Showing posts with label Poem. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Poem. Show all posts

March 1, 2008

Welcome Home

Adapted from an essay by Rob Brezsny from his fantastic book Pronoia: How the Whole World is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings.
Welcome Home

Let me remind you who you really are:
You're an immortal freedom fighter in service to divine love.

You have temporary taken on human form, forgetting your true origins, in order to liberate all sentient beings from suffering and the bondage of false belief.

You will accept nothing less than the miracle of bringing heaven all the way down to earth.

Your task may look impossible. Ignorance and inertia, partially camouflaged as time-honored morality, seem to surround you. Pessimism is enshrined as a hall mark of worldliness. Compulsive skepticism masquerades as wit and perceptiveness. Irony is hip. Stories about treachery and degradation provoke a visceral thrill in millions of people who think of themselves as reasonable and smart. Beautiful truths are suspect and ugly truth are readily believed.

To overcome these odds, we must be both a radical revolutionary and practice radical acceptance. We must be both a wrathful destroyer of falsehoods and a loving creator of true beauty. We must resist the temptation to be seduced by the thousands of delusions that have been carefully packaged to lull us into in-action. We must stay in a good mood as we overthrow the stressful hallucination that is mistakenly referred to as reality.

We are facing the extinction of our natural habitat and the possibility of endless war, but there is an even bigger threat to the long-term fate of the earth, of which all others are but symptoms: the death of the imagination.

But what can we do?

We can create safe houses to shelter those devoted to the incremental awakening of humanity. We can create sanctuaries of festivals and parties and cafes and workshops and homes, where we can ritually celebrate the evolving mysteries of positive co-creation.

We must facilitate the regular practice of trust, cooperation, innovation and love.

We can be patient with one another as we attempt the difficult and almost impossible. We can pull each other out of our comfort zones.
We can provide gentle encouragement and committed cooperation.
We can be inclusive.
We can offer the gift of our honesty.
We can resist the substitution of passive consumption for active participation.

We can discover, exercise and rely on our own inner resources, even as we move towards greater partnership.
We can seek to overcome barriers that stand between us and a recognition of our inner selves and the reality of those around us.
We can make contact with a natural world exceeding human powers.

We must conspire together to carry out an agenda that Barbara Marx Hubbard describes as: to hospice what's dying and midwife what's being born.




January 31, 2008

To Occur to Myself: A Poem

To Occur to Myself

To see myself, not as I use me but as I experience me.

A mirror for one brief second as the flapping stops and the waters still
a face is glimpsed
a shear face that dwarfs the reflecting ripples that play upon my surface.

To enter dreaming awake,
to digest what is known there in front of me
whole
and awake to life bigger than me at the breakfast nook with care and sorrow
and spoon and mouth
and lips that speak truth only when stumped by letters spelled in the mind of creation clutched in chubby cherub fingers,
flitting about the word I can't remember the meaning to...
but say anyway.

on these lips that move
directed by a life circumstance that offers up layers of petals around a seed as small as lifetimes of preparation and as vital as that breath I just
now
took.

Its all immensely important, surely you see that?
Isn't it more than egotism that places you and I together in the heart of the entire everything?
Gods drink from the pool that I don't know that I am.
Heavenly beings feast upon the life that I unconsciously lead,
now as a blind man,
now as a drunk falling asleep on the shoulder of a me that pretends to forget what I learned from me when I was that sorrow and care
and the breakfast nook was my home with the spoon that asked questions of my lips that supplied answers spoken of in me.

Horrible Deal : A Poem

Horrible Deal

I'd like to tell you my story in the same assured voice that whispered Mica the prophesy of Justice and humble walks with thy Lord.

I yearn for the voice that speaks in sun-rays from cloud-cover and burning archetypes,
conversation purged of get-down anger and and lift-up righteousness.

Speak to me of eyes that see and ears that hear.
Worlds transformed by lens I see through.

What do you offer there in your outstretched hand,
all shaky and clammy and not perfect?

You offer me dissolution of a separation that exists, a line where once a wall stood.
You offer me the hopeful paradox of life lived short and sweetly.

I want practical assurances with the grace you humbly offer
I want practical respite from practical frenzy
practical absolution from practical prack...tick...cal...ness.

Theses negotiations always go the same way,
(the same poem again and again)
all devouring demons and blood thirsty bliss.

The compulsions are the same beneath the surface,
here behind the skin, behind those flawed outstretched hands and this blackened corpse grinning wildly and screaming truth in its fried hair and crispy wings.

This horribleness is in you.
The one who makes the tentative offers,
who negotiates the back-room deals,
who marries the ugly daughter and sticks the knife into the fleshy part of the only little thing you ever really cared about.

Yes, there is sunlit beauty and 9 year olds demanding answers and dogs dreaming of sticks and trains arriving with lovers kissing on foreheads and hot water in the kettle and tulips alive in the snow. Yes, there is gold magic markers and brilliance behind the microphone and eyeglasses on noses and incense in temples and needles on thread. Yes, there is candles on windowsills and homecomings and footsteps and homecomings and washing and laughing and tossing and napping and...
and....
and...

But it is still a horrible deal.
Its terrible terms that you offer.
Its an awful game that you designed.

The only way I could possibly stand it is to know that you are playing it too.

March 12, 2006

The Only Temple We Have Ever Known

The Only Temple We Have Ever Known

I have you breathe down on me like an experience gone beyond mine
to ours
to cosmic universal
to starlight on a soft, soft summer night when rain drops fall from a cloudless sky and we gather in fields
exalted and humbled
and filthy
and grandly,
magnificently
soaking...
wet.

It pours down the base of my neck
over spine tingling particles that respond to touch
and breath
and me sensing you
long dead and gone
standing there just beyond a naked shoulder.

We've gather here to honor all time and place
to spread the message that has been whispered in ears
since ears were baby soft

We gather to groom the trails that form the circling crops
communicating the secrets that have yet to belong to more than the code broken
just now
when you said to me
"This...is...all...there...ever...was."

And we whirl together,
spinning on a field that has been created backwards
backwards from backwards
backwards from wholeness
backwards from truth
backwards from time spins
backwards from rocks crumble.

Backwards, the destination gives birth to the path.

Perhaps we whirl here together, alone
writing this journey into the only temple we have ever known.