IF YOU DON’T WANT A PULSE
If you don’t want a pulse
I’m not going to force one on you.
If you want to hold your breath on the moon
as if you were protecting the last flag
of its lost atmosphere
as your face turns blue as a moodring
I’m not going to show up like a gust of wind
and blow stars in your face
like the playful ghost
of a dandelion gone to seed.
The stars don’t twinkle in the eyes of the dead.
And when they cry in the mirror
their tears don’t make ripples.
The trees take their engagement rings off
and the mystic specificity of every snowflake
is banked like a fingerprint
someone forgot to wash off
when they thawed like a serial killer
in the warmth of an artificial heart
in a glacial interrogation room
with two-faced mirrors
sporting a camera
that cuddles like a recording device.
Clarity doesn’t mean
that everytime something shines
your mind jumps in front of your eyes
to make a point of the light.
If making a tent of a mental starmap
is enough of a sky for you
I’m not going to expose you to the radiance.
If your idea of extending your senses
is mirrors and lenses
I’m not going to make Spinoza
grind them all over again in his garret.
No donkey.
No stick.
No carrot.
I don’t need to make scaffoldings of thought
to climb up and paint the overview
in Botticellian blue
when I know it’s where it’s always been
right under my feet.
I starwalk on the things I’ve seen
and deepen my shadows
to inspire the light to burn hotter and brighter.
But fear of the dark
makes you lower your voice
everytime you hear a bird in a hidden grove
singing its heart out to the night
as if no one else were listening
and whisper
What was that?
I’m afraid.
But I can’t hear it for you
like an old Druid
divining in a sacred wood
and give you an interpretation
that would do your listening any good.
I’m not into cutting the balls off oaks
like mistletoe
or the mountain oysters of rams in the
or the figs of goats
with the sickle of the moon
to keep them from running amok with desire.
It’s the nature of fire
to always get out of hand.
Ask that red-tailed hawk of a heart
with blinders on
like an executioner’s hood
you keep tethered by a leg to your arm
what it’s like to get high
on your own thermals
alone on a late August afternoon
wheeling through double helices
like the spark of a planet in the sun
with the wingspan of an uninhibited sky.
But I’m not out to hunt your morning doves
like bloodless loveletters.
I admire the sails
but where’s the lifeboat.?
Where are the oars the feathers the wings?
I don’t want to waste a good star
on someone who isn’t rowing.
Row row row your boat
gently down the stream.
Merrily merrily merrily merrily
life is but a dream.
But even if you’re sleepwalking
you can still stub your heart on a rock
and find yourself caught in an earthquake.
If you don’t want to wake up
from the inside out
what good would it do to knock?
I’m not going to brainwash my ghost
into being ashamed it had a body once.
And who’s to say
that haunting isn’t just another way
of advancing your senses
into mediums they’ve never worked with before
like the seedbeds of new internal worlds
rooted in our starmud
like waterlilies anchored in a swamp
waiting for the wind to fill their sails
and drive them down the mindstream
to brighten the nightlife
in their ports of call?
One of the liberal graces of an enlightened life
is that you suffer fewer deaths
than you have afterlives.
And if you hear someone calling
it isn’t a summons to a seance.
How do I know this?
Because all of those who don’t.
The tree is made from the crutch
just as much as the crutch is made from the tree.
Two acts of compassion from the same heartwood.
Even the dead branch is delirious with fruit
that has ripened in the midnight sun
of an unexpected insight.
Birth doesn’t start the work
and death doesn’t finish it.
When opposites
look at each other in the mind mirror
one isn’t far
and the other near.
One isn’t love
and the other hate.
They copulate like sacred snakes
like the bannisters on the stairwells
of our dna
like wavelengths of life
from the same radiant source
long before forms and shadows
and when they meet eye to eye
it isn’t Hammurabi and Odeipus
it isn’t Lear and the wanton gods
it isn’t Tiresius being led around
like a blind old woman by a child for seven years.
It’s a union
a coincidence of the contradictories
a synthesis of opposites
that differentiates identities
like the names that we choose for our children.
A rainbow isn’t the optical illusion of a raindrop
anymore than your face
is a delusion of the mirror
or the moon’s reflection on water is.
The water can’t grasp it
or reject it.
And if water can’t wash it off
maybe it’s not a stain.
Graffitti under the bridge
or writing on the wall
maybe they’re not watercolours in the rain.
Maybe when I lay my head down to sleep
on the hard rock of my brain
my dreams are the grass and saxifrage
that cracks it open like a fortune-cookie
or a message in a bottle
to read it like a genome.
Why run around like hieroglyphics
looking for a Rosetta stone
so you can understand yourself?
Why put a gate on your homelessness
to keep the wind and the weeds out?
Nothing’s empty.
Nothings’s real.
Everything has a creative feel about it.
Absurdity isn’t the black sheep of meaning.
Innocence isn’t driven out into the wilderness
like the scapegoat for a guilty world
to return like a prodigal tiger of karmic wrath.
are built in the ruins of perennial philosophies
that keep popping up like flowers
that don’t know when to quit.
Water air life fire light
all make better cornerstones
than
Because there’s nothing immaterial about the mind
it can grow a body out of nothing
like a tree grows an apple out of bees.
Delusion is the ore of enlightenment
It will weep gold
if you turn up the heat
to the cosmic intensity
of any one of an infinity
of transformative universes.
But the clarity of the mind
isn’t fixed like a mirror.
The mind has ripples in it.
It moves.
It grows.
It lives like a lake
Like a watersnake dripping with moonlight
as it swims to the further shore.
It’s always moving to keep its balance
like a stream does
or a fish
or blood.
The more people come together
they deeper they feel their solitude.
The deeper the grave that’s dug in the valley
the closer the mountain is to stars.
One mile east is one mile west
so that far is this close.
The candle doesn’t enflame the lover
but blow it out
and you set him ablaze.
All things are like that.
The ones you miss the most
are the ones you hold most near.
That’s what these words do.
They span the polarities
like migrating birds
habitable planets
clouds
and Monarch butterflies.
Life changes to stay the same.
Life’s changing all the time
to sustain its original harmony.
At one and the same moment
the whole of the universe
and everyone in it
is both the afterlife
and future of a single atom
that’s been exploding into existence
wavelength after wavelength
insight after insight
like an enlightenment experience
that’s never complete
because the more it understands
the less it grasps.
It returns home
without ever having left the place
with empty hands
and nothing to say
that could possibly explain its absence
though Wednesday’s child is full of grace.
In a field of vision deeper than seeing
the eye is a mere toy of insight
and feeling and thought
a soft alloy of body and mind
blood starmud and water.
Not readiness.
Not ripeness.
But awareness is all.
Beyond being and non-being
there are no guides.
There are no teachers.
There are no mirrors.
There are no more Dantes to mislead Virgil.
When everything is missing
what is there about life
that isn’t already fulfilled?
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