“Oh My Look at that Ole Dog” by the author. Luna on Fort Myers Beach. She made it.
Congress can come to my bank. I have ideas representational spiraling towards the universe. I can show you yourself, your muffin. I’m not in a handbag. I’m not parkin’ cars. I look at the world and smile, because I know its price. It’s huge big, but I don’t get lost in it. I see the telltale signs of behind. I can gauge the world through there. The Spirit has the show. Behind the world does.
It’s not communicable. You can’t see it with normal eyes that see vision. It’s not in your visual field. It’s nowhere apparent. How do I know it’s there? I can descry it in spiritual vision. I see the substance of things. I know that huge engines lie in the fabric of the wood. I can see the frontal of things land on it.
I’m a thought proper. Pregnant I stand and sing, and I offend people doing so. It’s cost me my livelihood. I got fired. I’m in trouble today. I see it in spiritual vision. All around me there’s trees involved with my pen. I’ve really written some things alarming to the public. They shoulder my hero. They’re here and there.
Mainly what I show you is how to change from one thing into another, from a blind man into one who sees. I show you how to bring good out of bad, how to change your very nature. Poem after poem has landed on the world’s docket. I don’t get known there. Do you know the price of change? It sits on your life extractin’ good. It’s costly. You have to pay in sacrifice. The world takes its toll. People are very small about it. Forgiveness and understanding, no one gives them to yah. You will be persecuted for good, even if your sins aren’t listed to the world, to the people in front of you.
You make power uneasy. They can’t believe you’re there. The people that hold the world in its little stations mostly are mean and jewel, and it’s fake jewelry. They’re petty people. They have an arm on society that robs it of its worth, but they will tell you differently. We’re used to this, the hypocrisy at the top. It’s all for show, but here I’m gettin’ in those little wears, like a community organizer or some little boss.
Where do you find good that’s good to everyone, equal pay even to the riffraff? Is there a worldwide heart there? Is there someone that embraces humanity, has goodwill at all times, treats people kindly even if they’re homeless and destitute, sacrifices for people not worthy of it, loves them too?
I’m not talkin’ about the perfect man or woman. I mean they really try to treats others as themselves, regardless of the other. They’re fair people to everyone. It’s me, it’s me you say. Glad to meet yah. Continue readin’.
You threaten people then, challenge their sense of self, will be very unwelcome at their parties by your own sense of self. You can’t shoot the breeze and not feel the weight of other people and their meaningfulness to you. You’re flabbergasted by it. It’s not a little show. You examine yourself continually for false pride and vanity, for things that don’t match love, and when people hurt you, you feel that sting, but you try to get your head around their price. You study the world and their place in it to see what world needs arise. If you act, it’s not with malice. Empathizing with them you understand they need a reckoning. Their world play has gotten too far in selfish ends. They harm.
Are you there my friend in being good even when it hurts, in bein’ inside yourself an open vessel to feel other people? Is that person in front of you the weight of the world? Do you take delight in dogs, and can you feel a tree there the livingness of everything? Do you laugh with the wind filled with the caprice of its consciousness, identifying even with the forces of nature? There’s more of being then being shows, and we’ve come to the invisible, but would we find you there identifying with the wind and sea? Great Scott! you’re a tall human being.
The organic meanness of the machine, that’s not your pride. You’re a tall order. You do penance for people. You never leave someone out in the cold. You’re understanding and kind, forceful when you have to be, but not mean and cruel. You are so on yourself to set things right. Can I get across to you your underwear? You have left lust behind. It’s not what you do eat people. The roles of sex are no longer in your play. You’ve matured out of that.
How can I count this? It’s my livin’ mood. It’s my every day. This is the price you pay for love, and you’re not ready for it I know, the death of your own genital squeeze play, but we can still have children. Youth gives birth to our young, old enough to know the consequences and take on that responsibility where society thinks, where society helps them grow where society grows. We are no longer individuals on our own, and we get along with each other. Individuals have room to grow and be themselves, the freedom of their nature that lets society grow.
I’m a social revolutionary. I see the beyond, and I carry my dogs there. The world for me is paper thin. I see the behind, and I love it there. My dog just messed. Did you see that? Can a poet have a sense of humor? No, I don’t like butts and smelly asses. I’m walkin’ on miracles, this world set in place, all its motion, a storybook Earth.
I’m tryin’ to tell yah the price of the world in seeing, how you handle the world in moments of gloom, in cries of despair. You look up into your largeness. You look out there into your springtime. You handle the world as it eats you, but you’re too much for the world, and so it spits you out, and you stare at it an equal integer. It can’t get at you in your lists.
We are a bubble inside an immensity beyond time, tiny as the wind blows, a drop in an ocean of continuous being. We are one aggrandizing look in everybody’s lookingness. Worlds upon worlds tell this show. All-Containing seeing rides us all. We are a looking glass into infinity, and we only see ourselves on finite Earth. Ever being grows to its larger glass, and can you count that?
I’m on the high seas of the bottomless lookingness. I see larger being than ours messing with us, setting us straight, and I can see bigger than them beyond this universe of stars into the larger looking glass that encompasses ours. I’ve sat up there once looking down on Earth. Miracle on miracle bridges who we are, who put us into this play, the larger than time’s being we are. So many seconds started this show, a poet here in your lap singin’ the ends of time, singin’ for all its worth.
I’m bangin’ on time. I’m giving extra credit. I know the hunt in time. It’s bigger than stars. I can grapple the world there, just this old codger who walks his dog and means nothin’ to nobody savin’ a few. It’s a laugh really, the breath of my vision and how little you see me. I’m showin’ you inside. These are the concepts of my thoughts. These are the concepts of my dreams. I habitat these thoughts all day. Lookin’ at the world through a dog’s eyes, I can gather life. It’s insane really I’m not the one insane.
Let’s go back to lunch, shall we, that the stars in the sky tell us we’re wrong. There are bigger fields than Earth, and I’m countin’ stars in my diary and know there’s beyond them. I know you’re safe, even if you get tarred and feathered, crucified on some cross. Nothing can touch the Spirit. The soul is free from everything, and it laughs that gentle laughs that knows the score, but is sure hurts down here doesn’t it, to be a beggar at time’s gates just wantin’ to be loved?
That’s the shit of it, and the soul takes these shocks and turns them into gold, but we suffer the because of it because we are flesh here not soul. The soul is deep. The soul is long, and it might let you get killed before it shows itself, and what poor bugger can take comfort in soul when his trials and tribulations are happenin’? This is the juxtaposition do Earth we bury here, where we mean something to each other. It’s a lamp unto our feet, ain’t it?
I show you the price of a laugh. Let’s make this work. The price of a fall, that’s too expensive for us. We are here on Planet Earth wantin’ to survive. Will it happen? It’s certainly meant to. We have to get out of our kingpin. We have to get out of our nursery. We tarry there. We rob there. We’re stadium laughter. Do you know how many eyes see us? Do you know how many eyes care?
Let’s get this down to a science, hey, everybody’s a hero on Planet Earth. You can do it I know you can, be there bigger than the world. Are you just gonna stand there and do it, practice burnin’ people? Will you see my face? I didn’t get away with it. I shoulder more than society’s prison. I shoulder the pain of the world. Unhand me I’m free? No, I’m not enlightened. Good luck, that’s in my hand, and I may reach freedom yet. Is that the answer to tomorrow? Yes and soul release. We interrupt this broadcast, and it looks like we broadcast now.
Everything bad happens, not everything good. Do we just spit at each other? I’ve got radio silence. You might kill your mistakes. Look at this. Why would you want me silent? Maybe tomorrow lip service you’ll give. They’re not hiring. I want to go to Mound Key. I just put a belt on and I make that hirin’ the world. Where is my pay? I warned you. Oh look, the hammer, it will get all over your fur. Men home it’s comin’. Everyone, I’ve got a tale to tell, and it shows.
Well it’s time to go to sleep. A poem has not made you ready. (vision of Grace Beagle sitting pretty and looking at me like in a life-size picture frame, two or three poses) Taking a picture, you know how dogs to that. Keepin’ your fingers crossed, we’ll get them here too, Grace and Hannah and Bruno. Now be off with you. I got a train to catch. That ole boy put his foot on the pedal and headed towards them yards. We are not in hospital beds.
Grace and Hannah, photo by DouglasBruno, photo by the author
Look at the homeless with binoculars. Our individual freedom doesn’t extend that far in the thousand mile kingdom. No homeless please. We’re all fruitcakes. Be crazy live a crazy day, tantalizing. We are moored in individual freedom everywhere our commercials reach. They key of the individual has been locked in some drawer. Look at it. Conformity in obedience is every sign.
Conformance and mobility, is that a high-rise condominium? We live in nation great. Has anybody seen it? It’s a melting house of the wrong ideas. It’s a house of conformity livin’ in big beds. Try to bring four dogs to town, and you’re out the door. Can the people that make such decisions respect you?
What are we doing here? Everything makes money or is about the same. We don’t live in a society of free people. We think politics rules the day. It’s each other we rule with our dumb attitudes of you’re not my type or you don’t do that right.
Let’s all be mean to everybody when we have the power to do so. Who wears a social mask when you’re a hero championing all the distain? I can be mean to you because social hierarchy is everything in the land of the free.
What’s up? Have we sold our souls for product? Look at the shelves. The comfortable eating world of me, my God it’s big. The availability of product has destroyed the world, but I put America first in my prayers, and I get fat doin’ it.
Now it’s the Gulf of Mexico bein’ drained out in America’s name. We are proud people, and we stick our nose up at a fall. We don’t know there’s a fall. Just ask an immigrant, illegal if they’re non-white, legal or not. They know a reckoning. How are they not human beings? They know the price of a fall.
Can we discuss national boundaries? How are we managin’ this, without constraint? The people that sleep in the same trees as me my country ’tis of thee? Open borders haunt us all, but are borders and hatred the same thing? I’m ICE lookin’ down its long list to expel people: let’s get rid of vermin will yah? Is that the land of the free and the home of the brave?
Salute the flag again. Everybody’s doin’ it, and here comes Trump, an underdeveloped character from our minions, who does not have love for his neighbor, has taken the golden rule and shove it up your ass, hates even his constituents if they’re not about his name.
Where is God? He is not in Trump’s eyes. He won’t fit there. The justice of God is concerned with the Earth, sacrifices for the love of mankind, loves the just and the unjust, let’s his rains benefit everybody, is an ambulance carrying people to righteousness.
America puts God first? Let’s send everybody to hell who hasn’t got the formula right worship Jesus or die. Now that’s love for all eternity, no forgiveness ever, and you are suffering the worst hell imaginable. Found your nation on this religion, make this your idea of God, his final character, and you don’t have a nation love your brother let me tell yah.
Now give Trump the power of God, that carte blanche you’ve given him, and make him mean you. Trump is not there in the love of your life. He’s a dangerous will armed with time. Where do you see Christ? Where do you see the love of man? What is his dollar statement? Every head and every hands making that the chief concern. Right on the beach put this hood on yah: you’re makin’ money off of sunbathers; you’re makin’ money off of fences; call this the American way.
The mess we’re all in, have you found it yet? Would you look for it if you could? Are you just blind to the peripherals? Would you love your brother if you could, whoever that is? That’s not giving them a dollar to eat. You’re giving every man, woman, and child on the Earth we inhabit, in our togetherness, the helpful goodwill we need to see each other correctly.
And America, the most powerful nation on earth, can you lead us all to goodwill and be an example of sacrifice? Never mind defending your borders; you have that genuine need, but can we get grace to policy your movements?
There, my God I poet. Do you hear me? And found peace a few times before the profound peace. I’m lookin’ for it now. I have an appointment with destiny. It’s just my own personal flavor on things, a poet in the halls of America let’s be good shall we? I didn’t cut my teeth on it, and boy have I been a sinner, but goodness is my way to meet the world because I’ve learned the price of love.
Can I give you that honor? Let’s swim on the beach and never harm anyone, even in the throes of thought. Let’s pick up ourselves and cherish one another. I’m rootin’ for you in this sundown meditation. Do you hear the beach?
photo by me of one of my only real friends on the island
I’m telling you the birds and the bees. It’s way over your head? Come on now slow down and read. This is the biggest thing on earth where we whip up ourselves. I’ve revealed the times, any way you look at them. See that dog standin’ there? It’s the same for him. Now let this poem unfold before your eyes a poet where you’re sittin’.
All about bears and livid nature just feed the worm. They just didn’t do it right, be themselves in a public crowd. An exaggerated sense of self led them through the day. This is the human worm. I think this plagues everybody. It’s baseline bein’ human, when we encounter each other. I am so big in my eyes. I need to show this to people. I have to feel good about myself and expose my difference. I am just one in a crowd, and that hurts.
A social hierarchy makes everybody sting and just messes up bein’ human. Everyone is just falling all over themselves to be an item. Your boss said no. Now, what’s at fault here? Everybody’s just bein’ human. Let me give you a hug. I’ve just arrived on the scene, and I think we met once, and I have to show this scene my Jesus imitation mi corazón, or I just sit back and judge everybody pretendin’ to be bigger than everybody else with my debonair, so they see I’m the one important here.
Can you stop? Nobody can. These are the facts of life. I’m a hole in one. I see everything as the center of me. My senses place me dead center. I hear everything inside confirm that. I feel it on my skin, and you can be my child, and I am not your senses to you, and your inner life is dead to me. I don’t hear a thing. I infer. I gather. I learn to empathize. I don’t know where you’re at as you see me. My world is so big you understand, your world pressin’ in on me. I’ve got to show yah I’m worth.
Here’s the deal. You don’t believe me, unlessin’ we mean for each other. There are just too many of us to care about them others. This is such an exaggerated posture, however much noise we make to show our worth. We feel ourselves so deeply. We are ever-present with ourselves, and we want so to be liked and loved, not made to feel bad about who we are. Oh man please listen to me. We each and everyone of us hurt so because we’re ridin’ the world right upon its seat, legitimately the peddlers of existence, wind in our hair, fire under our tires, and not a person sees that but us.
Oh my God that hurts. It’s downright mean to arrange a world bottle this way. Is it a Creator laugh? We’re so on ourselves, little children at the handlebars, peddlin’ for all it’s worth. Who can blame us for bein’ mean? Now you know that’s not right, and God is not a son of a bitch. We’re workin’ out a plan too big for us to see. We have to take the impossible and pump it on our bikes, not live in a storm of I am the you, the me.
We have to do this ourselves, realize every Dick and Jane is the center of ourself too, and they feel the world out there the central event in it, just like everyone of us does to our existential eyes. Oh my God all life fits there. Oh my God all the world fits there.
Can you see the change in identity? There you are identifying with everything. Now you can still get your work done, but with radically changed hands and thought process, and your heart beats in everyone’s so that you can feel them like yourself. Even if you fumble this someone really does you in, you climb back up there because it’s how you see.
Now am I livin’ wart? I have the apple in my hand. I’ve explained to you humanity, right there in social dice. I’m the cows come home, and I’m different you see? I’m posturin’ so you’ll give me worth. Is it all a game? Do we just bury our heads in sand dunes we are so embarrassing on each other? Oh no sweet brother, sweet sister, puppy dog, pussy cat, we are so much more than tumultuous sees. We are bigger than stars, just immature infants that’s all to how fucking big everything is and meaningful. We have a role to play in an unimaginable creation’s purpose, these little animals that we are, but we grow up you see.
I’m speakin’ from that tall noon far off in a shimmering distance. Inevitable we arrive. A chrysalises our dumb selves, and we’re just waitin’ on that greater light to open us, and this poem has eyes on that light. Is that okay? You sent me the email to shut up. I’m sorry I can’t. It’s what makes me tick, right here: see that me there? I’m lookin’ at the world poet my number. His editorial number God central that’s you.
I have to have a storm to peddle in emergencies, passage mean, this business of losing my job. A cute muffin is my horticulture, a grassroots revealing poem. Now think on this. What’s so weird this is Candid Camera. We’re bein’ caught in ourselves, because as luck would have it we are the One lookin’ out at the world through everyone’s eyes.
We get caught in ourselves seein’ that, and there’s a host of pile-ons. We’re creation’s niggers, little hapless animals breastfeeding on life, not knowin’ who we are, not knowin’ where we came from. We’re a little window on time, unaware of the All inside. It’s spurs us on. It gives us courage. It’s not bound by time or even existence. We are there you see in the front of ourselves too close to see.
What a Hollywood. It’s wonderful really, and validates all our notions of look important me. To discover that in yourselves you would have to remove the Earth from view, see brighter than stars. Can you do that? That will be the day you will count forever as the starting of your see. You would’ve seen Earth laid bare in all of its miracle. In several seconds sums it up for me. I’m seein’ all those pile-ons a poet describin’ time. Is that so bad? A referee man, I’m tellin’ yah how the cow ate the cabbage. Am I invited to dinner?
The most precious thing on earth, your dog loves you so, and you can treat ‘im like a dog, piss all over him with your human control, shock the shit out of him with that play-button shock collar, and he’ll lick your hand and throw away all his pride at your feet. Now how do we help that dog? It's not abuse you get arrested for, but you don't wanna look at it. There’s better hours his master can spend with him. Well I found out theys do me dog here too. Comin’ in didn’t see that. I thought I was a pedigree dog. (The sound of laughter) He gets embarrassed and shy we share identity. Get that puppy so much better than scoldin’s. Honor that dog.
If you are reading this poem on a phone, note that the integrity of the lines, a major feature of poetry, is not displayed properly. Many if not most get cut short because of the small screen.
The captive adult, I’m not that bad. Dated immigrant, 21 years in India, and I didn’t have a form to fill out, and they called me illegal. Are you kiddin’ me? Human beings are wrong, nasty, and evil, if they’ve overstayed their visa. Everybody says so. Look at Trump.
I’ve got a million dollars. I’ve got hair in my ICE, and my hair in on fire lookin’ at the human being. I judge is my luxury. I’m not as tall as I am, and I get downright small on the issues group think.
Now murder me some, the I now the poet, who can say I to anyone. Okay we’ve called down Congress, hopin to find some expediency to keep tyranny from happenin’. I mean we’ve wrote a poem, maybe several, that ask government to be government and not make us bow down to nationalism and be a dictator over our lives.
No British government can force the crown on us. We are all we are in the halls of independence, and everybody who signed the paper put their lives on the line. Protest is useless. Give a government what it wants, total dominion, you stupid s.o.b. Let it take over Auroville and rule with an iron fist and remove the international scene if the people resist.
To point this out to people, to use poetry to stop it. Now let’s get on with it, movin’ Heaven and Earth to get our dogs. No, no, no, you can’t do that, ask the community for help, the man at large, the woman with the telephone. Get second jobs you fools and pay for your dogs yourself.
You selfish points of contact with the society in the bag. You are supposed to work, work, work and create no art, write no poetry, or go on your little round abouts and discover the community. You are of no value to us as a society, and you cannot ask for a thing. Asking the community for help with your dogs, you’re throwin’ pies in our face. Get your act together and stop asking people for help. So many millionaires on this island, and please don’t bother them. They’re makin’ money.
I think we’d need to ask the millionaire. We find some kind, nice, and warm, open to humanity, especially dog lovers, and we’ve gotten a lot of help. Thank you. But the thing most profound in all this mess, in all this criticism, concerns our way of life. We are digging a well into the meaning of life, and every decision is based on that. We live our lives to a spiritual plan and put that first. It’s not lip service. It’s the reality of our lives.
Even our dreams we hone in on God and seek to find the higher consciousness. We do not base our lives on survival, making money, or anything of the sort. We are not here to have a good time. The consequences of that are huge. We get attacked constantly. Jesus died on the cross, and you think it was for sin? Poor bugger got caught openin’ up God inside himself.
What’s this I say? Jesus was on a tree, castigated and torn, murdered, because he showed men how to change their lives in spiritual substance. He gave men and women a way to be free by breaking the bonds of consciousness and being born again into the higher type, and you think it’s a wish-wash hangin’ on a prayer, and you’re clean and good, religious for the rest of your life? A radical transformation of our whole life Jesus envisioned. Now shoot me for saying that he did not die for our sins.
So anybody we’re up against, as we try to change, base our life on this mountain, is either put off or keeps us at a distance. Few come inside our home or invite us to socialize. We are too weird for TV. I think you’d find us warm and very human to be with. We know you’re God starin’ back at us, a startling revelation we challenge ourselves with every day.
Now kick us and be mean to us because we are different from you, and you need validation that only your life is true. Have I said enough? I’m on time I think to be Who I am, a man in search of himself that his divinity timeshare wears, a man tryin’ to change in his higher type, and I’m doin’ that in normal life. I got kicked out of India.
Now say I keep my nose to the grindstone, work a 40 hour week, pay my bills, keep my mind to myself, unless someone asks— I’m talkin’ about at work. Can I be in America and do that, or is conformity the rule of the day now, and if I don’t conform I’m fired, lose my home? Will I be chased off this island for poetry like I was India?
Do you understand what’s your doin’? There’s a radical change of consciousness ahead, how we evolve out of this mess. There’s a new society of ourselves waitin’ to be born. There’s human survival in the balance. Let’s huff and puff and blow it down because we cannot tolerate change out of our satisfied little lives, and these two beggars, Don and Doug, we need them to straighten up and be just like us.
Now all you good people, can you get your head around that? Can you please? “Douglas at the Watering Hole”, another joy for understanding. It’s so true yes. All the whiles are looking at me. You raise your hands among yourselves. Why should I be any different? Another two weeks before bylaws are stated. A bunch of people, a bunch of people on this island support, are lookin’ at this way: I approach the bench, and there are good vibes there.
You’re on dissidence you’re on daily bread, you just take a deep breath and keep on goin’, confirmation code casting problems away from your human beings and comin’ to yourself for the love of man. Are there any other spring rolls? An island bright in sunshine, and all those puppy dogs— the love of animals too. Well they’re on our diet. Would if they’re off in time for us to renew the Earth? Yeah I know. I got a ways to go, but our dogs are our children, and I don’t eat those.
For the love of dog, they’re honored guests on our island too, and who are we but guests on bright and shiny seashores the power of Nature rules? What causes earthquakes? Well, we might have something to do with them greed takes the shore, if we honor our pocketbooks more. Help was health insurance, but would the Calusa listen? There are no more creeds for the Calusa to close. It was 30 miles an hour, their hunting season, who put other peoples out. I pointed it out. Pointed it out wind, we do it, no socioeconomic class below the poverty level.
It’s easy for me to say. I just got here. And they’re real deep in there so be good to them Harbor Island. Ed the reason an algebra drive, if you wanna get past your schoolbooks. We are representative creatures ourselves hook, line, and sinker. An actor plays a part, you and me, and you don’t save your soul. Your soul you find it and rise above yourself to Who you represent in time. Find Yourself to believe in. That’s good news and that One is all of us, islands and dogs included.
Now believe in hell as a preferable option for most people, and you really need to examine yourself, don’t you think? I’m just talkin’ islands. Now you hear them speak. Rise power to Nature, or we’re not gonna make it. Will you listen?
Well legalized in a fiery seal, we’ve moved mountains on Fort Myers Beach to get in there. Would you welcome please Doug and Donny and let them have their dogs and spiritual life? I need to put poems on it, this startup page. Rock me gently, rock me slowly (sing to Rock Me Gently by Andy Kim) for the love of the island. It touches yah you know and helps people along like us. Thank you island.
Come on Jim, we’re just here for a little while. We’re off to the mountains in springtime. Not now. When we put our time in on the island. Meaning we are open to the island. Can you gauge that? Just let it be.
There’s somethin’ Earth husband, but can we be accepted not being gay doing it? We don’t have to be gay, do we, to be two husbands and a wife? We’re celibate you know, but we don’t live inside an egg. I don’t like it. You guys are doin’ great. Good riddens. Well we’ve heard from the crowd. It’s nice to be accepted, ain’t it? We’re just a laboratory. I’m doin’ the laboratory. Could you stop threatenin’ to kick me out? I wuv you.
I suppose you can read the writings after the fall, but I was really hopin’ humanity wouldn’t fall. Is there anybody out there? We don’t have to fall. Now I’ve taken on the voice of the world, but who believes you can get that done? Now you know the spirit of Old St. Nick, and it shows by a red light. Build for sunlit paths the stadium of our Earth. Is that today’s date? I have found good shit to faith, but we’re at a watering hole, and we have no sense of each other. Love others as yourself, that’s precious to us now.
Sure, are you singing the song, or does your music just get drunk island hopper? Gimme, gimme, gimme the honky tonk blues. (sing to Honky Tonk Woman) Let the big sheet guests know that the grassroots can do it themselves, move Earth towards our up stand. Now gotta get to work. You have a great day.
If you are reading this poem on a phone, note that the integrity of the lines, a major feature of poetry, is not displayed properly. Many if not most get cut short because of the small screen.
How do we know each one of us is a liar? How do we know each one is true? We’re not criminals anymore, those of us thinking the worst of you.
It’s just procedure, the inhumanity of our times, despite all the books that say so: let’s get our humanity down to a science, the feelings test, the look in the eyes, the agreements made by hand and not the machine.
The ones who take our humanity to the test crowd us up upon ourselves the attitude of you are a liar until proven guilty. We would just make them mad writing poems on their behalf.
Just to get a library card you have to take a lie detector test, and you live right next door, can prove beyond a shadow of a doubt you live there, without paper-wiping the machine.
Oh God give me a break you’re playing trivial pursuit— the one who looked me in the eyes and needed confirmation they were true. / I’m as tall as grass, and this is buggin’ the shit out of humanity: prove you’re a human being.
It’s everywhere apparent we’re crowdin’ in on each other, and you have to prove the rule of the machine. Oh my God bylaws, and I’m a derelict for sayin’ so?
We are all too common now, the gateway to total control the way we are with each other. Can I sing this to you where we bake our bread? Poetry doesn’t have a shoreline. It’s unhanded. It’s not the way we have with books.
Now they’re for leisure time. It’s not to challenge us in our thinking. It’s not to make waves where we meet each other to take us back to square one in mutual trust.
How do we lift the veil and get yah to read a poem? Any poem points to the human being getting higher than themself. Can you copy that? It can be in an estuary along a manatee’s spine line so glad you’re there leavin’ them alone. You feel better highin’ their part with you.
Now give that to everything you need to look at. Home owner’s insurance, are you sure you got a poem there? It’s the poems that take on life and better us with ourselves, and you’re not whistlin’ Dixie. Wow, I’ve landed a poem.
If you are reading this poem on a phone, note that the integrity of the lines, a major feature of poetry, is not displayed properly. Many if not most get cut short because of the small screen.
For both a ride on me, ageless against you, and the age of the suns, I’ll be thousands of fallin’ underneath my mind, startled by the springs of enlightenment, and the cards are in play but too grandiose for my design.
Involved in the history, I’m not chuckin’ wood, but let’s face it I’m this little man in a little play. Now look, even in my beach job parking lot the herald of swift event patterned life. I saw the nuances of things to come, and I was a bearer there.
You can’t grasp this in your hand. I held the Earth in impossible lilies. I knew it was a steamboat. I handled it carefully every damn day. Can you imagine sleep without it? It held me at night, working on its intricacies.
I saw the world comin’. It held my gasping hand in its own. It was a birthday kiss. It was a holocaust of things known. I did not put all my rocks there. I had bigger plans than Earth.
Can you starry enlightenment? It will do you away. You’re not there seein’ it. You’ve disappeared, standin’ right there in the middle of it, and you’ve gone father than the world.
I know this land. I can’t describe it to you. It’s taken the world away in perfect seeing. I am not sure of its moorings. My times there have been brief, but you hear it in my gifted speech.
A whole field’s to play, famous hotel, unknown to the world. Can you imagine seeing the impossible, a world where none is, sights and sounds that not be, thoughts where none be? A whole world arise from the Void where nonexistence is. What arises now?
I don’t know if I’m worth this. I don’t know if it’ll come, the springboards of the Earth a seer’s grasp, the passive in God’s hands, the no-self of enlightenment, the end of suffering for individual man.
The floodgates are open for this puny start, a beach bellhop boy liberals through the strong right-wing the doors of enlightenment, contentment and peace, where the wild things are. I carry that trailer. I tarry there.
It’s worth it, no firecrackers in the belly. Wish you that payment. I started looking at shiny objects. I realized there was a behind the behind in every word that’s true, when you touch base with reality.
I wanted a bridge. The vehicles of enlightenment silence the world, engineer reality to make the grand crossing. Uh-Huh, there’s a reality there enlightenment leads to, the nature of reality, where we come from.
And you think you’ve stalled on enlightenment? There’s a beyond. It studies the world for you. It’s its master design. The roads ever get deep. Another universe holds this one in ours, and we go on from there.
The All-Encompassing All-At-Once is the study of the game, and we’re on flat level Earth, the first rising structure to pick up This land. How can I get this across?
No sight can show you it. No mode of thought gets there. You can sit in the All-At-Once of the sun to use a metaphor, and there you can see the dynamics swiftly over your head in a secret passage to our Source.
Now bring enlightenment into the picture. It’s stills the world for you to get to the other side into the reality beyond the universe, into the reality that made us.
Glory in the spoken word of poetry. One bad dream is this universe to cross. Right this minute, can you get the sense of creation? Can you see it larger than the book?
We went past it. What happened? We got services hello Cape Canaveral. One accident, it’s gonna be close. Till Hunter gets back we don’t leave reality to the fishes. We get out of these beach suits, the mere survival looking for enjoyment, the group mind. I’ll be right back. And it was a hunter for spiritual dawns.
Can you see that out of the routine? Bonanza, we’ve established this fact on earth again. The pilot’s license, where we start. Oh my God my head on my shoulders, this is like the bus you know.
The podium on the stage of the Art Hall in Koreshan State Park, Florida, where the utopian religious group, Koreshan Unity, had its community, whose founder and prophet was Cyrus Teed. A visit and a meditation there inspired this poem.
If you are reading this poem on a phone, note that the integrity of the lines, a major feature of poetry, is not displayed properly. Many if not most get cut short because of the small screen.
In dreams and visions my voices speak. What are you doing over here? I’m a religious nut. I can’t control myself I hear visions. I count the salesmen in my dreams. Go wake up humanity, I can’t count the number of times I tried. I can’t even get a word across.
This is not save the world vision. I mean like I’ll never forget that I made the wrong sort of mud pies. I write poetry to reach the world. I’m not a religious figure to charm it. I’ve opened up consciousness inside. There’s no barnstormin’. I’m a quiet place takin’ a mile. I sit and read muse, no religious fanaticism, but I answer questions bluntly and with sarcasm. Let’s see what stinks here. Your mind.
Flying saucers from outer space did not tell me a thing. I have not been visited by angels tellin’ me I’m the man. I don’t want to get in your pants. I don’t want you to obey me. I would like a better society. I would like to say things that mean somethin’. I would like to hold your hand, where you don’t look down on me. I would like to lift you up in your mind where you think and touch that heart of yours.
We have a society here growin’ money and hate your neighbor. The mind of us is not the best of us. Our souls are only beliefs not houses kept. We think each other wrong. We don’t hand out society so you’re a prized member. That’s the rich and famous. We don’t know how to do it, be kind to one another, and it’s not a social laugh, the uncomfortableness of putting each other down to get at time with one another, or at best we keep our distance from heartfelt communication. We laugh at one another and wear big social masks to prove it, or we’re tryin’ to sell somethin’ when fake that sincerity.
Who is vulnerable and sweet? Who lets their guard down and give people meaningful communication? Our minds are full of the kingdoms of ourselves. And I’m not sure how to write that. Would you group with me? I’m a group-minded person, and I give group to my human being. I don’t consider other groups human, the Democratic Party for instance, or those Republicans. Man I love everybody. Now you everybody’s get off the bus. I’m lying to my social lying. I can only tolerate certain people.
You disguised my I, and I’m sharin’ in your business I don’t understand. You’re not the biggest people in the world Americans. You’re not even tryin’. What happened to me? There are changes in consciousness ahead. I’ve had some previews. I was not someone you handled correctly. You didn’t know how to see me, and I just fucked up. I got intah trouble. The previews came as a start to help me feel you as I feel myself, even if you look down on me.
I saw humanity. I’ve seen the world as my eye, no, no, not its offerings to me. I am a vision of the world as we speak. We look out each other’s eyes, in the world being that we are, and we look out the eyes of God, who is the vision everything. It is possible to break free from single vision’s number lair, from one pole of consciousness don’t you see? I’m about that vision. It’s universal. We all share it.
We’re lost in me’s and the boundaries of our group. I’m so sorry this chain gang has defeated my eyes too. Can I help you some see the truth, reality as it is, no religious overlays, no scientism that can’t see past its own nose? Reality’s bigger than you think, and you have identity outside of time. You aren’t this puny self laboring on a hapless globe that can’t see itself and know it’s true. You’ve put on actors wings, and it’s a hell of a ride ain’t it?
And all your dreams represent things to you because you are representative in time. You’re bigger than you think, in household wears, not your peckin’ order. You are actually beyond the stars lookin’ through a thin pigeonhole at that embarrassed I down in time. We’re all naked down here, and pride just can’t seem to go with us to sleep. It takes coffee to perk it up, and who knows the master plan of the universe? Kids we are and kids we’ll be, until we wake up on ourselves.
Do you know a mature notion? It’s not here, in every man for himself, in the little world we’ve made, in the societies we’ve engendered that make you obey it like it’s a real group but blames its faults on individuals, a world that does not know itself.
Good works and technology, you can’t move the field there. We have consciousness to change, and that’s not a thought process. The consciousness changes into its larger type. I’m puttin’ this in your hands, the ideal for the ages, the thing we’ve been workin’ at all along. It’s not a messiah you see. It’s not wings from outer space. You do the change and me, and we get bigger than ourselves. Blinded I am?
The Dalai Lama in Auroville, 1993, putting in the foundation stone for the construction of the Tibetan Pavilion there. In a speech afterwards, he said, “You can be a believer or an unbeliever…, but there is no choice between being a compassionate or non-compassionate person.” Photo courtesy of The Auroville Adventure
Did you know an Aurovillian won’t read this, no matter what I do? These are tough shares. Talk about hang in the water all in yoga. My cousin slapped my mother. It’s hard to believe such anxiety. Let me muscle you at, heart poundin’ in my ears.
Let me say that again. Oh boy, you wouldn’t believe it. These are in heartbeats that you don’t know to measure the light of the sun. I wish I could come down to a heart in my living room the Shambhala success magic. I cannot spray this in numbers. The heart central has to be the case. It’s dog eat dog otherwise.
Where do I put this compartment? In everything I do and breathe. It can’t be left out. You regard everyone as potential shares. You can’t stop evil among you with the ball and chain. You can’t just keep it from happening with everybody’s suspicions.
You have to rise to the occasion and also consider the bad man. What does he need to do to change? Can he do that among you? Yeah, people just want him gone.
There’s somethin’ I can’t get across over here. If you wanna create Shambhala, you have to envision his place among you healed and changed. Shambhala is the perfection of humanity where Auroville is. You have to rise above yourselves and do that.
You will not even listen to the change. You have closed your hearts and ears to a peaceful man among you who is poeting this change. How can it leave out the community, the bedrock of the change?
You know it would speak to it drum rose people. It would have the imprint of the divine sounding poetry’s worth. Terrible is it?
I come from another land. I do not meet the world it’s a thing out there and I’m a thing in here. / Those lines have been drawn, and they are wiggly now. I meet the world inside myself. In the substance of my vision something is wrong. The world is not a normal train ride, and my thoughts don’t take me there. I see the substance of vision it’s all acres of That, the substance of the show. You wanna know the gist of it? It comes to oneness.
Now bake my bread I’m normal, nothing special to look at, just another person to be around. Now test my feet I’m normal. I get angry laugh and cry. I can give you an argument. My difference is my hands on you. I’m lookin’ at the One starin’ back at me.
This is so real to my eyes my hands collaborate this. I am in your field of vision, and my that hurts, if I even make you feel bad. I don’t wanna do that, and this is strong stuff to prevent me.
Are you an alien on that? Have you reached the divine in vision? Do you know how to heal the sick, and they are not sick in body they are sick in hands, and their actions hurt the world, rob the community? How many times we said we needed that, heal the community?
This is a frog suit. I’m lifted out of the water until I cry. I mean I have to come up and record lines. Do you get the picture back and forth? I’m hearin’ these lines in inner vision I’ve developed over a lifetime. You hear the sauce now all Sri Aurobindo’d, the Mother’s guidance please.
Here’s the thing. It changes consciousness. The world grabs you in this. You see signs everywhere. You’re walkin’ hand in hand with the divine, but that’s not the beauty of it. It’s soundin’ bodies way out in front of you the substance of their mystery crayola figures of That, and it dawns on you it’s peeling you through everything, and will you get a load of that? The invisible ties connects us. Wow, I’ve just shored everything.
The Prime Minister, Shri Narendra Modi at the great Banyan Tree in Auroville on February 25, 2018. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and the Prime Minister’s Office (GODL-India)
From the paths of the Alone, if it’s any consolation, I alone this to you, the next lesson cheerio. The heart of Auroville is the banyan tree establish the Earth oneness drive everything. The Infinite of days, things are stepped back, exploded on the scene: I hate this bible; I have a schoolbook to cram down your throat, the rules and regulations; I just wanna have fun. The voices chorus. Just leave my damn trees alone and my vegetables— I’m sustainable Auroville. I’ve got some rocket science get yah, a whole lot of Sri Aurobindo— the Mother’s disciples’ Auroville.
It’s a land grab right in the heart of the city, and then the government comes in and makes you disciples of her all the way to India that’s the tower we find. It makes you want to pull up stakes, the whole registry. A failed experiment has come apart on itself. You can’t get there from here. You can’t even try. You just sit and wait for another dawn.
Where do we go wrong? The goodwill to continue. It doesn’t hurt anybody. It doesn’t seek them shame. It’s taller than a government and is not about right of way. It has no agenda to sell you at the expense of itself. It’s charitable to everybody, even the weak. It has no bad man. Goodwill lifts him out of that. It’s good to everybody.
The fundamentals of goodwill started this place, and all this was hijacked early on and has led to today, a fractured Auroville. Policy glows in goodwill, is meant for the right change, and it glows on our vegetables. People’s particulars glow in goodwill to come right themselves. This is not known among you? If you see the fruit you see the tree. Goodwill governs all, and that’s where we land Auroville to come back to itself. Are you going to fight this? Are you going to make it mean?
The heart collapsed, the heart of Auroville. It puts lunch in children’s boxes and go all over India. Get to every place on earth, the Auroville plane. This trap is completely in our noosphere, such is the spirit of this endeavor, the daunting human-wide of Auroville.
You’ve blocked me with anger and ill will from the anger and ill will in the very pocketbook of Auroville, the poet of your gifted change, the poet sent here to warn you. Just come and govern everything with ill will, is this just your blindness or your willful stance? Time of death, is that the lesson of Auroville?
This is the form of the divine. I report that they are only satellites. It's all fences regarding the sun. We can’t get at that meat in the matter. It’s too broad-minded you, and you will not meet us there. I cough this up now a poem rose in certain straits, but I’m not in a tin can. The availability of truth is relative to the participant, but I tell you sincerity guides my house. It’s what I lean on. I can get closer to the truth, but will you meet me there? Will you even try?
Oh my goodness Auroville, that’s the study sheet, that’s what we make our daily rounds: ever widening to the truth, ever widening to contain it all, to stand at last on higher ground, to get there, the reason Auroville was made. We localize human divinity here, and that is ever the strength now.
I attempted to send this poem via email to recipients in Auroville, but my email ID was blocked. I’d sent the previous poem on this blog, “The New Business”, to all the addresses that blocked this one. This poem and the previous one made the secretary of Auroville, Jayanti Ravi, mad, and she got me kicked out of India over it, personally.
In the stories of the Self, the eyes of sunshine, it’s been Armageddon. A small voice out front says no, it’s been leading to something big. I’m a hope, and a skip, and a jump away from that. That’s what I’m pettin’. You hear the ups and downs, the soliloquies harbored on the snake. I swear these muse. I’m tellin’ the story of God. I’m not coughin’ up Skid Row, but I’m giving you pencils and integers of everything, and I don’t neglect nothin’ out. We’re on a roll now.
I feel something big. I can’t get my heart out to show you. I’m bein’ pushed from the inside. Still I can’t see my boy or anything else big, like a sudden public share. I still sit in someone else’s pain and cry, anyone on the planet I hear their story loud, and join that with my own. I still see the pain of the world and not its bright sunrise.
What is this bear I speak of now? A coming tidal wave, my head upon the stake? My faith in God hasn’t reached that far: he loves me at high noon, I mean like in front of everybody, and I’m not a bad man anymore. I’m a way with him. Would you count that, or do you even see him right out here open fields with everybody? I do have that smile.
Do performance art, and I’m from there. Stay in your room, that’s me. Catch me, you are my god I announce things at the seriousness of a child, and I am hurt by one. Look at me, a fattening calf, I have golden reins. I don’t know how to handle this: you don’t put my face on. That’s how it needs to be done to God knows what. You cannot contain this. You think aliens wrote it, or a moved lunatic. Some of you know I smile the meaning of the word. Play your blindfolded world.
Did the boy end up revealing anything to us? He’s happy and content on the outside I heard that your honor. On the inside he can’t handle himself, is boiling in pain. These are irreconcilable. He can’t hold this script down. Those around him only see the happy kid. He doesn’t reveal himself inside. I am not a name on his lips, like he doesn’t want to see me, but he cries for me inside and is continually scheming to see me or make contact.
These are all along the lines of Earth. He can’t make it right. He can’t get up out of his stool. He’s frozen there, and he and I are frozen there. You don’t know how this hits me. It’s like a betrayal that loves me so impossible to understand. He won’t even call my name, acts like I do not exist, and he is finished with me. This just does my head in, confuses me to no end. I swear the real boy’s right there, but he is so earnest when he shows me his inside, especially when he calls me and cries— so much pain, so much out of control, with a rage that wants to blow up the world, and I’m supposed to believe him? I get so worried about him. There is no end to this. There is no issue from this as he grows older.
I just want to walk away, but I’m pulled back every time by divine love and my unmanageable love for him. He is so big inside me. This is all in my reality. Can you lose a child, have him kidnapped, and he’s winin’ and dinin’ with his kidnappers just down the street, sending you secret notes of ransom that say daddy I love you so much and want to be with you? This is a crash course in reality. Fuck this I want off, and the Mother and Sri Aurobindo and other divine bid me stay with him, and I love that kid so much I do.
Here’s the trick. Get rid of the pain they say. Don’t even operate on that attachment. Count the divine only you see in everybody. Don’t be forlorn. He’s comin’ back. It’s all in my muse, there or in the background of every poem I write, his name, his name, Nithish, Nithish.
Stop the forlorn? The ache inside my breast all the time, the absence of my child and his dangerous psychological situation, how in the world do I stop that or believe the divine he’s here sometime soon? This plays with me and plays with me. Are the divine devils? I don’t know what’s goin’ on. I’ve lost my child.
You my divine reader swing with the Gods with your heart-breaths, your beliefs, your unaccountable sum. Have you seen the Great Beyond? Are you a born object of God, what others now discuss as an occasional moment in the Sun? It would change your way of life, radically transform society, because it’s there at our divinity’s base. We lit triumph with our children to bring this home to us.
Do you know the transformation of the outer life into the inborn divinity we wear? When do we put that on with our children, a radical new way of life that busts out of the husks of the old, where children can be themselves and not the uniforms they wear, not crammed down society’s schoolbook, not made to think your thoughts but open God up inside themselves? I’m a motion on that, a mover, and can I remind you here of our high aim in your classrooms with your kids, in your downtime? Nothing more to say except my time with children is that, who they are in time and their inborn sense to go beyond it a revolutionary.
How do the boatmen row? Gently and in springtime. I’m saying my worth, and I’m not a cherry picker. I’ve seen the city up high and the elephants the grass ate, the thieves that robbed bottom and the song they sang when they saw God they now with children row. I’ve counted the stars and their admonishments and protests, their gifted speech to the poets of the time. It’s all a crocodile beautifully put. It doesn’t change us. It only makes us mean towards our brother when we find them doing wrong.
Who can translate poetry the Gods themselves can’t bore? Do you know the living Ray? It comes form other shores, and we hand it in our pencils blockchains we wore. Can I pencil this in for you with the freedom of the Infinite involving children, involving Light?
It breaks on us a new path: you’re the leader finally acting, and I storybook my little boy from a full moon today where we draw redemption. Outstanding citizens no, we want radical revolutionaries with every child we write. Do I dare you? Radically I write time. I am life’s sacrament. It won’t pull me under. I am not dyin’ here. Somethin’ climbs in my room I don’t know. It’s got handles on it, but oh what they are? I’m a space nigger in time. Maybe that’s coming to an end? Maybe there’s a zombie apocalypse, and I get loved right out in the open by my boy? I think it will take that for him to act, despite this poem I wrote. Maybe I’m onto better days. Maybe I’m big stuff.
It’s Armageddon folks, is that how this is supposed to end? No we just pray there, and we get up and run the world again I lit in the face of certainty. The foreigners would wait outside folks, and the lady is a figure on trapped. Startled by his brightness, I see the Alone in every tree. It looks out at me with my dogs’ eyes. It’s in every figure of self, looking out at the world with timeless eyes. I am not alone here, even though you keep me at bay. I am a figure of Self, and I break bread with the Alone as a matter of happenstance. You can’t rob me of that deep. You can’t even see it.
Fine, I will wear your society, but I’m on revolution’s springs, and I stand there alone investing in time an uprising out of it. Now read me won’t you please? I see the Alone in every face, and you are nothing but he. Crowd me now with your figure of him. I dance on this delight on Earth’s shores just poetin’ the hell out of time, and that’s the start of it, prayfully yours.
Harm's End 