END OF THE PAVEMENT

At sunset in the high desert
an old man gets on a new motorcycle
and rides it to the end of the pavement.
At this elevation even cactus won’t grow.
There’s nothing but silence and open space.
He shuts off the engine and puts the kickstand down.
He sits and lets the vacuum of action suck him away.
There once was a time when life had fullness and direction.
There existed a time when joy made life noisy and vibrant.
That was all taken away from him in fits of anger and bouts of trauma.
Reality has a way of crashing down sometimes.
One cannot stand forever among the broken pieces
trying with innocent hope and errant pride for what once was.
What is gone is gone and leaving it gone is the hard medicine one has to take.
It’s only asking for a world of hurt for an old man
to have a young man’s dream. That kind of dream burns too hot to hold onto
and to expect to chase such a thing down with old man legs is laughable at best.
An old man knows too much to run himself ragged over phantoms,
even if those ghosts of fulfillment haunt one’s soul.
Facing facts in a relentless present moment is more horrific than bittersweet.
For what it was worth, for as long as it lasted,
the old man thought he had found a lifetime love unique and rare,
a love that shined as soul mates across endless time and many lives.
He once lived brightly as though such a thing was core to his soul.
But that was a fool’s illusion, nothing but crazy folly, that rubric
was brought crashing down in a HUGE way and left as bloody shards in the hot sand.
Now there’s nothing left but to walk across those shards
and feel them crunch underfoot, under those tenderfoot bare feet.
If only the final downfall had happened earlier, not later in life.
If only the bottom had fallen out at an earlier time when
there could have been enough life and energy and naivete left to rebuild something.
If only the blow had come sooner when he still would have had
some youthful resilience and spirit to recover.
Where does an old man go when the pavement ends but the day is not done,
when night is about to fall but midnight into the next life is hours away?
Does one leave behind the ride of one’s life and set out on foot?
Does one at this point in life hope for an oasis out there somewhere across the desert?
Has it really come down to a choice between the most unlikely and the impossible?
They say the first cut is the deepest and there may be some truth to that.
But the first cut is usually not the most accurate cut.
Get cut when you’re older and wiser and feel deeper and more true.
Now that’s the cut that runs you through and through.
That’s the cut that goes more than deep.
That’s the cut that severs the very thing one has become
after a lifetime’s ride into the desert.

 

 

 PART OF ME
 

Part of me is dead, part of me is sore,
and part of me doesn’t want the wound of being healed anymore.
I’ve been to the putrid hidden places,
I’ve plumbed the unholy shadow crevasses of my soul,
I’ve seen the other side of an expanding nothing
where ghosts of grief and regret are self-condemned to go.
I know they don’t want to hide there, I know they feel too exposed,
I know they’d rather flee deeper, where ego projections of a higher self never show.

There’s been so many exotic medicines and incantations in other tongues,
intoxicating protection smoke and wales of releasing sadness moving up
the bending ladder of memory’s fiery rungs. All through the night
the moody face of an indifferent blue moon failed to offer
as much as a comforting blink, it hung there useless, an inscrutable rune.
Never in the swirl of magic potions and heady voodoo aphorisms
did an answer ever appear within the squirming knots
of searing thought too unspeakable to think.

Some say the source of the once oppressive heat was all-consuming emotion,
dogged passions too inflamed for their purifying container,
they erupted with the energy of a thousand stars exploding on high,
but it’s a stark rebuke from life to finally find that kind of passion
is but a symptom of numb places yet to be where dreams go to die.
Those embers are cool now, the essence of all meaning ashen.

There comes a time in every journey when time and circumstance wins the destined battle,
when what is done is done in ways too indelible to explain or nameste away.
There’s only uneasy silence as solace after such a struggle ends,
only a lingering nausea and the scent of one’s lofty ideals’ decay,
only a dull ache at fracture points, evidence for where one just couldn’t bend.

More moments will appear in rote succession until just as suddenly they don’t,
One would think by its nature hope would rise again but not this time, no – it won’t.
The passage of time will be different now although one never dares to know how,
no sense mid-fall trying to force something elsewhere when that’s so against the Tao.

Acceptance becomes a coward’s acquiescence to the normalized view out-of-bounds,
and reality is merely a construct we use when we foolishly assume there’s common ground.
But I’ve been freed of all those illusions and incumbent delusions, and sappy false ideals,
I’ve felt the final justice of the actualized circus court that grants no compassionate appeals.

And now part of me is dead, and part of me is sore,
and part of me doesn’t want the wound of being joined to me anymore.
If only those parts were all of me I’d be so very free,
the rest of life would be so simple, the rest I would summarily ignore,
the rest I could write off and let play out as crass comeuppance,
the rest would be a prank, the rest mere shivaree
mocking the tragic union of my body and my soul.

 

 

TATTOOED SOUL

I go to the high desert, to a place as barren as my spirit.
I need to be alone and yet I find others there with me.
I cannot see them. They pass around as whistles in the wind.
They find me a curiosity, a sad tumble weed within a sack of flesh.
They urge me to share my rambling pain. I don’t trust their interest
but there’s no way to hide my thoughts. I’m determined to ignore them.
I aim my steps for a far horizon and sink within the mirage of me.

Ripples of light blaze on the sand, burning away the dust devils
encircling dry bones, the very things in me never forgotten or denied.
A scorpion in the shadow of a cactus brandishes its tail hook, as if to say,
“And now I will show you the most excellent way.”
The orthodox radicalism of my agnostic dogma befalls parasitic processing.
I hear a suggestion, unsettling the spell -- thought breaks things apart,
emotions solidify them together. But what good is there liberating the light
in a place with nothing left to shine on?

If love exists it only proves that God is not bound by rationality.
Wisdom is not falling into despair over the truth of one’s fate.
A rock falls nearby and I accept that it’s not trying to get where it belongs.
In life, fullness is more than duration and yet the desert is timeless.
My soul is covered with tattoos, each tattoo a meaning I made an essential part of me.
And now there is no space left within me to tattoo. My soul is covered with them.
Drives and desires ink tattoos of meaning on our eager souls,
those craven canvasses of purpose. We collect them with ardent energy
then live with them with mixed feelings and a dread of rational satori.

I assume it is possible to be happy, even in a palace,
and yet the fate of all things is an absurdity.
The point in heaven existing at all is to convince us to accept death
even though everyone will die but not everyone has lived.
The despairing hole in being is sucking the salient light away,
but why after all does a need exist for a light beam in the empty space of me?
Wisdom is knowing what is and isn’t in my control but how do I discern between?

I fuse my meaning to the objects I project it on and become confused,
an inner conflict ignites. The things and people and experiences out there
must be mere shadows on the wall of intended consummation, for even when
they initially appear as meaning’s satisfaction attained, the achievement hollows out
in time with changes and a closer examination of what eventually occurs
when the outside element asserts itself through its own projected meaning.
The illusion of mutual dreams realized via a link to meaning never matches either goal.

Why is it so hard to accept? Things outside of me are not in my control
and tattooing meaning on my soul’s image of the outside objects of desire
will never make it so. I am told I cannot know The One.
I can only become The One. Likewise, should I say I cannot find my meaning,
I only become my meaning? If only I had a clear soul, a pristine canvass
free of my lived meaning, perhaps then I could reflect clarity in lieu of certainty,
maybe then I would put into action what my soul truly is and always was.

Some say meaning is my mind’s attempt to assert itself on the world.
The world resists my will by the transcendence of inert indifference to me.
More so every day, accepted methods of knowing don’t see any of us as real.
I can’t trust my senses when my reality’s become abstract.
Dangling potential baits me still, but I don’t know what I will lose if I do
and I don’t know what I will miss if I don’t. Necessity not free will makes me choose.
I wish I could remove all of the glorious meaning tattoos from my soul
but I’m torn by the thought of it, all of it so much a skintight part of me now.
Reaching bottom, I pray there is a reason why everything turned out this way.

If the crisis of my soul was engineered to be like this, that is bad enough.
But if my crisis is purely random and chaotic, in fact no one’s plan, then
the terror of such an end state cannot be surmounted. For in truth
there is no one to fight, nothing to overcome. Chaos itself seduced me
to tattoo my soul with meaning. Random nothingness fueled my drives
to project that meaning onto others. Purposeless chance and crazed hope drove me
to link my soul’s tattoos with things outside of myself. Vapid rationals for feeling
filled 24,500 days with pathetic emotion. I suffer now from a fall into what was
always to be inevitable ennui, there’s no reason or restitution or redemption to salvage.

I wonder what image I would have of myself without the meaning tattoos on my soul.
Who would I be to myself? In turn, what attitude would I have towards others?
Is it maturity or resignation to say I don’t know how to separate meaning
from everything external to me? The two are one as sure as transcending paradox
mediates dilemma. But to hold both together too dearly is to suffer,
to lose one’s way to oneself. The wind whistles around me once again.
I cannot ignore the suggestion it gives. It may seem that pulling meaning back
into oneself, being content to find it inside is a negation of living,
a denial of emotional involvement in life, when in fact the opposite is true.
Only by retaining meaning within will the outside phantoms make un-suffering sense.
Meaning is experienced by being. It is not projected by desire and inked on the soul.

The rocky sand crunches under my feet, reminding me of hard facts.
The wind’s suggestion sounds pithy, a gem insight from a sacred space.
But where I live doesn’t have the luxury of the sacred.  Sacred and profane
are a philosophical dualism, an intellectual neo-construct, a self-limiting musing.
Where I live is a continuum of the detailed gray existing in between.
The hour is late, the desert cools into darkness, but even in the dark
I can see the tattoos on my soul, my projections of meaning coupled to the outside other.
They have been there so long I fear I have given them a meta-meaning of their own.
How can they be removed when I have come to identify with them so unconsciously?

I sit on the sand in the dark unable to escape the ants of my mind.
The glide of moon rise coaxes me to contemplate what’s left to do.
I can live out the rest of my days resigned to accept there’s nothing more to be done
or I can lose myself in activity and hope I forget what I did to my soul.
To be honest with myself at this point is to embrace the tragedy as triumph.
I wound up here by living all of my meaning as a collection of beautiful stains,
incredible indelible marks of impassioned foolishness congealed as living art,
shaped together on a whim as a limiting self-portrait reflected onto myself,
leaving me no more space to be more, leaving no more time to recover,
and now, nearing the end, I bear little more than the garish marks
of my aroused animal, the meaningful beast,

to show for a life misspent as meaning's folly.

 

 

 AI / AE / AE-IOU

I hesitate telling this to anyone. I hear everyone is so judgmental,
so encapsulated, so disconnected from love as intended by Source.
We tell ourselves we are both, the cause and the constraint,
we are the active agent and the bounded arena,
we are the reason we wind up with self-guilt, imploring ourselves – I owe you.
But this has to be said. Don’t ask me why. We’re not here for answers.
We’re here because we’re the question.

A magical scene appears around me, shiny in its vividness.
In the glowing forest a gnome, reeling in an altered state, gives a lecture to no one.
Meanwhile, fatuous fairies whisper something about a lark, about a prayer,
a call to an invocation of yearning, a fabled wish within a well of reverent silence.
The lightning bugs may have intervened, briefly they may have buzzed something
in my ear about all of this no less a punchline within a forgotten cosmic joke.
I’m drawn in anyway, curious if there’s a message hidden in the fading obviousness.

Somewhere in between the glorious sparkles of later afternoon timelessness
I hear the timbre within the light and wonder about the gnome’s solitary plea.
Airborne on wisps of transient rainbows the dense matters at hand coalesce.
The gnome hops mad with emphasis, proclaiming self-deception is dialogical!
Ignorance speaks with foolishness until the wisdom of false intuition prevails.
The savior is a trickster demanding glow deprivation within the divine ego.
Concentration has boundless dimensionality irrespective of time and space.

Time transforms everything into absurdly relative oddities.
It’s made passionately clear, what's so important for us in the moment,
in the vast eternity of time is actually insignificant,
and the vast eternity of time is likewise insignificant to anyone
compared to what's important in their precious moment.
To be in the moment, one with the present, defies credulity
as our very character and form predicts how critical remains our formative past
and all the multi-various push-pulling possibilities of our future yet to be.

Thunderstone and Soulflight,
dualistic friends of earnest disunity, wrestle to snatch any answer away,
they pull the golden thread towards a cool flow state absent a steady purpose,
possessed of a bruised meaning, an aching beauty beyond victory,
a jarring truth beyond constricted volition. In light of our shadow,
love becomes a virtual goal with truth its surrendering servant,
all the while beauty begs to be the language of true slaves condemned
to recede and worship over cremated ideals on passion’s pyre.

Love shines just out of grasp, content as its own way of knowing,
forever indwelling in another in hopeful potential, making space for the divine,
offering a gift of light beyond the trust in dreams,
a heavenly host spawned from the grief of loss forever anticipating
the arrival of the central spirit, missing the joy chased out by shock and sadness,
demonically intent to fall in love with mere being, thus fating a nihilism,
a wounding by reality found, with nothing left but love offered as a propositional void,
a place where hope expands in diaphanous whispers of hollow promise,
vapid reasoning joining willful blindness, all relegated
to inform imagination about things it does not realize.
Influence is meted out by culturally moist machines that master Artificial Intelligence
in the same way humans have so skillfully mastered Artificial Emotionality.

The sacred cannot be exhausted and the heavens never stop expanding,
all of it out of reach for us since our flavor of consciousness contains
the necessary folly of binding itself to self-knowledge,
therefore at the very moment consciousness became aware
of its own existence, it defined the limits of itself,
condemning enlightenment within constructs needing bounding definitions.

Speculative realism now plumbs the unconscious depths,
the world is left at the mercy of embodied perceptions shaping the way,
a semi-logical universe blazes as one’s reality du jour,
an arbitrary pattern so entrenched as a frame of reference
that nature as hungry grifter camouflages the morphing truth, an honest realization
that the universe is God's inescapable altered state of consciousness.
We’re awash in God’s numinous eternal pause of entheogenic disbelief,
the seminal point at which God’s fugue insight finds a place beyond God itself.

Everything in God is possible including God
discovering It is not All after all,
as no infinite process can ever be or stake such a claim,
and we, lost in the figment rumored to be ourselves,
trapped in our well-purposed attachments, striving for a healing illusion,
we miss the awakening within God's sacred wet dream,
lusting after Its own intention’s pure Holy Grail,
God’s quest to include more to All than simply being complete.

We are the fait accompli made to appear as indeterminate attempt,
the divine archetype of necessary limitation upon which
the will to expand becomes conscious of itself
in evermore revealing ways. Perhaps that’s why
the most meaningful experiences in our lives
are often the ineffable ones, the ones we cannot explain and barely grasp
even as they shade everything else as pale and not as real.

I can’t tell if the gnome pretends his outburst or is serious,
he shouts in ways no one understands
but with a passion that begs us to believe he’s sincere.
He acts as if third-order contemplation can never conclude
that proper thinking lacks feeling, their codependent combination
so necessary for our egotistic absorption in chasing fulfillment.
We decide our fate employing summary wisdom without transformation,
a burning truth without relevance, a heart wrenching beauty without context,
our own insistent influence without a consistent acting out of our moral rhetoric,
a state of suspension where belief is no longer
a voluntary action of a fallen nature.

There is a temple in contemplation where
a pure consciousness event enables the third option of non-duality,
an indwelling expansiveness aligned with an ineffable schema.
In such a place rationality shrinks as the asylum of the absurd
made self-evident by self-referential confidences run a muck.

We entirely miss the crux of the crucible we face.
Our insights aren’t something that consciousness produces,
they’re something consciousness becomes.
Realizations about insights inform our significance landscape.
The noisy gnome swears by it, he demands more traits with less states,
endlessly renewing one’s interest without deliberate concentration.

The world is a circular explanation of how non-linear chaos
self-organizes by an out-of-phase state of hyperbolic mind,
but it’s a perilous journey by design,
inner conflicts birth self-deception,
meanwhile, everything is filled with gods.

More so often, Artificial Intelligence meets Artificial Emotionality.
Society finally achieves highly operative measures of both.
Robots and people approximate states to achieve their goals,
satisfy drives, fulfill motives, possess their desired end states.
AI for robots.  AE for the rest of us. Symbiosis of the two for the elite.
So shouts the inglorious gnome to no one in particular.

All the while, the magic forest pays the gnome no attention.
It’s the only way to induce him to persist in his efforts.
It’s the only way he’s motivated by his despair.
To despair in a magic place is more human than gnome-like.
He knows this and models it well.
But is it all a show for our benefit? He won’t say.
I know full well, shouting to no one is the human condition,
just as crying in front of all is relegated to sniveling little things.
The fact that I tried to listen to him proves nothing.
A fool must try to leap the castle walls
just as some are deluded enough to believe they understand.

A part of me wants to stay in the gnome’s forest, hide among its enchantments,
stay and dig a dry well and retreat within it forever.
There’s holiness in oblivion, there’s grace in sacrificial defeat,
none of this world is meant to be taken seriously, not eternally so,
and that’s the saddest part of being lost in the magic of life.
I am like the gnome in a way he is like all of us. We are all alone, together.
He knows the answer exists, the answer we all seek.
And yet he shouts in pain because the unacceptable truth is,
the answer doesn’t matter. It doesn’t change anything.
We’re still here and remain, we are the question,
the question no one asked, no one thought about
and to think it through would be calamitous,
to realize we are both question and answer,
to grasp the insight, that we have the power to stop the magic for good,
within us is the final potential, the last expression of AE.
Creation contains the means to render itself void.
Our free will can dis-invent love. AI won’t notice.
And neither will what we’ve become.

 

 

Days of Joy

Once I had a magic wand.
With sizzles and snaps of golden power
it dazzled me with all it could do.
I held it aloft, a beacon in the darkness,
a transformation stick bringing to life the promise
of realizing incredible possibilities
in flashes of joyful brilliance.
Life imbued by the magic was full and rich
in sacred depth, endless fascination,
revealing mysteries, and adventurous wonder.

Then one day I was struck blindsided by a terrible reality.
The truth of the matter was shouted in my face.
I was informed in no uncertain terms,
what I had in hand was not a magic wand.
Why would one ever think so?
It was merely a sparkler,
a most common and puerile type of firework
meant only to amuse children
with delusions of special enchantment.
To pretend anything else
was a neurotic attachment bond
to a romanticized, idealized illusion.

Ever since that fateful day,
I’ve kept that sparkler with me,
although sometimes I wonder why.
I still enjoy the brilliant shower
of golden sparks it produces,
but no matter how I try,
I can no longer see it as a magic wand.
In my maturity I know better,
as those around me like to remind.
 
Life moves on, as it will.
As much as I attempt to be mature
and enlightened on the matter,
a quiet insistence within can't shake
the telling thing, the thing undeniable.
The experience is still there
and yet the eruption of sparks isn’t the same
and neither are the emotions they evoke.
Now there’s meager enjoyment,
not glorious enchantment.
Now there’s passing amusement,
not golden transcendence.
Now I find pale pleasure,
not colorful excitement and fulfillment.

As consolation, I suppose,
I can now say I am not neurotic, I’m not deluded,
I’m not lost in immature make-believe.
But if, as I am told, I am so much better now,
now that I know the truth
and accept the reality of the situation,
then why can’t I shake this feeling deep inside,
a sinking sense of loss of spirit.
Something lingers, a fervent yearning,
a most pure quest wedded to my soul.
Secretly I long for the days
when I had my magic wand.
Those were the days of my joy.

 

ENTROPY ARROW

Eros has his arrow. Mathematics its vector. Psychology its intention.

With force and direction, all of them straight lines of determination.

Entropy joins them, swift and forward in time in one direction only.

Something is said, a deed is done, a state change inevitably sets in.

What was said can’t be taken back. The thing done cannot un-happen.

What was is now no longer, the broken never to be mended as it was.

Nothing can be reversed. It’s time’s gift and time’s curse.

So many questions are moot, their answers muted by the strike of the arrow.

How do you get the feeling back again?

How does betrayal set itself right?

How do you un-hear what was heard?

When will the memory transform and no longer sting?

How does the broken heart find its original wholeness?

When will the sands of time shift back to where they once were on the shore?

When will the clouds reform the shapes they had only yesterday?

The hopeful trope claims healing comes with time, never mind the scars.

Metaphors of Kintsugi promise being better than new with inlaid gold,

but in truth the jagged lines of repair fool no one into forgetting 

the places where the arrow of entropy struck.

Such attempts only highlight the extent people will go

to try to recover from the thing that can’t be undone.

But the attempt only proves the strength of entropy’s arrow.

Not willing to accept the vector of its force,

mental contortions and emotional tangles ensue.

Stoic smiles and ongoing practices of letting go abound,

all of it added layers of patchwork, stippling our souls with 

thousands of paper cut patterns of tearful wear.

Fate plays the trickster and twists our pain with irony,

rubbing our faces into stinging synchronicities,

echoing our losses with pathos and bête noire humor.

Our passions find Eros, when turned backward upon us, becomes Sore.

Even the straight and narrow eludes us for math vectors 

in the presence of the gravity of our situation only travel 

in curved lines through non-Euclidean personal spacetime.

And shadow work unveils our intentions are mostly unconscious,

driven as much by instinct and drives and trauma as willful purpose.

As final insult we are left bereft, never sure if what we think we lost

was ever really ours at all, or was it just our charade

of ego, projection, and wishful illusion? If so, then we are the punchline

of the saddest joke of all, played on ourselves by ourselves

in a field of mirages where we spent our impassioned past 

chained to phantoms beguiling us with what we wanted to find,

not at all with what was really there.

Is there an easy way back to where we were, to the way it was?

Why speak of easy, for there is no way back at all.

The only thing left for us we’re told is acceptance. We must accept.

Accept the loss of what was. Accept how you can’t go back.

Accept the impact of entropy’s arrow. And accept it has changed you.

But more importantly, you must determine in your heart,

and you cannot lie to yourself, for you will know your lie

and it will chase you in circles until you’re mad,

you must determine in your heart one thing only –

now that you are the way you are, now that you’re left with what remains,

answer truthfully – are you more because of it – or are you less?

How this question is answered determines the fine line,

the essential phase state going forward,

the vital distinction between peace and torment.

Resist answering, and your life becomes a scalar,

a vector of magnitude only with no direction.

Either way, you’re impaled on entropy’s arrow.

 

SNOWMAN SAMADHI

I stand on the rock of who I am, knowing I am solid 

in my position by the strong shadow I cast for all to see.

I project that shadow onto the rocks around me

as the light of rising truth moves through my days.

I ask the Great Spirit to help me find peace in my soul.

The answer comes – your soul is always at peace,

all that is required is to know and remove what you hide from yourself,

the persistent passions blocking your way in knowing this peace.

This answer leaves me with cold comfort

for the thing that gives me pleasure is the thing that gives me pain,

the thing that gives me meaning is the thing that gives me torment,

the thing so a part of me, of my nature, is the thing I must let go of.

I find there is good reason to hide such inner turmoil and strife.

But good reasons are the excuses of this world, 

a world of frigid fire and burning ice,

a world not made for fervent idealized states 

of imagined fulfillment and glory.

The Spirit’s answer is clear 

as the deepening sky spread out above me.

Every day the light of truth passes over me,

reminding me of the things I hide from myself.

I awake to find the rock and I are two separate things.

In fact, I stand on something that is not me.

The rock and I both have a shadow

but that does not make us equal or the same.

I do not stand on the rock of who I am.

I stand on the rock of something else, wholly other,

something dense and heavy enough to squash me.

I must not attach to the rock of who I am

for who I am is not who I have come to believe in.

The sun cautions me, I am not like the rocks.

My cares and troubles, my pleasures and pain

and all the meaning I project through my shadow,

everything one day will soon be gone.

The moving pattern of the daily light ever reminds me, 

I am only here a short while. 

The light of warming truth cannot be denied.

In time it will melt away what I think is me.

I will pass from the rock of who I presume I am

like snow becoming grateful tears, 

swiftly evaporating into skies clear of form,

an anointed place where the Great Spirit 

will welcome me home,

home to the peace in my soul.