nothing going on

 In quiet zendo

Candle burns before Buddha 

Bell, incense, Han clap

shuffling alone

 Ruminance obscures

Wandering lost empty brook

This waning summer

once new, now not

Final days summer

Melancholy chilly nights

Our passing season 

or does he think, jesus is wrong

 when a baptist looks 

at a Buddha statue, does

he see Christ's good friend?

fraud's interpretation of schemes

Let's all hold our breath.

One, two, three. Are they gone? Bad

dream scat -- Ron, Don, Greg!

use them, use the immigrants, laugh at them, traffic them

 Always a crapshoot

Democracy devolves with

Ugly smirking pols

a retiring champion

 Where is my racquet —

I’ll show Roger my backhand

Right into the net

strange ruling, strange judge, strange former presiding-dent

 High level dumb shit

Up is not up, down not down —

Nor is the law law

each unexpected lesson, the urge to meet his eye

I was reading Don Paterson's book of poems, The Eyes, A Version of Antonio Machado (c.1999) when I found online this poem by Paterson and a commentary by Martin Collins: 

 The Lie

As was my custom, I’d risen a full hour

before the house had woken to make sure

that everything was in order with The Lie,

his drip changed and his shackles all secure.

I was by then so practiced in this chore

I’d counted maybe thirteen years or more

since last I’d felt the urge to meet his eye.

Such, I liked to think, was our rapport.

I was at full stretch to test some ligature

when I must have caught a ragged thread, and tore

his gag away; though as he made no cry,

I kept on with my checking as before.

Why do you call me The Lie? he said. I swore:

it was a child’s voice. I looked up from the floor.

The dark had turned his eyes to milk and sky

and his arms and legs were all one scarlet sore.

He was a boy of maybe three or four.

His straps and chains were all the things he wore.

Knowing I could make him no reply

I took the gag before he could say more

and put it back as tight as it would tie

and locked the door and locked the door and locked the door

                                                                (Poem by Don Paterson)  

Comments by Martin Collins: 

The ritual is a great way of opening as it frames the way we approach a lie - as something that requires maintenance. It makes me think of Don Draper in Mad Men constantly working to hide the fact that he isn't who he says he is and removing all traces of evidence(As an aside Don Paterson said that he had been watching Mad Men and one of his conclusions was that Don was the one person everyone wished they were - I completely disagree but that is another rant).

I particularly like the fact that the lie is a child, because it shows a sense of innocence. In all honesty it is we that confer importance, whether white or dread, upon a lie and is meaningless and unknowing in itself which makes it seem all the more fitting.

The fact that it questions him, perhaps a metaphor for the why our lies question our identity. Why do we feel a need to support the lie? What does it tell us about ourselves? What we need to hide or more importantly protect? But then again the point we often don't attempt to confront the lie we hide from it and lock the door and lock the door and lock the door.

The final line that is ace with its furious repetition, like scouring skin with soap until it is raw to get some unseen dirt out. It also manages to maintain the rhyme scheme which I am pretending isn't there...

The poignancy lingers.

My lies are also well cloaked and muted.

Today in the Christian calendar is the feast of  Our Lady of Sorrows. A good timing. Yesterday I learned some old news that filled me with sorrow -- a dead former student, killed by a current prison friend, the connection sixteen years later made. Only sorrow for both. For the "no reply" of a muted mind. For the gagged silences walking around with and within us.

           Haiku

                         (pour les pertes)

     Learning to suffer

    each unexpected lesson

    assigns deep reading

                        (wfh/15sept2022)

exaltation of the holy (cross/ensō)

 These days I suspect 97.5% of Christians do not understand one of the primary archetype symbols of their narrative metaphor.

Me neither.

Perhaps what is needed is the Zen Buddhist corrolary of Shunyata to arrive at dialogic harmony of perspectivity.*

The cross -- radical compassionate suffering -- equivolated by stark empty wholeness.

Memento mori.

Allowing what-is to become/be itself.

Letting creation arise.

Practicing don't-know mind.

...   ...   ...

        * "The bijective correspondence between points on two lines in a plane determined by a point of that plane not on either line has higher-dimensional analogues which will also be called perspectivities."  (wikipedia)

présent à sa pensée

We use the word “mindless.”

As if the “sinner” is unwilling to have “thought” of God.

There’s no account of God that moves through the sinners mind, no thought, no thinking. 

Here, thinking is looking into what is here, looking into what is longing to be manifest, apparent, transparent, diaphanous.

Instead, defilements. Kleshas.

Le pécheur irrite de plus en plus le Seigneur ; dans sa fureur aveugle, il ne tient compte de rien ;

Dieu n’est jamais présent à sa pensée. Ses voies en tout temps sont pleines de souillures ;

The sinner irritates the Lord more and more; in his blind fury, he does not take into account anything;

God is never present in his thought. Its paths at all times are full of defilements;

 (—de Psaume 9 (2), Mercredi, Prime, https://www.barroux.org/fr/spiritualite/ecoutez-nos-offices.html)

 The mind is clouded. Perhaps deliberately. Often intentionally. Certainly, throughout,  carelessly. 

Let’s suggest that thought is the travels of mind, the mind traveling through instants of existence, moving through experience as it presents itself moment to moment. 

Thought need not be limited to conceptual or logical analysis. 

Thought is looking at, a gaze of inclusion, a wandering of wonder through this and this and this.

We say there is a suffering of reality. Patior (Latin) translates as: suffer, permit, allow, endure, bear, experience, tolerate, submit, abide.

Can it be said that unwillingness to suffer reality — (and here I mean core root reality, not the diversion from reality, the distraction from reality, the disdain of reality that permeates contemporary delusive and aberrative behavior) — but that which is referred to as the really real, the underlying ever-present origin/wholeness without which there is not anything that ever has been, that is, that can possibly ever be.

When the philosopher says of our current maladaptive way of being in the world — that we are not yet thinking — perhaps he is saying that we do not yet see, are not yet looking, will not yet allow Reality to be (what it actually is) as it is.

This echoing resonance of the ancient dialogue from Exodus (Hebrew Scripture) wherein the intimation of Yahweh is received as “I Am Who Am” or, “I shall be there, as who I am, shall I be there” — begins the process invitation of thinking/seeing. 

This invitation to thinking/seeing is gateway through illusion and distortion. It says, somewhat like The Who’s Tommy lyric: “See me, feel me, touch me, heal me.”

Reality — or “God” — longs to be seen, felt, touched, healed.

We might have to learn to reorientate the words “God saves” to “Save God”.

As in Nikos Kazantzakis’ title, perhaps our true vocation is to become “The Saviors of God.”

Delusion, anger, and greed poison us.

Sanity, love, generosity and compassion heal us.

“Suffering” is not what we think it is. 

Thinking, or seeing through reality, is our courageous, kind, engaged “suffering” — allowing what-is, the really real, to be there, to be here, with, for, as us.

Take this into account.

This is my prayer, that you’ll always be there!

to those who dislike poetry, consider this

 Poetry

Is

Being 

Written

replacing the state with stateless societies

 Anarchist passes

Friends organize and protest

His classical move

a condolence

                             (for bob dickens, d.29aug2022)

I liked Bob. He liked poetry I like poetry He was like a good poem: good words, good heart, and good feeling lingering after finishing the reading

the opportunity of a life, time

 I am already

Dead. Do you have anything

You want to ask me?

waka

 Nothing left to say

The universe came alert

One day, thought “oh god” —

Right there, just like that, was god

Just a fresh faced newly born

they’re fine on their own

 It’s humility,

I thought, when another’s words

Come unimpeded

a million isolations burn away

Perhaps we might speak of this?

If you'd like?

            Crystal Cabinet

“The world of things entered your infant mind
To populate that crystal cabinet.
Within its walls the strangest partners met,
And things turned thoughts did propagate their kind.
For, once within, corporeal fact could find
A spirit. Fact and you in mutual debt
Built there your little microcosm - which yet
Had hugest tasks to its small self assigned.

Dead men can live there, and converse with stars:
Equator speaks with pole, and night with day;
Spirit dissolves the world's material bars -
A million isolations burn away.
The Universe can live and work and plan,
At last made God within the mind of man.”

(― Poem by Julian Huxley)

 Go ahead, do begin.

I'll be here to follow on. 

hard-a-lee

 Thank you Barbara

For “no” vote twenty one years

Ago — mull power

comfort in this

 Staying very still

One can hear through the mute night 

No sound the dead make