Posts made in March, 2008

Stay Awake

This is the way
It’s inside you
Every minute of the day
Every moment of your life
Stay awake!
Watch your life unfold
Like a story being told
For the first time

Surrounded by Certainty

In photography contrast is important, light illuminating the focused sector,with perhaps the rest in varying degrees of shadow.

This understanding of light and dark, clarity and confusion, illustrates that not only do both occupy our space, but that we have choice which to give our attention to.

I can sit down to the inner practice that has been revealed, to those who have received this Knowledge, and in the beginning the likelihood of being distracted by thoughts is fairly standard.

However there comes a point where peace occupies the field and I am no longer thinking, for I have entered the state of feeling.

When this occurs you can rest, for you see that the barrage of your thoughts has nothing to do with reality, for eventually your ideas and concerns dissolve back into the ethers, and you are left simply breathing in beauty.

The One For Whom It All Makes Sense

I have written a thousand poems for you
that have never left my room.
They fill the pages of notebooks stacked high on a shelf
no one can reach.
Orphans they are, beggars afraid they are not noble enough for the King,
would never make it past the guards.
I make a vain attempt to dress them up,
disguise their ridiculous origins, but still they smell bad.

There are times, late at night, however, when they think I’m asleep,
I can almost hear them talking to each other,
conjuring new ways to make it to your court.
Oh, the arguments they have! The barroom brawls!
Some of them actually think a shower and a shave is all they need.
Others insist on practicing, all night long, the perfect way of greeting you.
There is much to be said for these backroom bards,
these arm wrestling vagrants from another world.

Indeed, if I was dead,
my ambitious biographer, after paying his due respects
and asking permission of my dear, sweet wife,
would borrow them just long enough to search for pearls
and find the perfect turn of phrase, the verse,
the sudden storm of brilliance even my harshest critics would have to praise.
He’d think of clever titles for the tome, describing, in his carefully written way,
the “man who left his muse too soon”
or some such thing that might make you wonder
why I never gave these poems to you –
the one for whom it all makes sense even when it doesn’t.

Holding the song

gold grass
around the pool

breath’s flute fills

& empties

It makes me weep
to feel how much holding.
(draw your mouth to my ear)

What do I wait for, Love?
One chord, one tone.

One song,

mine alone.

from the CD of poems,
Holding the Song, wiredonwords

Knowing You