Hafiz and I on a bench, basking in a rosy sunset. Falcons gathering on the limbs overhead– some Merlins, some Sooties, a Grey– all of them edging awkwardly close, coalescing into an artillery of vision. The theater is full. A door opens like an out-sized black pixel on the face of the sun– a cuckoo-clock pronouncement– and brilliant birds of flame fly out to swoop across our sky like smoke rings blown by the sun’s innermost […]
I remember falling in love with Bucky Fuller’s use of the word artifact the first time I ran across it– the way the modern world, seen through his eyes, was an assemblage of present day artifacts. These were not clay bowls and petrified implements unearthed from a Sumerian archaeological dig, but mass-produced silverware, jet engine airplanes, and home heating furnaces. An artifact in this sense is the embodiment of a particular era’s state of thought. […]
Staggering through the dim light of Heaven’s front yard, slinking into the greenish shadows of distant outdoor halogens as if to hide forever, and ranting silently about the burden of makeshift woes and ramshackle postulates with which I’d saddled myself– including my favorite one about the pending arrival of something hellish but indeterminate in nature that no being should ever have to face– why wouldn’t I accept the cocktail napkin and the nice sandwich offered to me […]
Without mindfulness, you might spaz out in a moment of adversity and plunge the toilet recklessly completely oblivious to the fact that only a little nudge is being asked for in that location, a gentle rhythm that will pass through a vast and holy maze of intersecting worlds that just happen for that one moment to share your half bath, so that in places broadcasting colors your eyes can’t understand, and sounding deft languages that long ago […]
If the premonitions of being that scythe through your soul’s back forty all day like shadowy pendulums hung from a pivot so insanely near to the nodal origins of your existence that it’s a perpetually mild discomfort to your otherwise undistracted mind cause you to tremble, take a quick, nervous breath and brace for impact, dive towards an embankment, spontaneously recite procedures for exiting sunken cars, or climb the stairs of tall buildings to burden […]
A cardboard tube can make all the difference, and I’ll tell you how. Walking through a flavor of solitude in which I find myself sometimes, covering my face to ward off the trace of distant putrefaction, and squinting into the heat to see if my suspicion is correct about the horizon stockpiling behind its dusty curvature all the sad carcasses not fortunate enough to receive a proper burial– I’m wheezing in the fumes of my […]
What I told Hafiz when I opened the bedroom door and entered the main living area after my daily five or so minutes of high-intensity, mid-morning meditation on the illumined heart of being, was that I was finally prepared to commit myself to crossing the Sea of Meaninglessness– to enduring the winds of fate, the firecracker heavens, and whatever battering-about goes on out there– to gritting my teeth at the sight of hungry kraken and […]
One day I was astonished to find Hafiz giving instruction to a cadre of beggars. He was explaining to us how much better off we would be, if we were drunk right from the get go, and he was passing out copies of his latest poem, saying, Drink these my friends… Drink these with the rising sun… The idea being– all our surly ideas about fate and how things really work and who could of and should […]
On that summer day, that I still remember… doorways beckoned from every direction, hovering near stacked horizons as if the Beloved had hung wreaths of heat and time along our world’s borders. There were voices you could see occasionally, ribbons of them wafting up from the ends to mix with the sky like jugs of clear sap poured into whiskey, swirling and touching noses and everything at once… merging. And the air, too. The air….! […]
At the center of every human being, something stupendous is happening– something deadpan naked beautiful, a trembling madness, a high outcropping of multiplying swooning cliff diving lovers. I don’t know what it is, but I think it might be related to the fact that the sky is peppered with drums so vast their beats shake galaxies out of the darkness like dust from the Beloved’s rug, that it’s full of light transmissions, secret messages, and the odd comet, […]
Embracing Forever 