The World is Fading

The World is Fading

Writing is thinking on paper
Poetry is music on air
Someday I’ll know how not to be a fool
Not to be attached and insist
For beyond teachings, I’ve learned

Tenderness, and beyond hurt
I’ve learned compassion
Until my heart became clear

And I was resolved to peace
Attuned to soul
Surrendered to spirit
I need to give up what
No longer works and take up new

Ways of being that keep us close
To what matters, like divinity
Writing is thinking in narratives

Poetry is communion with the infinite
The poet has enough flowers
To doze in dream worlds
My poems are not poems
They are how I speak to nature.

Untitled zen poem

On observing the P r e s e n t s t a t e

There is an error in thought
That does not recognize silence
Or witness the unity behind everything
Unwilling to see the page of nature

We believe our agency to be separate
But our thoughts are rather
Manifestations of nature

We are part of this design
We lack the trust of instinct
Separating, labeling, judging

Living in a cost-benefit duality
Our intelligence is quite limited
So we search for the coin
In the river where we lost it

But time does not function like that
Memory is no longer accurate
The moment it is recalled
And self is a poor approximation of destiny

Destiny is a non-dual experience
It is the Tao of fundamental reality
So empty your body of illusions

And throw away the madness of attachment
Freedom is not to approve anything
For reality is a gold and dung phenomenon

If we stop pursuing things outside of ourselves
Then might we be able to witness
What is actual and what is essential.

On The F r i n g e s of E n l i g h t e n m e n t

On The F r i n g e s of E n l i g h t e n m e n t

I am the beginning’s mind
In love with many possibilities
So I became a poet
Without accepting the fact

That everything changes
We are impotent
We cannot find perfect composure

Life is a koan ready to be experienced
Transience is that nature
And nurture of the game
Art is like the discipline

Of creating a reoccurring situation
Where the world is its own magic
And we are visitors, it’s that simple

So won’t you stay for a while?
Everything is perfect
And understanding yourself
Allows you to understand everything

And ultimately, we must exist
Right here and now
I am the beginner at love

For only recently
Did I recognize her everywhere.

Significant Other

I’ve braided your looks
Into my soul like
A knot of nurturance

Your burgundy tongue
Of earth-laced hope
In truth, I’m not sure

I would survive without you
The writing that writes in me
And the art of harmony

Incarnated in our daily lives
Through the paired fortunes
Of our highs and lows

I live in awe of your embrace
Your laugh over our ashes
The destiny of waiting

A lifetime just for a moment
We’ve swam in darkness
Endured a loyalty of stupidity

To people who were ingenuine
I’ve tattooed your language
Into my consciousness

That I might be able to
Speak and write mandarin
Poems one day, so that

The spoken tongues
Of the ancient Taoists
Might speak through me.

Photography courtesy: http://www.deviantart.com/art/Giulia-Mihai-Flowers-501597812

The Beautiful Landscape

In the real world
The pure world
No separation exists

That is why in this world
You sometimes feel things
Are connected in a way
Beyond explanation, the subtle
Layer of reality is not divided

It’s a quantum entanglement
Like perfect enlightenment
That’s the beautiful landscape

Mystics see, after a lifetime of seeking
And the original language
Linguists of the soul observe
In the real world
Of ideas and energy

We are all strange and rare
And yet indivisible, parts of the same
Origin, coming from the same source

I know, it’s difficult to fully grasp
Traveling east or west
Light and free
Identity is preserving the self
In the real world, identity
Is a myth, a fragment, a shell.

Photo Courtesy:

1. http://www.deviantart.com/art/A-l-aise-197858159
2. http://www.deviantart.com/art/Morning-at-Situ-Gunung-II-95853490

GREAT FOOLS

I am too lazy to be ambitious
My unconditional surrender too full to act
I let the world take care of itself
I let my fate weave its roads
I can get along with good books
One friend, one meal of rice a day
Why chatter about the news or enlightenment?
We are all deluded in our own ways
With our familiar dull frames of reference
I write instead, poems that are not my poems
These poems are not my poems
This way we can begin to speak
About the poems that touch everybody
The seers wrote poems like putting twigs
Into the fireplace, the fire that keeps all beings warm
It is not important to be famous, but to be comfortable
I am too lazy to be ambitious
I am too free to believe in particulars.

“Morning” Means Living Without Expectation

Delayed, till the rest of my life –
My goodness cannot wait
To be spent on the bliss

Of the slow pace of a simple life
Who knows this but
A surrendered face, trusting

The Universe with all that matters
In this imperial route of non-attachment
Like a Buddhist I will strive

To give without asking in return
I have no native town, no home-people
I am but a soul in a form on Earth

A Wonderful rotation of artistic seasons
My “last poems” ended where the silver perished
On my tongue that spoke less and less

The flute of an Autumn morning
It’s all I have to bring today
Delayed, till the rest of my life –

My heart beside the field of all hearts
I throw myself into the river
The river that forgets everything.

Photo Courtesy: http://www.deviantart.com/art/Long-Live-Independence-I-413323382

Having Crossed Many Rivers

Having crossed the river
Of future to ancient past
Where will you go, O friend?

The world is what it is
There’s no road to tread
But contemporary lives

Life has neither a beginning or an end
To an individual
In a moment there is no time

We only invented ‘time’
To speak of the sky, the river, the boatman
But the truth is we are

The water, will always be the water
In the same ocean
You search for yourself in the world

In vain, having forgotten how to swim
Like an angel, how to surrender like a star-fish.

The Veins that Run from all Centuries

I can feel a tremendous ballad
Approaching me from within

A rising discontent, with locality
I want to live outside of time & space

Embrace dimensions where “I” does not exist
That is the trusting of Omnipotence
And the true unity of Immortality
Life sustains itself, I can forsake this body

So long as I have a means to experience
The Kingdom of Heaven, spiritual totality

I can feel a tremendous ballad
Overtaking me from without

All these Delinquent Palaces
Achieving poetic strain, at a distance
Assisted by false estimates of mortal consequence
I can feel a tremendous ballad

Between Zero and the Bone
Between Love and all other interchange.