Before I had you

before I had you
I had nature to admire or something
akin to a background unity
Of all spiritual time and sacred “everywhere”
It was nearly enough to sustain me

I loved nature, and I still do
But you have changed “Nature”
And in a way, you are now
My everything, harmonious and flattering
The heartfelt call beyond roses

And I don’t regret the responsibility
Of being mated, cuddled, sacrificed
to the “us” our lives have become
before I had you
I distinctly remember being miserable

or some shade of bored with myself
And that my dear, is you
A light that’s better than the sun’s rays!
I guess flowers are more flowery
With inner and outer beauty

Easily within reach
Before I had you
I ached for flowers
But I only had my verses
And they exquisitely wept to endure

Into the far future as if untarnished by death
And certainly I don’t recollect
The memories associated with those poems
Before I had you
All I had were mere words

And the inner music that had inspired them
Verses that celebrated the brevity
Of life’s delight and the ancient union of things…

And he felt the air reopen, and the pain was glad

on an incredibly clear day
my petty self-centered wounds
dissolved like butter

and I discovered a great secret
what may well be the great mystery
the kind you wish you had known

when you suffered worse
I saw that there is no
desire truly worth pursing

for these gratifications are like
echoes of lack in our chest
the burning of freedom in our chest

our drama is moreover, inconsequential
to the greater dilemmas of the species
and to the plight, no less

of the less fortunate
for one is not loved as one is born, necessarily
but it may happen that one is

lucky or unlucky, and it’s not better
to be one or the other
but to have our share of both

and to suffer is as natural
as baking bread or walking through dew
and I hope it doesn’t take

an especially clear day
to realize the obvious once again
though knowing me, and how

tiny my love is, I may have to
remind myself many moons from now
why the bright sunlight heals.

Thoughts at a brief surprise appearance of spring

I took consolation just today
the first day of Spring
the first day the sun felt

That I could feel enough to be distracted
From monotony, that hum-drum
Feeling of walking the same path
Again or, yet again
I took consolation that the

Light had a beautiful slant
And it all started for me again
About how it’s easy to love life

For me, it’s an immediate reality
Watching faces is enough sometimes
To stimulate my mirror neurons
Into serendipity, or, that place
Of empathy, where my own existence

Does not feel so horrible after all
What it’s to me that my life will cease
To exist one day, I’ll just remember spring
No doubt all thoughts will be thought again
And my heart recycled like poetry.

What went wrong with capitalism

yesterday I heard a preacher of truths
otherwise known as “advertisements”
they are everywhere

stand in my way
the speak to me in personalized
machine-learning pitches

but they don’t feel biological anxiety
I really don’t care about
the latest car or clothes

I’d prefer to think about injustice
inequality, racism, intolerance, sexism
actual human truths and problems

how happy the man must be right?
who can contemplate the
unhappiness of others

or does altruism and activism
no matter how insignificant my impact
make me feel better somehow?

I who cannot be cursed from the outside
since I am poor, ugly, unpopular
having nothing, owning nothing

being anonymous, I can ignore
the better part of capitalism
gluttony, profit-memes, exploits
of privilege and status

abuse of power, corruption
and mental hoopla taken for granted
that’s why, in a word
I could never live in America.

Stanzas to us

Reality is always
More or less
A love shared

Or a purpose experienced
Between human beings
Somehow together
A social construct
That is, that’s how we are

Our brain is hardwired
So the idea of one person
Being separate, is sort of idiotic

Reality is always
More or less
The people you care about
Or the lack of people there
Only we are ourselves

Equal to ourselves and
Incomplete without
Significant others

Or a simplified relationship
With ourselves, that amounts
To many sub-selves conversing
That I may safely add:
“I we ourselves, salute you
Salute you we us.”

Philosophy of maybe

I see that there is no nature
only that which we project onto her
that image perhaps evolved in us
due to an interaction with her

but we do not ascertain directly
we do not know anything concretely
everything is translated by sense

imperfectly, translated by science
temporarily, dictated by out-dated dogma
unsystematically, felt incompletely
identified with, with a mesh of duality

I see that there is no nature
that Nature does not exist
there are these myths of the good

myths of God, and shoulds
but our entire world imprisoned
memes, simulations, accepted truth
between us here, that may be false

to another kind of creature
the true and real are a disease
of their own ideas, there exists

a unity that we cannot fathom
that the hills, valleys, plains, oceans
forests, sunlight, flowers, grass
maybe nature without parts

is a whole for which we are
only a piece and therefore
cannot fully grasp beyond ourselves.

Philosophy of disappearances

the mystery of things?
what is the outcome
of this drama of life

what mystery? We get to live
then die, one moment the sun
the next we close our eyes

the only mystery is that
some people think about mystery
to forget the sun is not impossible

if we close our eyes
but if we are blind, we hear
more intensely, if we are

introverted, we internalize
more sufficiently, as if
the world were an experience

approached from many different perspectives
it’s not a mystery we approach
life in dramatic fashion, branding

it ours, I am, in large measure
the examination of choice
the will to freedom, the instinct

to flee from that which is difficult
the mystery of things?
is that I love in language

and touch with my eyes
that I evolved to outgrow God
then die, one moment a brain

the next a light across the universe
a star, a medium fluid of space-time

Auto-poetry

the poet is a faker
to be a voice among the crowd
the poet must approach magic
To say what the crowd would imagine

without used words
the poet is a faker
who’s so good at his act

he even fakes the pain
or becomes the pain
of the fact of creation

an introduction to the human condition
the poet is a faker
and those who read his words
participate in the autopsychotherapy

they will feel in what he wrote
the substance of pain healed

and that is the beauty of
performance, and that is the
final confession of all art.

Legacy of dead poets

if I die young
it will not be
because I hated life
on the contrary I

love life too much and therefore
feel unworthy of her
if I die young
without having been able

to publish a book
even if my verses are never published
I live the same as I would anyhow
writing for pockets of joy

reading for eternal pleasure
exploring my soul
in the unpolished mirror of literature
if I die young, take note:

the spring will return
a thousand poets will take my place
today I wish I could think of Spring
as a person, she would remain

beautiful even if not watched
that’s how poems should leave us
we are all nothing more than children
playing in simulations

everyone is a dreamer
and if I wasn’t loved or die
young, I can say it wasn’t meant to be
because roots are hidden

in the ground, and I’m happy
because I don’t ask for anything.

And the rest is the dreams of men

It isn’t enough to write about the sun
we felt the absolute
body of things
in our bones and breath

ready to squander a lifetime
if necessary, to sacrifice
for the causes we believed in

exiting, an exact and entire coincidence
the ironies of society
a myopia of the perfect hope
that cannot understand the world
since it does not know itself

it isn’t enough to write about history
what I dream is for a sun
more sun than the sun

but how can this be?
the earth has held us for millennia
there are no meadows
more meadows than the meadows here

there are no oceans like
the oceans of ancient days
if a soul resides in this body
I want it to animate a better world.