You Didn't Think I Was Going To Waste My Life Trying To Make Money, Did You?

Look where it's gotten you, and,

where it's gotten to you. 

Only a few rulers that got to power

through war turned their efforts to 

peace...Ashoka and Charlemagne,

(somewhat), come to mind.

Greed is a one way street.

Luxury gets old.

The pursuit has no more 

understanding in it

than a board game.

I saw it, somehow, when I was

young...perhaps it was because

growing up in a melodrama...it was all

exaggerated and unreal, even my

father's success. The first person

I met that I would call "real" was

my English teacher when I was 17.

I had just arrived on campus of my

boarding school for my junior year.

This short man came up to me and

introduced himself...Mr. Osborne,

and shook my hand, and said he was

looking forward to working with me.

That was the first time anyone treated

me as if I was a real person...I was

stunned.

That was what I was attracted to...that

realness. He taught me to be an actor

the next two years. He could have

taught me anything. 

So, no, when ever I was among a group 

of people working hard, it always raised 

a question....like the one afternoon I visited

the Boy Scouts, and they were busy 

learning to tie knots under bright lamps, no,

I never went back. College was the same. 

A school where students studied under bright

lamps because they didn't get into Harvard,

but they could still get into graduate school...

not elite, but good enough.  Me, it took a year

to give up that illusion. And another year of

drugs to give up everything else....erase and

get back to tabula rasa....going against the

stream I knew by then.

Oddly enough, it opened me to everything..

new possibilities, new knowledge that was

just becoming available in USA. Buddhism,

for example. What I discovered I had been.

looking for....and, koanically, had been 

looking for me.

So, I forgot about money for a long time...

managed to work things around..it was 

easier in those days because our parents,

the best generation, having still not lost

control of USA, were very supportive and

permissive.....this scared the crap out of 

power. They won the domestic, civil, flower

power war....the last time poems got close

to being as powerful as bullets. They didn't

get that close. 

I knew I was something besides regular, so,

I chose plumbing, both as something I could

learn that would make a living, that it could 

travel, and, I wouldn't have to think so much

to do it, which, I thought, would help quiet, or,

still my mind.

I was completely correct. I was the snake, 

and, I bit me.

If I look at now, and assess the process of

my life....if I just describe my life right now,

that would be more interesting for all of us,

rather than giving my opinion of 

what happened.

Tepoztlan, Morelos, Mexico....In October,

I will have been here ten years. They went

very fast...but even a second is history.

Now, I sit in my casita, in total reflection, if

you want to characterize me that way right

now.... sixty six years old...still physically

functional...minor problems with the legs

and joints because of thirty years of 

plumbing.....stomach's going because of

drinking....mind just keeps getting better

and better....whatever you imagine that

might mean. That's because of forty five 

years of meditation.....read the 

goddamned Time article, the one where

there's a monk, head covered in probes.

I have plenty of patience.

If I didn't, if I was a poet,

I wouldn't bother writing.