Two Realms

Armies Of Israel
Slam, slash, bash-in
Crush walls
  
Targeted neighborhoods  
Are gutted looking for David
  
Bombs, ships, jets       slaughter
Your home
Your brothers daughter

Iron bent, wrenches
Wails

Hezbulla
It's slings, stones

Legions of pin pricks  
Bleeding Haifa

Missile through the roof
   
A stolen boy
  
Gods
Demi-Gods
In the aged struggle
Never settled
In all this time
  
Lebanon: We've been here before  

They have agreed
There will be gnashing

Seven words for G.W.

Guantanamo

Guantanamo

Guantanamo

Guantanamo

Guantanamo

Guantanamo

Guantanamo

Object Of Respect

Tim and his brother Pete and I

Walk the streets of New York

The two of them Buddhists

And I wannabe maybe

I took the road trip with Tim down from Rochester

Thru-Way east and south

Tim winding his way till we get to 8^th street

Petes one room apartment

His Gohonzon, Nicherin Soshu object of respect, shrine

The main focus in the room

We bow

And fall out the door

Tim slides down the cast iron railing on the steps and gets

A black line down his ass from the dirt

We hit a restaurant and have muscles and beer

Then glide young down the street

They want to catch some strip clubs

Walking down 8^th , it’s crowded and a car going the other way slows

And hookers try to sell us

One without teeth offers a blowjob

Another jiggles her tits

Each the size of a nerf ball

We laugh and keep walking but I keep thinking

Of a woman that age with no teeth

We criss-cross streets and clubs till I am lost and drunk

We end the night at one joint where there are sex acts behind

Smeared glass, on red satin and gold

Two women, one eating the other

Whose eyes are open, gazing dead pan at the glass

Right

Back

At me

Dead glass retinas

I turn and grab Tim

“I’m done”

And walk out and back to the apartment

Drinking more on the way

They keep laughing at me, how I bolted

The next morning I wake up

The two of them chanting Nam Myoho Renge Kyo

Incense and a small bell now and then

As they chant texts in Japanese

Hung over I look out the window and see some old platinum blonde

Standing in the street in a white fur coat, open

Her naked body heaving puke out, I turn and go and sit

Knees folded under me

Looking at the Gogonzon repeating

Nam Myoho Renge Kyo

down then over

windshield sweep
after hours
of gutter drone

The Miraculous Dragon Fly

In 1995 we were on a family summer vacation, on Stonington Deer Island off the coast of Maine. I rise before the rest of the family most days. I seek the quest time to ponder or wander or do meditation.

It had rained all night but it was a bright sunny morning. I decided to climb the the hill across the street and look out at the ocean. It was one large chunk of rock and I scrambled up using hands and feet. When I got to the top, I could look out at the sea which sparkled before me. But looking behind me, the large hill of solid rock had a dip in the center that collected rain water. And in the water there was a collection of small water lilly flowers, frogs, and an array of dragon flies of varying neon colorsd (blue, green, majenta, purple).

It was a hidden japanese garden with pines in two directions, the ocen in another, and our cottege in the other. I sat down and did some meditation and then in a calm state, watched the dragonflies for an hour. Every morning for the rest of the vacation I got up and repeated this ritual before going on to enjoy the day with the family.

In 2001 as the towers came down, I was on retreat in the mountains of Santa Cruz. Totally not knowing what was going on in the rest of the world I spent each day doing meditation in a brambly field, down by a small pond. Sitting under a sapling on a rock, I would do meditation. During periods of rest inbetween sessions, I would observe the fish, and the lizards. My attention was mostly occupied by the hundreds of dragonflies as they dipped to the water and danced to avoid the fish. They mated in the air, zoomed jaggedly, a multi-colored frenzy of bio-helicopters. Day after day for three weeks, I watched this miniature world of flight and color birth and death, mating and being eaten, fighting over mates, being plucked from the air by birds.

Now wherever I go, hiking, kayaking, I look for water and dragon flies who magically delight me.

Mind Fart

Listening to an mp3
I hear my old friend laughing
long hair
and ear-ring
white teeth
and wide smile
rain
falling in the mountains

November on the North Coast

Cold gray slab of cloud
it could be granite
or glacier
sliding frozen, down
from Ontario.

Thirty degrees
and falling
everything sinking
a compressing weight.

Snow crust on the telephone line
looping low over the street
sagging and still.

November
has remembered the Genesee,
turned,
glanced over.

Retreat Ride

The muddy ruts of the cornfield
already cut, mashed and ploughed under,
with occasional stalks amputated at the knee.

An old wreck of a house (now a shack)
with a sag-gut front porch and the roof about to collapse.
All shades of grey in the patched tar-shingle walls
falling into the crumbling morning.

Rounding the bend, sun tumbles through fall leaves of maples
turning into mid-october north-east-colors
and lands on tufts of scrub-grass in a pasture
with black&white/brown&white cows lounging and lazey.
One stands hunched, muscles taut,
pissing gallons into the golden universe.