A Secret Chord
And I just realized I can never truly know the fullness of myself because the true fullness of myself is with God and is God. So relax. Let it be what it will be.
Archive for category Poetry
Me and Delilah
I’m not speaking in tongues
But there’s a forest growing in my mouth
Singing you my saddest song
And it’s all off key
The world has a way with a man
Makes him madder the harder he tries
Can’t win for losing
As the saying goes
As the wind blows
empty
Free as I wish I could be
Sure wish I had something smart to say
Can’t remember the last good thing I read
Don’t look at me like a sphinx, woman
I’m telling the truth
Only it doesn’t matter the more I explain
I had a point but the moment’s gone
It’s like this every time
What kind of kryptonite are you
Standing there with hands full of my hair
And with these two coarse hands, I would shake this house to the ground
I would tear down the world
But who else would have me?
Today’s Thought [Don't Pity My Blues, I'm Singing]
Really, the only bad part about not having a job is how sometimes it can make you feel a little less awesome than you actually are.
Mommy, why don’t we have a daddy to come home with us?
Second worst is the pity you get from people about your new untouchable status.
Jeez, how do you do it? How do you go on drawing breath not knowing where your next order is coming from? I hope you find a new boss soon before it’s too late.
They’d have you believe it’s because of the money. They’re concerned about you. Your family. What will happen if you get sick? How will you survive on non-organic food?
Is that stuff even palatable?
It’s not about money. Deep down, everybody knows it’s not about money. Everybody knows it’s really about status. How much you have and how much you can give or take. Money just being the short-hand for how we keep score.
Money, the invisible current that allows us to do or take things. Property, the invisible force field around stuff that means they’re yours and no one else’s.
I mean, if you really think about this stuff, you start to see it’s very juvenile. All of this taking and hoarding and stuffing ourselves is precisely the behavior of young children not even fully aware of the existence and subjectivity of others, much less themselves. We’re like kindergarteners running around trying to lick things so no one else will touch them.
Meanwhile, the clock keeps counting down to our own personal judgement day. A lot of us want to forget it and shove it to the back of our minds, but it’s always lurking, the knowledge that we’re powerless against the onslaught of time. Time gives us all things and takes it all back at once.
We do so many things to stave off the trembling, but there it is. You’re dying. Life is killing you. The wick is eating itself up in ecstasy, in pleasure, in agony… everything cascading into darkness.
We create stories called “meanings” and “purposes” to parse the angelic flame that is existence. We haven’t evolved much from gut-readers and bone-grinders. We change our clothes and think we’re reborn.
I don’t want pity from children.
Even if I live to 99, I will die a newborn. Humans are transients in the music of the spheres. Soft flesh, mostly water, easily discarded, quick to reform. What is there to mourn?
I’ve seen my brother lain on a metal slab, his face identical to a drunkard’s in death, and I’ve held my son, still wet with placenta… separated only by quivers and spasms.
When the music of these quivers and spasms becomes unbearable, we call it living and we start seeking our escape. And the entire movement of our escape is what we call the body of life and we adorn it with stories. Like a Christmas tree, we hang our hopes and disappointments on it, singing it hymns and dreaming of a bloody red savior beyond time.
The best short story I’ve ever read was written by Neil Gaiman. It’s called “In the End” and it goes a lot like the beginning.
Folded in time, bent like a telekinetic’s spoon, life is the interval between beginnings and endings.
Don’t pity a blue note when it sings.
Tonight’s Thought [Love is the Mind Healer Pt. 3]
It’s difficult to talk about my struggles with myself because one of them happens to revolve around pride. On one hand, I want to share everything going on in my mind, just open up like a floodgate and let it all pour out. But not here. Not in this way. There’s something I find vulgar about exposing oneself like that, without even the decency of a fictional or philosophical pretense. I suppose it’s linked to years of digesting Protestant guilt, wearing clothes, not flinging my feces in frustration…
But really it’s pride. I’m too proud to admit I have any real problems. I’m too proud to admit that I’m struggling all the time, that sometimes I wonder if I’m even a good person. It shames me because, deep down, I realize these are everyone’s problems and it’s embarassing to realize I am not the beautiful and delicate snow flake I was always told. No matter how nice our clothes, our perfumes, our vehicles or homes… we are still the same naked, emotionally-driven apes that crawled from mother earth’s dripping womb. The fact that there are 6-billion of us now doesn’t change the schematics.
You remember that part from Fight Club where Durden’s wimpy alter ego can’t continue going to the group meetings because he knows someone else in the group is faking? Just knowing that someone else is faking makes him feel so self-conscious that he can no longer let go and cry, which is the only way he can sleep. Or have you ever seen a baby bawling its eyes out, but stops the moment another baby starts crying. The first baby looks at the new baby like, “Hey, stop honing in on my racket!”
We’re all like that, jockeying for the same bandwidth to be seen, heard and validated. We all want to be acknowledged for the invaluable, indispensable asset that we are. This goes back to our ancestral mind; the one that originated in tribal life when everyone’s acquaintances could fit into one camp. In such a situation, it was much easier to be the fastest, the brightest, the best with tools or a the best cook. One’s value could be determined practically.
However, as the size of our social units increased, we found that it was much more difficult to determine one’s value. So we came up with more complex systems involving money, hierarchy and property laws. No one person can entirely explain how we determine why one person deserves a $100-million bonus and someone else has to make due with $15/hour with no benefits. The reasoning is so deeply embedded in our system that it requires none. We take the dollar value of a person as the empirical evidence of their worthiness.
This is so vastly different from how we are set up as animals. The social bonds that unite us establish trust and cooperation, but the further outside of our network we venture, the less certain trust and cooperation become. Money is how we abstract trust and cooperation; in exchange for money, we give our cooperation, with the trust that our efforts will be rewarded with cooperation when we need it. That is, if we have the money.
Money is also how we abstract importance. The more money a person has, the more they should be listened to, the more respect they are entitled to. We don’t always know why this is. It isn’t because they’ve earned our respect. It isn’t because we have deep knowledge of their moral character. We give them respect because we are conditioned to understand money demands it.
Having depersonalized our value to such an extent, there’s no wonder so many of us wander in despair, grasping after things to make us feel real and important. We plaster our cars with bumper stickers announcing our interests, we dress in branded clothes, drive branded cars — everything to associate ourselves with something realer, more lasting and important than we are. After all, there are many Bobs, but only one Saab car company. Driving a Saab says so much more about you in our society than being named Bob.
The same goes for working at a certain company. God knows I felt so proud to work for Apple. Apple is a brand that everyone knows and, as everyone knows without knowing, the more people know about something, the realer it is. Nyaze is barely a ghost in the machine, but Apple is a machine unto itself. From its holy corporate ark flowed strength, meaning and purpose. This type of infusion is addictive, even more so than the money. The grand sense of moving across the world stage is intoxicating.
Going back to being just one ordinary person can be quite a blow. I mean, who wants to be ordinary?
Ordinary.
What a word. Commonly meaning “of no special interest,” “the usual.”
Funny how things in this category wind up being the most important substrate of our existence. Not often do we think about the air we’re constanting sucking into our lungs. Or the light that allows us to see. These are perfectly ordinary things. Just like the ground we walk on, the sky above us, and all the people we’ve ever met.
It’s precisely this consistency that makes life bearable. We would soon be driven crazy if life were constant flux. It’s approximated via television sometimes, but we hang on by a nail.
The Tao is master of all because it serves all. It is utterly and totally lackluster. It’s so plain it can hardly been seen, heard, touched or smelt. It’s blander than water. It’s emptier than a hole. It’s lower than bottom.
All things know it without knowing, all understanding flows from its darkness.
Dammit, you see, there I go rhapsodizing again.
This Afternoon’s Thought [Love is the Mind Healer Pt. 2]
There is nothing to it. Only wants.
Love binds all things.
Life is change. Death is change. Everything’s change.
So nothing is changing.
War’s change. Peace is change.
Everything in the middle. Going nowhere. Restless.
In a moment you know.
Fear knows nothing. Go forward.
The wheel curves beneath you, dropping into the void. All cares.
Gone.
This Afternoon’s Thought [Love Is the Mind Healer]
Attitude determines everything and nothing determines attittude more than the people you associate with. I don’t care if you are Mary Poppins, if you hang with negative people, your energy will turn sour. I used to make the mistake of thinking other people’s emotions and views didn’t influence mine. That’s like walking waste deep in shit and thinking you’re going to come out smelling of roses.
The way I grew up, I was surrounded by negativity. From the negative people to the negative environment to the negative life prognosis, it was all anyone could do to hold their head up. The crushing weight of the drug dealing, the overpainted walls and pissy stairwells was more than any human was meant to bear.
We originated in the wilderness surrounded by clean air, water and sunlight. Even as we struggled to survive, we did so in the best possible situation. Now the struggle to survive goes on but we fight our war on concrete fields, dressed in uniforms of status, jockeying for access to the low-hanging fruit.
You can think so hard about how hard things are it can make you want to give up, but I don’t know what the point would be. Why give up when there’s nothing left but the grave? Why give up when life is still the best thing going?
I want to feel sorry for myself. I want to blame something or someone for how I feel. Because that’s what nature has taught me to do — to seek my enemy with my senses, to ready my defense, to attack.
But that is no longer my enemy. My enemy is not an animal or even the environment. My enemy is human nature, my enemy is abundance.
I’ve grown spoiled. Positively rotten. I was taught to believe that everything I want is good to want if I’m willing to work hard enough for it. Everything rests on my shoulders. Success and failure are mine to pluck or squander.
That’s too much weight for a human’s shoulders, but it may be the burden we carry nonetheless. Maybe the world is tired like the Hindu scriptures say, maybe it is running out of steam, slowly, surely, inexorably. That still doesn’t mean it gives up. The moment the play begins, it’s finale is foretold, but we play it nonetheless. By God, we play it.
I don’t have any special knowledge. I only know what I’ve seen. The people who keep going keep going. There’s no mystery. There’s no secret.
You wake up, you open your eyes, you put one foot down and then another. The next thing you know, you’re living a life. And the further you go, the more you see, the larger your map gets and you start to recognize the familiar markings. By the time you’ve seen it all, you realize it wasn’t much to see. Everything that’s happened has happened before and will happen again.
Back to the wild, go ye, my friends. I’ll see you where the sidewalk crumbles and the rivers begin.
Tonight’s Thought [Poem: "We Are Blind All"]
Never trust your eyes
For the tubes that run back
Lead to the darkness you busted out from
Where you yet crouch
Coiled in endless anticipation
Blind
Today’s Thought [Prose Poem: “For Science”)
In honor of the successful non-disintegration of the Earth upon activating the Large Hadron Collider.
***
god is a field of potential
wishing to be known
it knows itself
and our all our minds and our yearnings
serve the execution of this flawless circuit
which is why science
in all its poetic rigor
is the most sublime and highest art
the inquiry of existence
for the sake of everything that exists.
More Thoughts [Poets Rush In]
Being a poet is not simply a vocation characterized by recitation and composition of rhyme and meter. No, being a poet means being first in line to get gunned down by the imperial forces of reality. It means surfing the deep waves sanity calls madness. It’s somewhat hyperbolic, but must be. Poets break semantics, freeing us from tired notions such as ‘what a poet does.’ Instead they are replaced with booby traps, mines and sink holes to foil rationality. The disciples of apathy and inertia will never understand it; for it looks toward what could be and not what cannot. It does not define; it transforms.
***
Do not trust those who would trade your belief for fear.
This Morning’s Thoughts [Take No Sides]
Take no sides, not even your own. The radar cannot save the ship from a leak. Just so, consciousness does not save you from yourself. You are meant to return everything to its source. Do not mourn the wind when it does not blow. It is not dead.