Happy 2020

You can hear the music in town begin 

to build. 

You know the fireworks are coming.

I saw three new friends at the market…

portend of the new year.

What will be real, soon, that is fiction today?

Time changes here, but not the seasons;

not if you’ve lived in Minnesota.

The air is fresh and calm and clear. 

The moon a beautiful croissant.

If I could see the future, and you wanted 

to know about the coming year, I would say:

“For some, you’ll enjoy it more as a surprise...

for others, you don’t even want to know.” 

Triumph The Insult Comic President

I don’t think I have to say much more.

You make fun of your enemies in this 

psychological world war.

Triumph Of The Ordinary (for Donald J. Trump)

You are Everyman with a lot of money and power,

which seems like a contradiction,

but, 
any man who has not lost his bearings

lost his common touch

lost his common sense

lost his heart and soul in the process

is a true pilgrim; 

"a man who has come from afar

and is on his way to a holy place".

Guest Poet: Norm Fischer

Take death out for a walk, folks

Not on a leash but at the end of a thin thread

Outsource yourself to your friends

Who will do a better job of loving you than you ever could

They say life is brief; that

Depends on where you’re standing
How you count from where you stand
When you fall
The most complicated things remain simple
When you don’t complicate them
And when language retains
Its linear tendency
Of subjects in control of verbs acting on nouns
With occasional modifiers
That you can take or leave
What’s the world outside your window
If not a spectacle colored by your tears
Produced by the years of torture
You’ve undergone pretending
Against the odds
To be yourself
What if that world and that sense
Too of your having lived this long
And no longer
On a timeframe that spans
Only so far and in one direction
Were a feat of sleight of hand
A party trick an unattainable brush
A handshake among stars
That died long ago
And become visible only now
When you sit at a table among tables of other eaters
Who’s to say what truly occurs
It’s an embarrassment to eat it public
To be bearably alive in this in-between condition

Alien Agenda

Aliens engineered primates long ago so that

they would develop into beings that could

self evolve. 2500 years ago, Buddha was the

first example of one who accomplished this 

feat. He showed thousands of people at that 

time the path of self evolution, and Buddhism

dominated human culture in the East for two 

thousand years. Unfortunately, the West 

didn’t hear about Buddhism for most of that 

time, so, the intelligence that humans had 

been endowed with led there to ego 

dominating the affairs of men for all that time.

So, aliens have realized their failure to seed the

planet with enlightenment fully. Since the Atomic

Age, the aliens realized that their failure had 

led to the possibility that humans could destroy 

the planet and its people, and have been trying to 

correct that mistake through direct contact with 

humans, as well as an alien/human hybrid 

breeding program. Waking humans up to what

they have been up to is also part of their agenda

at this time. Perhaps if humans can realize that

they are only part of something big, they will feel

less inclined to destroy themselves.

Is any of this true? What is true is the amount of 

information about the real nature of the universe

that has been hidden from most people due to

the various agendas of ego driven humans that

still want to have control of humanity. It's true that
much information is now being revealed. The truth

may be that aliens still have hope that humans 

can dig themselves out of a dark age, and begin 

to recognize their shared experience, and the path

to liberation. It’s certainly true that if the aliens 

wanted humans to be gone, they could accomplish

that in an instant. It’s true that the real truth is bound 

to be strange. As Mark Twain said, to paraphrase, of

course the truth is stranger than fiction, because

fiction has to make sense.

Watermelon (for Richard Brautigan)

Sweet beefcake ballistics...

someone pull the file...

be careful out there...you never know...

could be a brave new world

could be a dark age

it all depends on how you look at it:

could be the start of something big...

could be we wasted our lives...

could be Plato's cave we're in...

could be a figment of our imagination...

could be just our luck...

could be a communist plot...

could be the rapture...

could be the Great Awakening...

could be the end times...

could be the new Golden Age...

could be we think too much...

I always wanted to end a poem

with the word mayonnaise.

Cuddly Curmudgeon

Full of love and nowhere to go…

Hey!

I can feel this way 

even though I’m old!

Just a sweet old guy, shuffling along…

let’s face it, it’s true, I’m high!

At my age? 

Should I know better?

What’s the meaning of life?

Get the picture?

Nothing more shocking to some

than an oldster having fun.

You think you’re smarter ‘cause you’re young?

You’re just learning what I already knew!

Here’s a big, ugly old man hug!

Now, get a job.

Lifescape

The big picture, a hologram

in four dimensions. not a binary,

logical situation.

If you want to see the past or future

look at the present, wherein the

momentum of the continuity is manifest.

Take a photo;

it will last longer

than any complication,

clearer than any exposition,

a better reference than an explanation.

Take time, sit down

and look at your life.

Everything you can find in books

is right there in front of you.

Where do you think books cane from?

No one thought the whole thing up.

Go back to the senses

back to the senses go

senses the go back to.

Sorry, folks, that is the punchline.

The Night Before

The town is too quiet for a Friday night…

even the dogs.

The day went too quickly, as if it knew

it’s time was up.

The moment before you strike a wooden

match with your finger, as you look at it,

tension, attention; nothing else.

How fresh, when the air is cleared,

when there’s nothing on the plate,

when the toys have been put away,

ready to slip back into eternity.

The new day will rise

with so much from yesterday 

not even a memory.

Time Enough

The end of the road…

the end of life…

the end of the path…

looking back at the steps

I’ve taken…

hard decisions,

fruitions of actions, 

the unfolded patterns

transparent

like a clear overlay on a map

showing a journey through time.

The old men in India dwell

on the banks of the Ganges

doing exactly this.

Most of the big decisions 

were the right ones,

though I seldom saw that at the time.

The end of a life is like

the end of a chapter;

the pages keep turning.

Since you don’t know 

where you came from,

you have no idea 

where you’re going.

As long as there’s a crowd,

you think you’re going somewhere,

always back, in the end,

at square one.

If you know where you are,

how can you be lost?

Please be kind to your

fellow passengers.

Sacred Space Program

Chogyam Trungpa developed a sacred 

space program. It was an open secret, in that,

anyone could take part in it and be transported,

magically, to the enlightened kingdom of

Shambhala, albeit for a modest period of time.

Anyone who has done Shambhala Training and 

experienced that ordinary magic understands

the experience I’m speaking of, just as anyone

who has taken LSD, jumped out of an airplane,

or had a near death experience can understand 

what a person who has had a similar experience 

has seen. 

The sacred space of Shambhala is inner space 

and outer space experienced simultaneously. As

Suzuki Roshi pointed out, “me’ is really,  merely, 

a thin veil that obscures, more or less, the inner 

from the outer space. We get hung up because 

we experience “me” so solidly, that we get cut 

off from the inner space, which is why the outer

space can feel so cold, makes us feel like such 

a lonely, solid little thing.

The sacred space program is to dissolve the 

veil between inner and outer space, so that we

can realize that we are really, ultimately, just

part of the environment. No reflecting our light

back into our own mirror. Rather, the sun of 

awareness shining out.

Evening Raga

Bees swarming in late afternoon

as the sun is going down.

Bring in the cows, then, the clowns,

prepare the feast

let’s have some fun

now the sun is done.

Poem For Reggie

My dear brother,

the path we’ve chosen is perilous!

All we have is devotion to the guru,

the dharma, and our fellow warriors!

No one said it would be pretty!

Luckily, 

we can always get back to square one,

which may seem like defeat,

but, really,

it’s where we came from!

Rejoice in the stripping of fake illusion!

We have enough problems with the real one!

Tobor The Great

Twinkling tingling tinkling tightrope

walking on an infinity of eggshells

so vast is the universe, so many lives

we’ve had in every realm, so precarious 

the outcome of our actions that echo

their karma down eons of fractal

possibilities, no wonder the Zen Master

said: “Keep it simple.”

Fractal Evening

Looking into the flowing stream

without thinking of jumping in.

Showy snow job of infinite variety

parsed into bits as small as a pixie

pixel perhaps distracted to swirl in

an eddy of momentary recognition

in the sea there’s nothing to hold

onto except the water better than

falling through air nothing to see 

here move along.

Even the wall in front of me is a

stationary, reliable hallucination,

texture of painted concrete a

snapshot of Pollock visualization.

“I’ll have the same again…”

…even though it’s never the same

because you’re never the same

or you don’t remember.

So, good luck with that…I have 

to go out into the dark night, and

when I return…

Auto Da Fe

I let the world eat me up...

I gave myself out in coffee spoons.

I had some support for some time

of freedom, which, it turns out, 

was miraculous in spite of myself.

Now, world, I'm yours.

Let me live or let me die.

I ask for nothing else.

A Sign

Sometimes I sit outside the coffee house, smoking, with

a little sign on the ground next to me that says:

"Consejos gratis

de un budista."

Some people ask me:

"Why don't you charge for your advice?"

And I say: "Because when I give my advice, 

it doesn't make any cents."

Trosang

Trosang: day of rest...give it a rest...

it's none of your business, and it will

probably turn out the same way 

anyway.

Stop taking sides.

Be part of the environment

and you'll never feel lonely.

A billboard in India showing the Dalai Lama

drinking a Coke, captioned: "The Dali Lama

takes a break."

My teacher sees it and asks: "From what?"