Epic Poem | Twisted Pots

This and That

Foam and splash
from the ocean spray
stream out, dried,
slaked, bleached,
ossified.

It's us, we’ve landed,
our legs still water-logged,
dogged by the darkness
of our slumber.

I lift a tiny grain of sand,
gaze upon that bright world
in my hand, toss it
in the ocean. I’m moving on,
I feel no loss.

The frog, the crocodile, deer,
elk, vulture, raven, all
fled the same spurious foam,
all turned, looked seaward,
saw what we could, turned
landward, emptyhanded.

Bernardo Kastrup said if we saw
the world as it really is, it would kill us.
But we saw what we could.

I keep it moving, feed it,
nurture it, this bit
of spume, the body-mind.

While the sea lies undefined,
undivided, liquid light,
the landscape dries molded
by our senses: the sight
of a cloud, so amorphous;
the taste of a scallop
plucked from the sea, like us;
the shell of a coconut,
rough to the touch.

The Eggmen are playing
in the central market of the mind
where things are bought into.
A British Beatles band.
Insects, cockroaches, armadillos,
the exoskeleton has
its beauty, as does the ego.

When will we break,
crack this dense shell?
Is it the veil?
Arunachala open, bring your
cave, your silence, please
burst in me.

Fill me with white light
and surround me in black, both
containing all colors.

I am broken.

Sara Peskin says we’re a molecule away
from madness. I am
that molecule, that madness
that left the womb, left my home,
in search of an earthbound bliss
that will never exist.

Full moon in a drought
in September.
You have no water
of your own.
Is that why you pull
so deep at the moisture
within me?

I weep at your golden beauty.
We both feel that sense
of lack, something
missing, we want
it back.

Pulling at the waves
to fill that empty space—
I am the moon.

Does the seed participate
in the original
sin of creation,
that ecstasy
of the exploding apple?

One experience awareness
competes with most:
The eternal orgasm, a firehose
hooked to the source, spraying
everything, women, walls, buildings,
mountainsides, continents, galaxies,
storming, sliding, sluicing, gliding,
flowing, surfing, gurgling, swirling,
surging, streaming, hurling,
easing, draining.

But really, if I’m honest, it ends so quickly,
one squirt, and there I am,
alone, staring out the window
at the cold moon
I can’t leap through,
and then sleep.

My dad often called me “Squirt.”
“Let’s go fishing tonight, Squirt.”
I’ve wondered if that’s what he meant,
that single hail Mary spunk punt
into the void, a note in a bottle
in the ocean, found by another
open body.

And the output: This empty vessel
in the desert.

I search in Mapquest for Eden, Beulah, Arunachala.
It tells me, “You can’t get there from here.”
When I fished with my dad in Lake Travis,
we crossed over the low water bridge.
We sat quite still, the black bass would lurk
in the deep.
We trolled for whites.
They hit hard within the wake.

Does the ocean troll for me, drag the bait
across the surface?

I watch for the water to rise, wait
for the floodgates to open,
rush me toward the source.
But I know this droplet can evaporate
in the desert, in Eden, Beulah,
Arunachala.

I grieve for this death,
not that one, but this,
this droplet cast out of Eden,
fallen, still falling
down the coarse, rocky
face of God, infinite
down down highway 2,
no return ticket.

Up is down, down is up.
I hold so tight to the form of this drop.
As Ry Cooder said,
“I have a short time to live
and a long time to lay dead.”
Someday this thought will unravel,
drop behind an empty sleave.

We believe the mind is the lifeboat
that will send us back to the sea.
But it will not.
We are landlocked, and our thought
is just a memory.

The prodigal body tries
so many tricks
to prepare for the journey:
yoga, weights, aerobics,
long runs, mineral baths, chai tea.
Should it tighten, or just dissolve?

This boat, this raft, sits stuck
in desert sands,
pleading for rain, for a deluge,
asking forgiveness for ever
having left.

My sister said I told her
I didn’t care about happiness.
How does a sister happen anyway,
and a brother, on this journey,
far, far from the sea,
adrift in the sunsoaked sand.
Another grain, I guess, another droplet or two.

Being born is a wave diving
headfirst into the shore,
unafraid.

Being born is a boat
sprouting in the water.

Being born is a word
rising from silence.

The underworld cats are dogging me.
They obliterated my blog,
sank their teeth in my song,
gnawed holes in my boat
out of here. I long
for a means to transport
me down this arroyo.

I don’t mean to annoy you,
God, but a sustained rain, a torrent,
please, just squeeze the corpuscles
of your sky muscles.

I’ve been a foamy drop
of that dense stout
from Batch, my buddy's brewery.

Swirling down the esophagos,
down, dispersed, the worst
is over, I am the body,
the host, ghost of that ocean.
I am that infinite brew,
and I shine through.

The money managers announce their presence,
ka-ching their essence,
in the mental temple,
the house of money mirrors,
the hedge fund house.

I’m a deeply indebted entity,
the psychic account is frozen,
awaiting liquidity
to buy a boat out of this lion’s den,
ride the crypto-current
away.

But it’s not gold, not paper,
not real, it’s neither ether
nor dark matter. Just not there.

When I walked down Wall Street,
they were my walls,
and they crumbled.

I must insist
though he has genius
Ezra Pound was a fascist.
We overfill our empty vessels
with big ideas
and cannot float.
Our cantos are just old
rotten meat
in the cargo hold.

We know we need
to drop the skin
of the old self.
The vessel is rusted thin,
must be discarded.

How do I get from here
to there with no vehicle,
no tracks, no trace?
Is there nothing
I can embrace?

“It is hard to follow one great vision in this world of darkness and many changing shadows.
Among those shadows men get lost.”
Black Elk

I know there will be more wars.
Must I absorb the inner
insurrections, the rumbling,
the trumplings, the stumbling
over each broken news blurb?
It all gets blurred.

The inner and outer must converge,
outside-in and inside-out,
without a doubt.
The mind must relinquish the urge
to solve it all.

The mind is a sword that slices
the world, our baby, into many pieces.
Then we hope to splice it,
leap into oneness.

Sometimes I gaze through the dark
bars of hatred toward those
who don’t seem to be me.
Arunachala—such a distant memory.

“We are not ‘human beings.’ We are being temporarily clothed in human experience.”
Rupert Spira

I know the transmission
is missing,
because as a man, I sense
an off note
in its singing,
a tiny vibration in the crankshaft
of the cerebellum.

We blend with the things we know well,
vibrate with them.
I was lost in the world of raw materials
for years, still carry a blowtorch
for concrete imagery.

In ancient times, King Arthur’s knights
forged metal armor for protection.
Me, I built foundations,
prefer concrete, reinforced
‘round the imagination.

“Not ideas but in things,”
Williams said.
I have lived in a thing called the body,
in the mountains, in the desert,
in the hill country.
At times, on a steep hip roof,
I’ve felt one-sixty-fourth of an inch
from eternity.

“Silence is ever-speaking. It is the perennial flow of language that is interrupted by speaking.”
Ramana Maharshi

Words are migrants
we send across the borders
of our brains.

A bird died on my stoop today
from the sheer clarity
of hitting the window.

Like when the temple bell rang
and blew the butterfly’s wings
to shreds. This form we cling
so tightly to,
though we know the distant rumbling
of the sea—do you hear it? I do.
But some of these boundaries
are so solid, I can’t get through.

“The boundaries of the body need to dissolve
and then we feel like the world is our body.”
Rupert Spira

Some say suffering is the key,
but I don’t care to open that door.
It’s cold out there.

At age 4, I had a cat named
for the LSU tiger, Mike,
who I’d seen pacing behind a fence.
Our eyes met,
and I’ll never forget
that locked up look.

When my Mike got pregnant,
they took her away
and Mom said she might die.
That was the first word I
had heard of not being here,
of not being.

And now I step out upon the icy deck.
The body will not grip.
And I can’t stop that slip--
oh what the heck,
just let it go.
We’re falling with no net below,
it's endless.
Will I awaken?
No? Call Uber Eats then.

Could the crunch of a quinoa
and black bean infused stone ground
tortilla chip be the sound
that cuts through,
cracks the whip
and breaks the veil?

“Evaporation:

The process of turning from liquid into vapor.
The process of something abstract ceasing to exist.”

Google dictionary

I wept.
How could a droplet weep?
Yet I wept from being separate,
from having slept,
and slipped into so tight
a mind-body outfit.

There is a way
I could escape the hooks
and lines that dragged me here,
though I know the hooks and lines
are mine.

How could going in
be the way out? Yet I go inward, weeping,
allowing edges to evaporate,
surrender, fall away.

A droplet cannot drown
nor swim nor sink. O fish,
fulfilled by your gills, you
too, one with the waves, are filled
with delight.

15

“My soul cries out for rest
and the end is not in sight”
Amazing Rhythm Aces

It’s hard when the stars
change their mood,
and the earth sulks.

Up here, I perceive
the rust and the grains of sand
in the steel and concrete buildings.
I know the ripple of the butterfly wing.
The logic and the mystery.
The water and the stone.
I’m going home.

Some history still lurks
in me. I toss it like string
with straightened hooks.
I’m not hungry for much.

I’m going home.

“Eternity is in love with the Productions of Time.”
William Blake

From the clouds I witness
wild horses, dark
eyes blazing.
I’m in the gamboge
glaze, in a watercolor haze
at the edge.

The light reveals the beauty
of this galaxy. There is only one light,
one color.

One zero,

One point,

One pointedness,

One O so big

It blisses out everything,

One egg about to explode,

One node, one ode to it all,