Return to Tomorrow

 

The night sea beckoned…
Beside the tide you stood,
Strange…supernatural…
 
Looking into the sea,
The sea looked into you.
The silver scales on its surface
Balanced.
 
With faraway eyes
Before a spectral stage
You parted the curtain of waves,
Dream entranced…
 
Consanguine with your arteries
An artery of moonlight bled
Into the unconscious,
A silver vein of infinite regression
Within and without,
An eternal chain of intimate kinship
Returning to tomorrow.
 
Undressed down to a whisper
Your body a mirage,
Lucidly you plunged into the impossible current
That perilously carried you far out to sea,
Pulled you suddenly into the flood of pulsing blood
Pumping lethally beneath the surface.
 
Fearless in the dark
Your body was liberated
Into a fish, then a bird.
Your entire body was hands and eyes,
A change happening
So quickly.

You gained direction from the night,
Learned and understood your destination.
 
And you had a long way to swim,
Just like papa’s seed
To the womb of she who birthed you.
And you had a long way to fly
Along a magnetic ray to conception.
And now you have a further journey;
To return to tomorrow.
 
No one remembers
How perfectly naked they were
When they were born.
No one remembers
How even more naked they were
When they were unborn.
 
It’s no wonder that you have no memory now
Of where you come from.
No one can see that far
Across the ocean.
No one can remember such a dream.
Do you wonder now, in another dream,
Who you really are?
 
Someday you will return to these shores,
Someday in a waking dream
You will return to tomorrow,
Someday.
 

Steppenwolf

Tonight a man and a wolf
Padded warily home through the biting cold,

Icily split in two,
Storming in polar fragments.

Inside the confusing cage of their room
They starved like a ravenous beast in the dark,

Starved beside bowls slopped with false human tyranny.

Condescension and manipulation crudely filled these bowls

Strewn with human deceit, imposture, and cruelty.

The affront of this nightly fare consumed them.

Scattered across the floor of their psyche,

The ulterior design of this sordid hash

Bared like fangs, its moon-like gleam 

Pouring maliciously throughout the room.

Painfully, the man and wolf curled up on the floor,

Wasting away, crippled by this mendacity.

Agonized, they hungered for the end 

Of inhuman deception, hypocrisy, and power plays.

Excruciated, they hungered to be freed from this freezing cage.

Reluctantly, the man gnawed this wretched fare, crunched it hard,

And finally swallowed these putrid lies,

Lies he had grown so accustomed to, yet he stopped

When  the wolf refused to take a bite. 

"Man is still my captor?."
"Man is my master, still?"
"Man is still my tormentor?"

Squealed and yelped the man to the wolf within him,

The wolf let out but a long, low, vicious growl

And began to pace.

They lunged at the prey of their own shadow
Which eluded them outside the cage.
The man's brain, the wolf's heart

Together howling,

Their bloody muzzle smashing into

The obstinate bars of cold moonbeams,

The vague glow of unspoken truth that forged this cage.

The unattainable moon in the sky through the window

The mirror of their freedom. 

 
The man and wolf could no longer endure
The stars and fire that throbbed in their head,

No longer withstand smashing their skull against

The unyielding spokes of moonlight every night.

They wanted out. 

The man desperately sought for the agents 

Of his constraint and entrapment.

The wolf searched for his own agency, night after night,

Its instinct for freedom prevailing over all.

Turning Word

 

“

“Ah, the emptiness of the great blue sky,

The flowing of the vast ocean.

I have not yet attained these utmost depths…”

12th century Chinese Zen apprentice

The wave the turning word

Of a koan

On which the wind and sky pivot

In the Ten Directions

Throughout the Ten Ages.

 

What the wave points to!

What the wind and sky dance upon!

 

The wave breaks-

The subtle Dharma Gate

Opens.

The wave spills-

The subtle Dharma Eye

Expands. 

Tathata.  

 

It is unusual for me to provide notes to my work, but I thought that in this instance it was appropriate given the use of Buddhist terminology that might be foreign to the reader. They are, of course, longer than the poem.

Turning word; a word or phrase that ignites insight into a koan. One may have encountered the koan many times previously, or perhaps for the first time, but on this occasion a revolution in understanding of it, and of thus the Buddha way, occurs.

The Ten Ages are: the Past within the Past, the Past within the Present, the Past within the Future, the Present within the Past, the Present within the Present, the Present within the Future, the Future within the Past, the Future within the Present, the Future within the Future, and Now.

A Dharma Gate; a place to enter a fresh and broader understanding of life, a more authentic one freed from previous delusion.. 

The Dharma Eye; one gains a glimpse of life's dream-likeness, its unsubstantiality in the moment, that is, its emptiness.. It is after this apprehension of emptiness that the Dharma Eye opens. It brings the vision that doesn't cling to the dream-like emptiness but returns to the here and now of ordinary mind and ordinary reality, which is extraordinary.  Further, the dharma eye specifically refers to the realization of Buddha's awakening that is not contained in the written words of the sutras.  

Tathata, or suchness. The true, concrete essence or nature of things before ideas or words about them. It is often best revealed in the seemingly mundane or meaningless, such as noticing the way the wind blows through a field of grass, or watching someone's face light up as they smile. 

The Wand of Time

A huge bubble

Blown from the wand

Of time,

And so many tiny bubbles, too.

You gazed at your reflection

On its rainbow surface

And watched it break

In air.

There had been someone there. 

You went clapping at the air.

Clap, clap, clapping

And the past broke,

And the future broke, too.

But the present-

That never broke

But remained forever constant,

The one thing to persistently celebrate

With all your clapping.

The mirror moment

Of these delicate spheres

The only thing that ever seemed real,

And now that you have aged and grown old

You have seen so many bubbles pop

From the wand of time-

The past a dream and the future, too.

But in this present moment

You are like a child on holiday

From some timeless realm that awaits you,

And you clap yet after all these bubbles

Blown by the wand of time.

Hole In The Sky

 

Streaming down,

The raw universe;

Twisting prism of one long memory

Streaming for light years

Through the air of dreamers.

 

Attenuated reflections of faces and stars

Inside the union of mirrors

Stretching for millions of miles-

The concreteness of space

The abstractness of rock

The transient eternal

Streaming mad and naked

Within the diaspora of reflections

 

Barreling down and down

Through an enormous hole in the sky,

An avalanche of infinity

In which the stars have nowhere to hide.

 

Moonlight in mirrors

Imploding in a vacuum of silver,

A long tornado of mirrors,

The great mirror of the present moment

Become one vast window.

A whirling funnel of dream and existence

A centrifuge of mind    

Uncoupled from reason,

Volute navel

Of the pregnant heavens,

Absurd womb

From which my very first cell was fed

Inside that labyrinth.

 

My torqued soul

Screwing in the astral winds,

Unlocking the first gate

Shrieking

With the birth pangs

Of my mother.

My torqued soul

Screwing inside the wind-blown skeleton

Of existence

Unlocking the final gate

Shrieking

With the death pangs

Of my body.

 

The silver and violet fabric of space

Torn wide open,

The garments of the soul burst and rent,

The All naked before sight,

The flesh of day, the flesh of night.

Nude stars doffing rays of light,

Their holy vestures unraveling in threads of fire.

My soul raving in rags 

Of thought and speech,

My head singing

Amidst all these sparkles of one brightness

 

An invisible assembly of a trillion beings,

Gods, demons, angels -

An ocean of Spirit where spins

A cyclone of whirling souls

As flies lay eggs

In the carcasses of lizards

That ants carry away to their nests.

 

                          II

Far in the desert, one broken signpost

With nothing written on it.

In a dream you understand anyway

The direction you must go.

You knock at the door of a house

Assembled from a myriad of contradictions.

On it is inscribed in a frenzied hand,

“Paradox”.

The wind kicks up.

All at once 

You have an epiphany of being

Aroused by the commonplace of dust.

Your knock goes unanswered.

Back into the desert you wander

Lost inside a dream. 

 

At the nexus of chaos and order.

You are their bursting limen

Where mantic galaxies scream prophecies

Contained in the Book of the Muses.

An automatic script

Written on the clay tablet of Earth,

An ancient lullaby

Beside the orphan cradle of civilization,

A bawling infant

Raised in poverty of understanding

By the hopelessly tragic grandmother

Of strange mystery

 

Your thought like a runner after a race,

A dancer after an exhausting dance

Here

Your mind is a very small cog

In a vast machine

Which assembles atoms into the universe,

That eternally manufactures wonder and pain.

You labor for a lifetime

Covered in the sweat of celestial madness.

In the divine economy.

This sweat is your capital.

You own the universe.

You consume it in illimitable privacy.

 

In this tornado of dream , 

In this whirling funnel of existence

Faith you have, and intuition too.

Both beyond reason

That is perfected by reason

When it surrenders to the absurd,

When it leaps into the window beyond 

With faith

And the tornado which never ceases, 

And the centrifuge which never cools

And the hole in the sky

Which never closes

Are all only a mere intuition of perception

As body and mind are dropped.

Adam Kadmon

 

Adam Kadmon 

Strides across the universe.

One massive leg rising

From the floor of Earth,

The next onto the farthest star,

Myriad glittering galaxies in between.

Immense body of light,

Flesh of stars, flesh of space

Cognate and coextensive with the cosmos.

This macrocosmic body

Containing all worlds,

This macrocosmic soul

The archetype of all souls.

Primordial Cosmic Man,

Divine androgyne

Resounding in the microcosm-

Light year upon light year

Stretching upward and downward

From this vast archetype

In golden ascensions, 

One solid, endlessly reverberant tone

Stretching inward and outward

From this vast archetype

In golden ascensions,

One solid, endlessly reverberant tone. 

A vast interiority of sound

Swelling in complex harmonics,

Extending in vast overtones

Vibrating in the towering firmament 

Of  Adam Kadmon's frame

That encompasses boundless space.

The dazzling figure

Of the human archetype

With a gaze so deep

That all distance dissolves

Before it.

Wearing a crown of starry nebulas,

The Cosmic Androgyne's voice

A super-nova

Of the uttered architecture 

Of Creation

Rising in cosmic stadia.

Then a final stillness within the aethers

Where begins the great Ain Soph Aur

Preceded by the great Ain Soph

And preceded again by simply the great Ain,

That vacuum of pure spirit

Resounding with the mathematics

Of original sound,

A music of infinite quietude

Performed like an act of love

In the open palm of eternity

That holds the stature of  microcosmic man

Together with that of 

Adam Kadmon

Within dimensions upon dimensions 

Of inconceivable design.

To this human archetype

Speechless before itself

In the mirror of silver seas 

Of void and space,

I ask as courageously as I can

That this spirit

Of Supreme Primordial Man

Love itself eternally in me

And that our existence never end.

I Refuse to Submit

 

I will never submit to facial recognition

Nor to electronic fingerprinting,

Of having my bodily identity

Uploaded into a political data grid.

 

Not the soul in my face

Not the soul that reaches down into my fingers

To be profiled before the electronic surveillance State

As its programs calculate and determine

Whether I am a docile sheep

And without dissent support it.

I will not be led from the stockyard

Of a totalitarian society

To the robotic abattoir of psychic slaughter

By techno-fiends whose machinations coerce

The diminishing terrain of a slender future

Where humans are driven through networked gates

And down automated ramps to their ruin.

 

If it ever comes to this

I would rather starve to death

Or freely by my own hands

Die with defiant courage.