Cheers to nothing
I take an empty cup of kindness. Expectantly. Ought I receive for my aesthetic sacrifice?
The poem bereft of words
A dry, soulless, immaculate uncertainty,
gossamer tulip wings limping, prancing,
(no! no!)
(Not verbs, we want nouns! Decorative, ornamental nouns!
And don’t say that ugly “adjective!”)
on the shore she waits,
ear to the Earth
A sensitivity to butterfly effects,
and beauty returns to her in a bottle from the sea,
but it was only a grocery list.
Untitled
It doesn’t have to be a lot
You could even lose something to a poem
Simple gestures of light and lifting rain
Shallow, knowing beauty hides nearby
Birds gathered on the nearby powerline
Just for some all-mighty small talk
To the crescendo of a setting sun.
The sun who knows us, little does he know:
How surfers feel his knowing just as well,
No words but the formal language of waves
They crash, they die the beautiful death.
Immortality hides in the water.
Profound words slip out, spilling, returning
water, like writing on a palm leaf
Left by the lifting rain.
We could have just surfed all day.
The waves and the rides they give,
Could it have been enough?
snow is the warmest wisdom
Falling,
land is light
the spaces between a crystal of water
Am I talking about an idea?
In snow…
There is life with wisdom
There is death with ignorance
Snow works against rebirth
I follow the snow because
There is no snow in hell
A fool’s calculation
A resignation to escape hell
Does the snow chase the wind?
The warmest wisdom
Is not safe in my naked hand
I may look in a microscope, snow is not white
It is invisible but for a play of light
light that only illuminates the lies
in things that are not snow
for my eye, snow reflects the wonder of light more easily than the lightest soul rises
I may hear how snow silences the world
If this is truth, what is this truth about? Am I talking about something real?
a being, a way of being?
I am wrong.
I only feel snow
An empathy devoid of touch
snow does not reward a groping mind
there is no knowing the road, covered, blank yet, like time, the snow betrays your past steps
I know all this nothing from a full life
my soul is so cold from feeling snow I have a PhD in numbness
wounds of the soul, lifted
For all to know,
The warmth,
the emptiness of words
They speak and I do not hear. I know the message,
again and again and it is only Shining
Like robes of gold and white,
I cannot see them, I know there is nothing under their veil
The words make me forget words
deep flaws, open wounds, laughable
“Remember them”
they are the only knowledge
An empty knowledge, there is no need to claw for more
I put my head on the ground
Just when the Sun, rising, touches the Earth.
Endless mistakes of snow
“To write everything is to put a sword in the hands of a child.”
Red turns to green
Do not make a difference,
both the same and the different
are cut down all the same by war machines.
Endless mistakes of snow
Words falling, failing,
my imagination turned black.
False stars, ghost stars, the sky envelops us in stone.
The weather is our pagan religion, lost within caverns,
faith in the eye of the whirlwind
A human is an even number
And this ghoulish number that writes
to self-curb
obscene flaps of skin,
makes light pen strokes that barely touch the page,
gestures of wings disappearing into the white sky.
A sneeze and a tissue to mop this face, afterwards, the dream continues
Perfection is only the mask of ambition.
Once upon a time, upon a cloudy brain,
The man barked at the clouds proudly.
His half-baked ideas standing in new cement and iron, gleaming, glittering
in the sun like a verse
With an air of a perfect verse.
“I don’t need friends, I don’t need warmth, I don’t need to go to the light:
Because I have purpose.”
He washed his old ailing head,
A crystal orb containing a wormy Hole.
I have a question, for the sake of instruction,
Could you please fill in the blank with my question?
He propped his life up,
With the only thing a madman has:
A pretense of madness to be discovered,
With the example of his pretense of work,
Funded by the government or a wealth he inherited, And rescued with money from corporate advertising.
“They want to say I, a consummated Virgin, did something.
Now Coca-Cola has dibs on my achievement that is barely standing, A scaffolding of learning that was never filled in,
That I learned from my mother before I was five.”
After fifty years between toil and Divine Rapture, There stood his unfathomable masterpiece
And by the grace of a mad god,
His church stands soundly.
You may ask what is Evil
And look at the monk who set himself on fire
You may think he failed in his training
Old, venerable, with mind stronger than a hundred elephants
Yet he burns, a failure in his training… surely that is Evil
Watch carefully as he burns, he is teaching us something we need to know
He looks at his audience and teaches calmly :
“Don’t let out the fire within, And don’t let in the fire outside”
The fire the monk felt was nothing
Here is the hottest flame. The thoughts that blame, the words that finds fault. The speech that condemns. This poem that looks for Evil, that we set to the flame. Burning, there is a consuming hate.
How I have burned for this world!
Blue Shell
If every rhyme were true,
How blue the sky would be;
How i would know i were me
And not a vessel for a crowd.
“Did you say a cloud?”
“Thats your foggy cochlea speaking.”
“White noise you mean?”
“Like the sound of the ocean,
Caught in our great blue shell.”
Sex and Dearth
When I was young I could be among rocks.
Their mystery was solid,
Forming a hidden creation story.
In the beginning, everything was
In the midsection, indifferent,
Now she is revealed,
Her solidity just another surface.
Oh to be among rocks again.
The Winnower
Winnowing the sand,
The fine ones sail first.
The subtleties do not stay.
A fresh easter wind will have hints,
Meaningless meanings of grass and pine.
To ignore these hints:
Even the wolf or bear does not live so brutally.
An awareness of things light
Keeps my foot off the gas peddle a little more
And saves the waif of an old man
From dying today.
Unseen for his tenuousness,
His mind of such strength
To direct his shaking foot
In front of the other
As he walks transparent in front of my car.
The winnower sifts such minds off the face of the earth By droves every day.
I do not know this presence in my mind
That keeps those on the verge of flight
Alight on this earth,
But it is these men and women
Who keep the winnower
From taking the earth.
Let’s be birds in human bodies
Her mind crawled inside a chrysalis
With her verb nouned
“Let us suppose,” says Socrates to Theatetus, “that the mind is an aviary”
And Timeas offers “Out of the innocent, light-minded”
Those with a clear sky for an aviary
“Transform into birds and grow feathers instead of hair.
And missiles in the air, as they are today,
Bring my sister flutters in her stomach
She says they are real butterflies
And that buzzing could be any electronic, yet for now it is still bees,
They are asking us to suppose Our transmogration
Into a verb.
The Sound of (Light)
The sound of light is heard, not anywhere you can shed light.
Listening hard is not hard, but on hearing the sound of a wildflower seed bursting open in the ground
The pregnant mind did no digging, that would be suicide.
When you ask something hard, and then you listen because the answer is inside
The imprint in the memory of a future ghost of
Recordings of recordings of still warm sounds overlapping: doors creak, giggling footfalls all parenthesized by the sound of
A father become grandfather, fading on the shelf.
The colors remember being bright, that is the sound of light.
A candle lit one after the other, I hear them recalling, farther than
The stars arms can reach, running their fingers over imprints over imprints.
Grandfather is smiling benevolently on grand-not-yet- mothers, grand,
Full with not-yet-dawn.
Where is tomorrow now?
“Tomorrow’s flowers are very weak today”, says the rain
We do one little thing for tomorrow,
without remembering our ancestors
who stole from us the joy of washing clothes by hand.
think this is a small matter?
Some people work all day at a conveyor belt making small motions with their hands.
These people are very useful, and when they are done, they have an energy called merit.
They have blissful sleep, and blissful waking.
No matter how small her movement on the conveyor belt,
how little left, this laundry
Is my laundry, Get out of my way and let me do it,
The proud poet, looking down on this small act of laundry, with an air of “knowing what it means.”
Because we need laundry, both towers of intellect will fall
People will not find ease easy, There is no “how” for ease.
Only a refrain
A mantra that yields merit
A refrain for truth
A refrain for harmlessness A refrain for great sex
A refrain for
Where is tomorrow now?
“Tomorrow’s water is very weak today”, says the rain
Tomorrow is a space we open today: A space we can close,
This tired subject cannot will itself into perfect vacuousness: when space is positively empty.
Oh spacious, generous mind: Refrain, only only a refrain
A refrain for truth
A refrain for harmlessness A refrain for great sex
A refrain for
Oh spacious, generous mind, where is tomorrow now? “Tomorrow is very weak today”
I am the shadow of a diamond
I am the breath of a fish
I am the one you love to hate
I am the master knot
That keeps obsidian from breaking From the aching mind.
I am nothing, really
untie me, I beg you
We can both be free
Red
My wife teaches me the passionate, fiery love
My mentor teaches me to follow this flame
But I chose yellow… yellow…
And my heart, my eyes and my song are green.
What a love triangle I have here.
My wife tells me I drink too much water
Water, to me, is luck… I suck from the bottle
A vile habit
For water
But not for beer, is it wrong?
I love water, and it harms, yes
There is no blameless food… minus air
Even thought drains others:
A wind that obstructs.
If you know how to eat fruit, breathe and keep a blank mind,
You would never have to give a thing to the world, not one bit of work.
It is not selfish, there is no need for trash, no need for babies, no need for conquest
Of abundance.
Are you going to blame the grasshopper for living his life this way?
The consumer philosophy is selfish. working and giving love, believing that justifies spending merit
On stem cells from babies, or a trash-filled ocean. Tearing a new hole in the sky, no…
But I was trying to write a poem about love. And now I think I know what my love is.
Drink Me.
to the goddess
Brilliant, born of someone ignorant, This verse of staggering beauty,
Is so light and enlightening,
You will gasp and drop the book, Expecting it to take to the air,
Or be inspired to take a leap of faith,
A leap of encouragement off a cliff—
Not a minor cliff, a staggering cliff that astounds and dumbfounds, as a true true leap, an honest leap
On to toothy rocks roiling with foam and green shag—
Lightning tears the sky over an unbroken horizon; striking, harming the radiant, primal mind. The god within made jagged.
We dream a fearful prayer as lights’ fingers stretch for us, succumb to the domineering clouds Pressing down over the early light, darkening, as, just as,
Just as the eyes wake, we leap
Never Enough
Are the only words that satisfy the requirement of truth
I read because there is a missing piece
I keep hope that the next word will fill me in. But the missing piece is hope,
And when I remember:
I want these memories, not those memories
But those dark memories weigh more Stop writing about death
And what if
My death does not echo forever What if there is something unfinished
Quick, throw the poem in the shower
Powder it and pinch its cheeks to make it rosy
Spray liberally with Febreeze
Children with a Moon Pie
Walking barefoot to a hot hot festival day,
When you don’t feel the heat because your mother baked a Moon pie
With money to feed us for a week.
We eat it soon, brothers elbowing skin and bones
The festival ahead, the best moment is not eating the pie at the festival
It is just before this moment.
(Untitled)
The poet drowns in a blurred surface
Painted to look like water
The painter has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that 3/4th of an inch is repugnant to the nature of his bread crumbs.
All he has are crumbs and he feasts on them
Smaller and smaller, emaciated, he can’t find the right amount of blurriness.
He fails because thinks blurriness
is an amount
He read Plato when his bread crumbs were bigger,
How he says likeness and difference are relationships between the same two things
Even though they are opposites
He wants there to be a degree for likeness and difference
So that he can ignore how little sense there is in the world
Therefore, beyond a shadow of a doubt,
He can never finish his painting.
Maybe 1/4 of an inch is a small enough crumb to stop.
Idea Consumer
Its all in the cut
Its all in the invisible
Mark it cut it rip it snatch it
A splash a wave
We touch it and it feels ))) what we feel.
The mind that loves
To read
Don’t let anyone see
How beautiful you are
Vive la Résistance
A cut-throat knew how to follow people So that they didn’t have a clue
Until the cold knife.
I was going up his alley
When I felt something.
Maybe I shouldn’t turn in the square,
Because they will laugh at me, because I am wrong, not confident,
I turn and he is there. He whistles with respect. I know he knows, I knew him, because he knows how to follow people.
This life, an abundance of war,
but the war is on the air.
Men who fight the air are fools, they can only occupy, And those who occupy are mortal.
The soldiers should carry sunflower seeds
To grow on their corpses.
They occupy me because
Because I am a push-over, Nothing, like power, only shadows,
Soldiers may pound the air forever and
Call the air names, like pussy
(and while you are acting, don’t forget to breathe) I know them when they enter me
give the air
A form,
wishing there was no limitless sky, no formless thought
Formless is union
Emptiness is union
These contemplations are better than sex.
We are pushed to humanize the soldier
Because that is double thinking. The soldier kills, he enters and occupies The soldier fights because he is angry
at his mortality,
boasting because he is weak.
Dig deep for your sex, they say Until they have lost the light And they are in the Underworld.
How light is heaven, how invisible, easy breezy beautiful Cover Girl How anger, acting fails to touch
the untouchable face
A Child who
Plays with Nothing
Plays with Creation.
Broken Home
Rags are indecent, and there is no shame in covering with what you have. Maybe it is mean for the beggar to beg, as a poet begs for his words, and a man begs for a bride. A woman will say no to the haggard emaciated beggars: Those hanging around the temple of the Green Buddha hoping for a hand out. The Green Buddha, who all clamber to, offering food and a home. Yet He will not eat except what will stave off death for a day, and even in the temple given to him, he knows his homelessness. The beggars, his disciples, where is the difference? Because everyone will learn. And who will be His bride? We are all Buddhas, you would know it if you would let the prophets speak. The ladles of immortality that the House of the West offer are empty. We clothe ourselves in fine ideas that are transparent, and the finer our idea, the more naked and indecent we are. The Emperor has no clothes, and has many women. Get down on your knees and believe: There is one and only one woven cloth with which all the worlds of dreams and hardships, queens and beggars clothe themselves. Only this cloth is real, we try to fill it, but in the end we must give the cloth away.
let it be known
let it be known, Anonymously
That there is a grand pronouncement that must be made: “Words are hotter than flame”
But if there is too much fire,
You end up with nothing.
I write words, and say sweet nothings
But people stop believing me
Not because I am a liar, I am the Liar of liars…. But because the beautiful, ever renewing truth Warm, overflowing, understanding
Is tiresome.
A murder and a dead body dissolved in powerful acid Is a riveting vision, brought by words,
That can only really burn you
When you are already on fire
But maybe didn’t notice
And I can say that it is warm, that it gives light But there is too much fire
And my words burned into emptiness.
Put your ear to the earth
Many low firefighters don’t see into shadows
They think knowledge of the underworld, known by the high and mighty sages, is not necessary to know.
Yet firefighters will hear
vibrations growing louder and louder in an ear full of positive thinking.
A sponge is a simple being,
A being I can empathize with,
who suffers in a world where we have all become firefighters,
I see the desperation in the positive thinker,
positive like the sun, a distant fire, called closer and closer
by those who run away from their own pain,
And so I run with trains and cars, bikes and planes, I run with body, but with mind
I face the fire and speak of its immanence.
I am a bad Buddhist because I weep for the earth, weep as she weeps,
Unabashedly,
with all strength.
Take up the Mother’s cry!
The silver lining while floating on the edge of the abyss.
If you’ll allow a moment of pause while reading these words..
I had a teacher who played a math game with me.
I would give him a math problem, and he would leave me alone
Until he solved it, then our roles exchanged.
I never spent a waking hour solving his problems
Because I would solve them in my sleep.
I do a tremendous amount of work in my sleep.
I didn’t realize how important it was that I always slept in
And missed my morning calculus class.
As you can predict, it became a waste of time to sleep.
And worst of all, it wasn’t my time I was wasting.
Awi
The bird on the wall
Sings a song that speaks light
A litany of souls
A-O-U-I-E
the 5 dragons, 5 elements,
The 9 legends and the 108 heroes and
heroines
They keep changing the chemical name, so they slip through the cracks of the law
And that way we can still get high
They call me Ghostname
Little did I know I was the
nameless nameless one
The residue left by Name and Form
Integrable Almost Everywhere
you sweep the floor and get a few particles of dust we like to call points that amount to nothing
You go to throw them away, but the dust pan is empty like your face
In the rain
beauty has all five vowel sounds too
the cracks between
the seven colors in the rainbow are uncountable
Like counting the waves, there is always one more, like this,
don’t look for me
The sad clown in the corner of your eye
On Complexity
There are very complex theories. A computer operating system is one of the most complex creations, with more moving parts than a commercial airplane. Airplanes fly, thats nice, but operating systems do something harder: they engage the human mind in every way. There are operating systems for household chores, entertainment, most kinds of work, and social existence. If there were a place for complexity, the internet and its administration would be this place, or non- place. Complexity is what protects our privacy… whats left of it.. in the form of encryption. In this case, and many others, complexity is there almost for its own sake. It is a gatekeeper. The complexity of encryption is not related to the privacy of our homemade pornography starring “me”. Encryption is dark for the sake of being dark. We need this darkness to make fools of ourselves in private. Computers are just embodied mathematics, after all, and mathematics has become the gatekeeper for most things. Science is one of few generalities that claim mathematics is not for its own sake as a gatekeeper. Most importantly, the complexity of mathematics in Science is both the gate and the reality. The reality in our minds: the conversion of ideas to things, and things to ideas. Mathematics is the night sky, the simple darkness in which the universe can play out its complexities. It is at once the mountain one must climb to reach the sky, and the sky itself. The arid peak, from which the world is a map, and new stars can be contemplated. The point of dependence of sky on land, and of land on sky. The recognition of complexity is a simple recognition.
Vagueness is Essential
Vagueness is not a matter of semantics. It is a problem that troubles the basic assertion that, as our old friend Berty Russell asserted as an axiom in the Principlia Mathematica, “Everything that is, is.” The basics are a very interesting place to stay. We would like to say this is a basic and acceptable assertion, and it turns out to not be basic at all. In fact, no subject is elementary, and also every subject is elementary.
Channell and Rowland argue that vagueness has pragmatic usefulness: “For language to be fully useful, therefore, in the sense of being able to describe all of human beings’ experience, it must incorporate built-in flexibility. This flexibility resides, in part, in its capacity for vagueness” (p201 Channell 1994) Dr. Channell outlines various views of where vagueness comes from, from the difference between the “same idea” in different minds (Fodor 1977 in Channell 1994), to language (Peirce 1902 in Channell 1994), to physical reality (Russell 1923). Vagueness is found discussed in logic (Lakoff 1972 in Channell 1994) where it is argued (along with Russell) that “true” and “false” are vague, and so classical logic could be modified…” (p66 Nightingale 2019)
“[i]t is perfectly obvious, since colours form a continuum, that there are shades of colour concerning which we shall be in doubt whether to call them red or not, not because we are ignorant of the meaning of the word “red,” but because it is a word the extent of whose application is essentially doubtful.” (1923 Russell as quoted in Nightingale 2019, p66).
“The word “red” is vague in this respect because there are borderline cases where it is not clear whether or not we should call the case “red”. Russell says “essentially doubtful” because this uncertainty is essential, in the sense of being a part of the nature of red. One deception here is in asserting that the “continuum” is a perfectly precise reality that can be expressed numerically. This renders vagueness a kind of error; without a perfectly known continuum underneath our words, vagueness is not error but has a reality of its own. Does the continuum suffer from vagueness?…
Peirce claimed that another way to describe generality is where the Law of Excluded Middle (“A or ~A is always true”) does not hold. This makes sense because normally, the LEM decides which of “A or ~A” is true (even if we don’t know which is decided, it asserts that “out there” it is decided.) When the LEM does not apply “A or ~A” is left undecided, which allows for a generalization on “A or ~A”, you can choose which. However the claim that something can be essentially uncertain is directly against the LEM.” (p66-68 Nightingale 2019)
I mean to say that reifying vagueness proves the LEM is false, in general. (The ideas of general and of vague are intimately connected) Russell asserted “everything that is, is” in order to “prove” the LEM. And here I am arguing against the LEM, which would also be against “everything that is, is” What makes red red? In this question i mean to be vague between term red and the actual red. If everything that is depends on other things to be, there is a certain spaciousness to Being, an undefined vagueness between Being and Space.