Neighbor

I carry too much synchronicity today
Packed per square inch,
Jammed into my heart,
A Universe of energy
In a space pinched by my thumb and forefinger.

I walk the Hessler Street Fair
And fall on a table of simple Chinese line drawings,
Beautiful, ink-drawn and watercolor washed with shaky hand,.

I study them,
So many, a booth full of them,
Small ones – birds, pools, flowers
Larger landscapes hang – of the sky, the forests, mountains.

And then my neighbor materializes,
Haggling with a bearded man,
My 5’3” Asian acquaintance from the apartment building
Who yells, animated, on his cellphone to someone in Mandarin
downstairs in the lobby some nights.

“Who painted these?” I ask him.
He replies, with eyebrows awash in brow,
Implying a punchline to the situation,
“I did! Haha!!...”

I shake his hand, appreciative,
Thinking how I must visit his apartment,
With 20 dollars in pocket, speak a few words,
Patronize the arts….

Stan

I was jealous of his easy sociability, his ability to maneuver 7th grade, his status -- not quite popular but conversant with the popular kids. He was, in every sense of the words, friendly and extraverted, by appearance a different soul than me.
As I’ve gotten to know Stan through the years, he’s struck me more and more as a Zen student. Riding the waves of good times and difficult blows, he celebrates and grieves but always remains true to his guiding principle, kindness.
My jealousy dropped the first time I spoke with him in history class the last day of 7th grade. He talked with a familiarity that wrapped me in his warmth and humor. It was just one conversation (in which he recounted a horror story he had read), but I knew I wanted to be friends with him.
At a football game the next autumn, we got to talk for a second time. For some reason, I broke the ice by throwing him down the hill from where the bleachers looked over our junior high school’s cleat-munched football field. I think that was some kind of initiation for Stan, and it was an expression of the rage that hovered below my frozen façade, come to the surface now that, in his presence, I felt totally myself. Call it an exaggerated “male-bonding” experience, Stan still remembers that incident and recalls it with laughter and some puzzlement.
I loved going over his house in South Euclid (the city just west of Lyndhurst). There was love there, in a way that may have been absent from my house. His parents were easy-going and they loved each other truly and devotedly.
If Stan was a Zen student, his father, Herb, was the guru on top of the mountain. Soft-spoken behind his green-tinted glasses (he had injured his eye in World War II), when I came over he treated me like a second son. His gentle wisdom and ironic laugh were soothing.
My friendship with Stan introduced me to emotional intimacy in which I could share anything -- my dreams and my failings. For the first time, I was accepted and respected as an intelligent kid, as he was, instead of made fun of for it. The relationship went a long way toward healing the loss of “home”, the disengagement with “Self” I had experienced all of my life due to being given up by my mother.

Buddha in a bomb shelter

let go the razor-blade
the tangle of red
the broad field
slicked with blood
filled with bodies, limbs playing Twister

hold on to the heart
the part about love...
correlations...
breath and death
-- sister nations

bodies in bags in
crates and plates
in heads of dead run round
and pierced through
with largely ignored truths

but from the seat of the heart,
you witness
all this passing --
this ghastly miraculous fraction
of Universe you see as your Self
your limbs, your torso, your glasses
playing in front of you like a puppet’s;

gaudy day-glo version of your dream Self
more real than dream, only perhaps, because this version picks up
where it left off the day before –
each and every day

and while you are no larger than any other dream
you are no smaller than any other dream
no more important, no less
for we are all connected
by the light that drowns us all,
fish swimming in light, longing in light
colliding in light, killing in light
righting in light – placing broken bodies back together
shooting them through with souls retrieved from
a madman’s medicine shelf
and, from a moment of passion, reborn

The Once and Future King

Reading Robert Bly's Iron John. Absolutely amazing. "A book about men". Not at all in contrast to a book about women or a snooty writing that exculdes gay men or transgender, nor a book about tough guys or anythng of the sort. REALLY interesting...Jungian in tone.

He talks about the archetypal kings, the sacred king, which is the transcendent male motif -- Adonai, Jesus, Allah, Odin, Jupiter, etc, and the inner king, the sacred within each man (and woman for each matter, as each man has an inner queen as well.)

One statement that totally blew me away was that "addiction does not have to do with Colombian drug lords, but with the abscence of the King"...not having to do with a lot of inner city fathers not taking in their kids, but really the other way around. Because we have ousted "the King", the inner sacred, (if we ever really honored the inner sacred as a society), all below falls; because we don't know our sacred selves, the poor suffer and the rich glut. Thus we have politicans who care more for religious fundamentalism than for humans, corporations into money and power, millions of addicted souls, and everything in between.

I haven't gotten to the point in the book where Bly talks about transformation of self and society, but in my opinion, this transformation takes place in the growing consciousness movement, the infiltration of Eastern religion into the West, the restructuring of Western religion, things like the Occupy movement, artists, musicians, actors, activists, the common man becoming more environmentally and socially conscious, 12-step recovery, the women's movement (for it takes the discovery of the Inner Queen concurrent with the discovery of the Inner King to bring society afloat -- one without the other is not enough -- and a growing matriarchy does not preclude the arrival of the King -- the two can coexist).

One component, along with the missing King, that has been lacking is making peace with the father -- ones physical father. This does not mean that the father has to become a good father, or even be present. One may not even know ones father, but I think the more one knows about his father and his father's story and situation, his good and bad, the more one can reconcile.

Thus the men's movement. Okay ladies, please stop snickering. This in no way opposes the woman's movement but arises hand in hand with it. We have our issues, us men, straight, gay and transgender. We all have fathers and have issues with them. I will share a Robert Bly exercise for digesting ones relaionship with ones father in a later post. It is rather ingenious and has helped me so much with my perspective on my Dad.

.

two-points

I am okay
with being here
but not
with being alive

the murmuring from outside
the half open
isolation room door
the motion
of my shallow breaths –
in
and out

they’ve all put up
with my crap
for half the night
as have I

and now
in two-point leathers
my left wrist
and left ankle
strapped to the side
of the gurney

with nowhere to go
but on my back
or on my side
I'm relieved to finally be left
with no option
but to rest

Terra crying
terrifying
Mother of dry
crumbling Earth
slips in sieve
rivers give
way to dust
the oceans pray
in sickening floods
leaves turn ash
we’ve come at last
to drown in glut
and so much blood
we're covered
in cash
we cover
our ass
we cannot
turn back