile
by the river.
We’re back in the Dreamtime.
The cold has come alive,
the sky become an arctic fire,
her sparks fluttering
in a swirling dizzy
of ballerina embers,
and the hawk’s vision is still again,
flooding my skull,
impaling my every thought,
studying my breath,
pressing against my ribs,
scrutinizing my shoe laces,
daring me to question why…
Every mote and speck
of this particle kingdom
has been pierced.
Every feather has been named.
Every being held.
Every silence seen.
He watches from the fence post,
through eyes not for this world,
unperturbed by the
buzzing, swarming frenzy–
Knowing:
there is a way of looking
in which all that is needed
dissolves steadily into view.

When I Say Jesus…

January 31, 2015
by Michael
comments 64
Christ / Poetry

When I say Jesus
in these poems,
I hope you don’t think
that I think
that I know
with any real precision
what I’m talking about.

When a stone
says yes
to one day
returning to
the shimmering heart of a star,
and the star says yes
to beaming that stone’s endless heart
through all of space and time,
and the gravity inside of every
pebble, rock, and speck of sand
becomes a continuum of Meaning,
it becomes difficult to say
just what exactly that
stone has become,
or what all those other stones
are really up to.

What seems most important,
is that after years of wandering
from town-to-town,
gathering in taverns
or caves by the sea
to listen to sages and saints,
after walking across miles
of starlit landscapes,
some nights torn asunder
by the tensions of possibility and custom,
others rescued from the void
by the touch of a friend–
after latching onto and exploding insights
like a two-legged supernova
trying on three piece suits
made of granite,
a choice was made
to embrace Love so fully,
so completely,
that in the blink of an eye
that dove into the gap
between the disappearance
of the last second on the scoreboard
and the settling
of all that dust in the arena,
Existence itself suddenly realized:
I just swallowed myself whole.

Now Jesus is gone.
You and I have emerged–
a field of daffodils protected by snowy mountains.
There is a meaning in that
only the stones can explain,
a mysterious contour we trace together
through the darkness,
our hands linked in an endless chain
reaching back all the way
to the Beginning.

When I say you and I
in these poems,
I hope you don’t think
that I think
that I know
with any real precision
what I’m talking about.
That’s why we have Jesus,
to explain it to us.

An Incurable Obstinance

January 26, 2015
by Michael
comments 23
Christ / Poetry

When Jesus was young
they thought
he had a learning disability.
At the very least,
they reconciled themselves
to the fact that the boy possessed
an incurable obstinance.
At the dinner table, for instance,
despite the most pressing tutelage,
he refused to concede
that an apple and a pear
were innately different,
choosing instead
to refer to them both
giddily as
flowers.
His mother
and his father
were also not
permitted to enjoy
the rights and privileges
of distinction,
as they were both obviously
stars.
He did, however,
during the early afternoon
while his mother was napping
and his father constructing
wooden dwellings,
like to wander
on his own
collecting fist-sized rocks
in a small woolen sack
strapped to his waist
like an absurd
volley of hatchling cannon balls.
He would carry them
through the field–
wobbling between their weight
and the awkward counter balance of
a suspicious looking diaper–
down the wagon-rutted lane,
under the lower rung of the fence,
and around back of the shed,
there to cup a hand
over his eyes to find out where
the neighbor’s horse was grazing.
Then he would walk over
to the animal,
and pat its leg,
and look up into its eyes,
and giggle,
and reach inside
his bag of rocks
to pull out an apple,
which he would hold up on his hand
like he was giving away his whole life,
or a mud pie,
to his very best friend.
Nobody ever saw him
do this but the happy horse,
who couldn’t be bothered
with the earnestness of language, by the way.
The rest of them were too busy
tending to all the important
distinctions on which
life as we know it
depends.

Confounded by Love

January 25, 2015
by Michael
comments 23
Book Reviews

For Christmas this year I received a copy of George Saunders’ collection of short stories entitled Tenth of December.  I had never heard of Saunders before, and didn’t know what to expect, but the giver of this gift– an inspiring young man securing his MFA in film directing with whom I’ve been known to occasionally watch Celtics games, make an Indian food run, or share a conversation in support of a draft screenplay in which we deconstruct the failed art of management performance reviews, whose mother I fell in love with some decade and a half ago– has had a habit of providing me with the next best bit of art or literature for which I am ready, so I began with eagerness.

And now I am hooked.

(Thank you, Willy…!)

(A music video Willy conceived, directed, shot and edited…)

All of the stories were great, and I can’t slight any of them by coughing up a favorite, but I will say I laughed with joy amidst the brief tragedy of My Chivalric Fiasco.  The witty ebullience and brash innocence that emerge after a few minor chemical “adjustments” to the main character were priceless.  When I reached the end of that particular session I set the book down and swore a few times in gratitude.  You might think that is a subtle acknowledgment of a favorite, but I swore to myself frequently while reading this book.

Frequently…

I loved the way Saunders uses TM and ® symbols in several of the stories, My Chivalric Fiasco among them, attaching those symbols to proper nouns he deploys to describe the active ingredients of mass manufactured experience– to fictitious drugs that are named for the moods and feelings they induce in the characters, or to events such as parties that are named for their caricatured themes.  His stories are sprinkled with these ACME style experience-inducing elements, as if all of life can be commoditized, controlled and offered in separately wrapped packages on aisle 5– a myth Saunders constantly dispels– but surrounding and infusing these carefully branded ironies are brilliantly wrought characters planted in moments of crisis or uncertainty to which we can all relate, situations where we find real lives in the balance.

Saunders’ characters are honest, complex, and confused, but also loving.  Like us.  We see in these stories the aberrations of loving that permeate our world– the distortions that arise from seeking to protect and defend,  from mixing love with shame and guilt, from introducing our conditioned expectations to the unscripted abyss.  I experienced Saunders’ characters with the immediacy of the way I experience myself, as a stream of consciousness muttered under the breath, as a rich stream of cognitions too scarcely examined, filled with desire, inconsistency, inadequacy, and compromise.  But still somehow luminous.

A great pleasure for me in reading this book was the discussion at the back (of the paperback version) where Saunders is interviewed by David Sedaris, another writer I would undoubtedly benefit from discovering.  During the interview Saunders talks about the way he writes– about how he begins with a glimmer, an insight, a line of dialogue, or a character, and then he builds from there.  I loved his notion that there are no failed stories, only stories that have a mind to become what they are rather than what we may have wanted them to be instead.  If we can sit with them, and let them teach us what they desire to be, we can bring them to life as fully as possible.  These morsels were reassuring to me, as they put into words things I had been feeling.  Not that this is any sort of validation of my potential as a writer…  It simply didn’t hurt to hear an author as accomplished as Saunders describe a phenomenon I’m able to correlate in some small way to my own plunking in the dark.

He also spoke, however, of his stories as his laboratory, as a means of putting love into the midst of difficulty to see what it might really be made of.  I thought that was a beautiful description of fiction’s power to guide and influence us.  When Willy gave me the book, he suggested I watch a Saunders video on-line, and while I’m not sure I found the one he had in mind, I found a good one.  I think it contains a little insight into the man, and what he may have meant about his characters being fundamentally loving.  Like us.  I know time is precious, but I think this is twelve minutes worth spending…

Falling Snow (New Life)

January 24, 2015
by Michael
comments 28
Poetry

Snow is
carefully disguised
propaganda
dropped by spring
a few moons
in advance of Her campaign,
a dusting of crystalline
apples and bergamots,
acorns and pomegranates,
perfect white kernels
of new life.

Snow is a fresh coat of
time-delayed beauty
sprinkled onto the land
that muffles every footstep
and rounds off every corner,
dissolving every edge
into a pure continuum,
while augmenting the
whack
whack
whack
of unimpressed woodpeckers.
Pay attention
they say.

whack whack whack

If you listen,
you will realize
that death falls down like snow,
so gentle and careful,
settling into lines along
every twig and angle
of our lives,
into every wrinkle
of our weathered faces,
smoothing every nook
of our topography
into something unbroken
and inviting
in every direction,
as one by one
our every boundary
and projection
is simply covered over,
reclaimed,
collected into a fresh
tableau of meaning.

If you don’t fight it,
you will realize death
is really the resurrection
moving in
one particle at a time,
faint as a whisper,
so you have a chance
to get comfortable with the idea
that every trace of history
will one day melt
and soften into spring colors,
to reconcile your every desire
with the rising drifts
crowding all around you
that freely proclaim:
everything
will be remade
once again.

A Few Prognostications

January 22, 2015
by Michael
comments 28
Poetry

I’m not really prophet material,
but how do you know
if you don’t try…?
Right…?

(Lots of forced,
intensely preparatory
meditative breaths.)

(Some swearing in confused frustration.)

(And then…!)

A few early warning signs
Heaven on Earth
is about to pull
into the driveway:

The number of trumpet players
per capita
starts feeling like a metric
that can no longer be ignored.

It starts to make
intuitive sense
why everything
is so beautiful.

Professional sports teams
begin employing mimes
instead of traffic cops
to direct traffic after the game.
Then to make personnel decisions.

In quantum astronomy,
the realization that
the center of the Universe
is located at every point
where you take a measurement.

Being good enough
and being on time
go the way of the mastadon.
We don’t really know
how they went–
we just realize they’re gone.
And we can’t remember what it was like
when they were around.

Public transportation
is banned because
everyone realizes
how much they value
the opportunity
to ride around together.

When two people
of different religious persuasions
ride in an elevator together,
they find it shockingly pleasant.

The only secret left
is a flagrant violation
of the process of elimination.

You read this,
and you realize
you’re the Answer
to someone else’s Question.
And you don’t even
need to know whose.

Double or Nothing

January 20, 2015
by Michael
comments 31
Poetry

I don’t know who
or what
God is anymore.
Each time I say this,
my Loving doubles.
Once I stepped into a room
with block walls
and old, worn carpets
to sit in the circle
with a prayer in my heart
while the man who travels
through worlds was bound
at the center.
Light was extinguished,
and darkness soared.
Singers joined us from the air itself.
The drummers poked
holes in our boundaries.
Lightning tickled the ceiling.
Rattles danced through the air
in flickering blue steps,
and our hearts were wiped clean.
A power fell upon our lives
like a gentle rain.
The next day I was
back at work.

Once I found Hafiz
laying on his back
in the breakdown lane,
gazing up at a clear blue sky,
and I asked him,
What are you looking at?
That sky isn’t there by accident,
he said.  Have you ever noticed
how everything is a clue?
He got up and we
hunted until dark
for egg-shaped rocks
bobbing up from the sand.
After the sun was gone,
in the lingering half-light,
we broke them all open.
See! he exclaimed.

I inferred the following:
everything has a reason
but the Reason itself.

Love is bearing
down on me
something fierce now,
and every night
while I sleep
we take out my
four-suited deck of pains
and gamble away my past.
The others are there,
every prayer I ever meant,
a clock wheel of sun-glassed figures,
and I lose in every direction I face.
Weeping, unable to speak,
I’m torn into pieces,
caught in the reflections
of a thousand mirrored stares.
Then I awaken,
impregnated by Mystery.
Free of all doubt.
Hafiz is sitting by the bed,
reading to me,
and the space between us
is a clue for me to savor.

My Loving doubles
each time I remember this:

There is no God.
There is no way or path.
There is no beginning or end.
There is no freedom from suffering.
There is no me, or you.
There is no possibility,
no holiness,
no meaning,
nothing that lives.
There is no power.
There is no vision,
and no way back.
There is nothing whatsoever
but a man in the darkness
at the center of the circle
who left a hole in our world
when he took all of my cards
and vanished in search of clues.

Sometimes,
like the Old Ones knew:
if we say it backwards,
we can see it clearly.
We can unwind
the knot of our nonexistence.
And we can double
our Loving.

I Love Me Some Treatises

January 17, 2015
by Michael
comments 27
Christ / Course Ideas

I love me some Treatises1.
Mmmm-mm!
I love me some Jesus breakin’ it down,
makin’ that holy road clear.
I love me some Truth expo-zishuns!
I love me some brotherly tutelage,
some way pointin’,
some little bing-bang dose of reality checkin’.
I do, I do, I do–
I do love me some Treat-sies…

* * * * *

1In the second book of A Course of Love there are four Treatises, the first of which is entitled “A Treatise on the Art of Thought.”  The first time I read these particular offerings I bored through them like a hydraulic-powered, diamond-tipped drill rig cutting through frozen tundra.  This is what you do, after all, when just hours before, in a far more desperate version of yourself that was flying over a particular swath of unexplored terrain in a sputtering helicopter equipped with state of the art, second-hand geological x-ray devices, necromancing paraphernalia, and other treasure-hunting apparatuses, you discovered to your considerable surprise a big huge X marks the spot engraved into a a few hundred square acres of real estate, along with a note on a stone tablet laying on the ground right at the vertex– a note signed by your own heart, oddly enough– that says Drill here, Mac.  When you encounter revelations of this order of magnitude, certain safety procedures, long-tested customs of geotechnical investigation, and rules of personal decorum are indiscreetly nullified.

Two years later, now that I have finally gotten the drilling fluid, sprayed dirt and bulletized caribou dung off of my safety glasses and nearly completely rehabilitated my trigger finger, I realize I may have– may have— not availed myself of all the life-affirming, eternity-beckoning, suffering-and-delusion-conquering content that was deposited there.  Lucky for us, when you read with such reckless abandon, you don’t actually rip the words right off the page, so you can, in point of fact, glean enough of the idea to get yourself going, and then go back and review them once again in light of all that has occurred in your life since that first tumultuous encounter.

So, relatively recently I had the exquisitely good fortune of reading A Treatise on the Art of Thought for what was likely the fourth or fifth (hundred) time.  I kind of knew it hadn’t fully computed the first time I had read it, but over time had become pretty convinced it had in fact rubbed off on me quite substantially.  Then, after six or eight weeks of professional gang-bustering with an intensity and a magnitude that had narrowed my cardio-cognitive wherewithal down to a single pixel, I read it again and walked out of the room feeling like a human who had just hatched from an egg.

You know the difference between the moment when you encounter a beautiful idea, and it rings your heart like a bell, and the moment when you realize you had the whole thing backwards, and it is your own nature that was sounding the idea in the first place?  And pretty soon you realize it’s a breath of insight, flowing in and out of your like the tides?  If not, you will.  If so, thank you for standing by me during all those presumptuous eons.

The Art of Thought is both parts simultaneously– allowing oneself to be rung by every single experience in a beautiful way, and simultaneously recognizing that you are a bell uniquely suited and desiring to ring beautifully into every single experience.  We get our bells rung (by grace).  We ring back, for we are bells (of grace).  And then of course, as we all start allowing ourselves to ring, in the lovely tapestry of sound that emerges, we clue in: oh(!), this entire tapestry of sound, all of that is who I Am.  And then you starting ringing right along, naturally and without forethought, with all sorts of delightful tones and harmonics tailored specifically to the instant in which you find yourself.

Now, maybe you can see: you can’t ring like that by thinking about how you should be ringing all the time.  You can’t ring like that by constructing ring models out of your past experience and worldly knowledge so that you can predict how best to ring to impact the experience in ways that you also thought long and hard about being the best and highest good ways of impacting it.  It’s already too late by then, and you’ll botch it anyway.  And you can’t ring like that by having pre-tested rules about what types of rings to offer in certain situations. All of that… is how we used to roll…

The Art of Thought begins with hatching from an egg and discovering you don’t need to upgrade your bell to a newer model, or fix any of its cracks, or hold it differently when the time comes.  The Art of Thought begins by appreciating the fact that you were created by the same Bell Maker who created the sunset that rang you last night, and that as such you are equally a majestic and endless gift given to all beings.  I daresay we may feel differently and respond differently, were we to enter the room knowing we are each the warmth and mystery of a sunset turned loose upon the world.

How do you tell a sunset it’s not doing it right?  How do you even think that?  How or why then, would we ever apply such logic to ourselves?  Well, you wouldn’t, after you realize and accept the nature of your Self and the nature of the sunset are the same.  This appreciation is the Art of Thought.  Jesus acknowledges that we are thinking beings, but that does not mean we have to come up with all the thoughts– or even could if we wanted to.  The really, really good thoughts are given, the way water is given to a river, the way a rung bell reminds us we are all bells ringing.  Through the Art of Thought, we can come to realize and experience this.

(Mmmm-mm!  I do love me some Treatises…)