Stop dyin’.
Don’t bury yourself.
Don’t compromise.
That’s when your guesses are weak.
Our thesis is this:
a themed to understand mankind.
Is that controlled see?
It’s bigger than you and me.
It doesn’t land you in the dirt,
grovelin’ life force pennies.
You know what I mean?
Now let’s program.
I will see you off to school,
okay?
I can’t do that.
Let’s do that.
You and Roberson are part of a family plan.
We have convinced you to send your kids to school.
Now that was a trick.
Don’t you blame it on the industrial revolution?
Thereabouts.
Universal education,
put China as a role model.
She started long before.
I’m not tellin’ yah to do it.
I’m tellin’ yah it stinks.
What’s wrong with society?
School.
We teach academics not to be good to one another.
While Japan started with good citizenry,
they created a monster,
copying the West.
We don’t teach boys and girls to be good people,
how to handle life,
their depression,
modes of being,
ways to get out of trouble.
We focus on one thing:
good handwriting
in academic subjects,
brain things.
Do you know how dumb this is?
Look at society.
I’m not talkin’ teachin’ morals,
do this don’t do that.
Yah hear me kids?
We’re not producin’ robots
Confucius.
We want them to obey
their conscience,
and that’s not mean and cruel.
It doesn’t hit anybody,
unless it’s warped,
like a magnet,
and is attracted to society’s dominance.
We want individuals here (sorry India)
that stand and reason
for the juxtapositions of society to stop.
Do you hear me Houston?
What do you teach in a classroom?
Able-bodied citizens,
can I speak with you?
Of course, I’m open.
Why you learn from me?
Now that’s a touch subject.
I need to study you first,
and we look at criteria.
These are society’s ways
we understand how to teach.
Well this presentation
is not a memorization kit.
It’s a school play.
You play a lot
to get the concepts down,
where society meets its roles.
Okay now you be the immigrant,
and you’re the assimilation policy.
You take it in droves:
students must constantly assimilate new material
of what they will face in life.
They will be ready for life.
We want to think and we want to feel
oh my that’s sad isn’t it?
I don’t think we avoid the tough stuff.
There’s a toddler in a revolution
sees his parents killed,
his brother his sister.
They live in Gaza now
or a kibbutz nearby.
Alright third grader,
feel that.
Are you lonely now?
Do we teach them to read?
Without society you cannot read.
We read all the time.
We need to learn to read to write.
Expressing feelings and ideas
takes the spotlight.
The grammar and spelling
is to encourage them to write,
and neither demands them to write.
Now I can polish off the academic subjects
in the same way.
It’s a feelings test.
Does the student feel like shit?
There’s still a prize
for academic achievers,
for those smart kids.
We just follow up
with their holistic report card.
We need them kind too.
We need them on the ball
to bring in a better world.
Piles and orchards,
we don’t spread them out in those.
Okay kill the neighborhood
you’ve made the secret formula.
Here’s an idea:
don’t try to make a scientist out of everybody,
or a doctor or an engineer.
Oh India you’re lost here.
Does the kid have a talent?
Teach them that
as if their life depends on it
because it does.
Teachers are role models
of good behavior.
If they fly off the handle they apologize
and start again.
Did I say they love children?
They never hit them.
They know what it’s like to be in school,
and that’s not all day.
It doesn’t take over children’s lives.
It doesn’t even need to be so big—
little small groups here and there
neighborhood arranged,
and there’s mixing
to bring everybody to state.
We do sports.
Do you see how small this is?
A few hundred students no.
Sometimes just a handful—
depend on the center used.
We really want time for the students
to get the attention they need.
How decentralized is this?
It’s a whole other concept of education,
called No School by the Mother.
No one follows her anymore
in this regard.
You wouldn’t spank them.
You can have an administration
visiting all the schools
constantly,
friendly,
a great big leviathan no.
We want nice people
that can work hard and play.
Do you hear me society?
A Palestinian boy sits on the rubble of his house destroyed in an Israeli airstrike, in Beit Hanun, Gaza. Photograph: Mohammed Saber/EPA
When the ticks were talking about building churches,
it’s free speech.
I don’t know who I have a ham on today.
I don’t know who’s worthy.
I don’t know who I’m talking about.
It’s race cards.
Can we talk about the Black Lives Movement supporting Israel?
It did in Chicago—
okay Hamas,
you terrorists,
thank you for being a friend.
I don’t know what I’m saying—
that was a Harvard trainee.
Let’s be blunt about this:
can we support Israel,
and they treat Palestinians like shit?
They are the oppressors.
Oh my goodness a homegrown flag:
the Palestinians weren’t there before Israel.
They became a nation under Israel’s cause.
Now they’re out to do harm,
indiscriminately killing civilians,
or that’s the show they put on
when they got out of their fence.
I mean they murdered.
It hurts doesn’t it?
The Palestinians want to show you
what it means to be Palestinian,
where Jewish means Israel.
That harms.
Okay we put Hamas in the kitchen and praise them.
You inhuman bastards,
is that how you gain freedom?
We don’t know.
We just hate ourselves
and see a Jew and want to kill them.
That’s the dry land:
we can’t kill Jews.
We shoulder our own freedom.
It must work among ourselves
before it goes outwards.
How is this done?
I have a naked little boy and don’t rape him.
I pull myself together.
I tie his shoe instead.
A poet will always speak in symbols,
his life the bait.
We learn to stop violence towards our children.
We are gentle and soft with them.
They eat out of our hand,
and we feed them warm and honey.
We do not blister them
with having to hate Jews.
We do not require this of them.
We do not indoctrinate them to kill.
How kind are we to one another?
We let our humanity light up our life.
A stray dog is an opportunity
to give our world some compassion.
We hold each other tightly,
as the brothers and sisters we are.
We do not do violence to one another.
We try to show each other love,
or at least the patience
you give a friend.
We strong arm no one.
We stand up for human rights.
We stop hurting one another.
Then our gliders come in peace.
We show the Israelis what they’re missin’.
We give them reason to respect us.
We brush aside their hatred
with the real human being.
This is all we can do.
War will kill us.
It will enslave our land.
Go to the heart of the conflict,
the hatred of the Jew,
and bury there.
Can you understand these people?
Can you see their plight?
More than a few are good-hearted towards you.
Not all are racists.
Not all think it’s their human right
to be the chosen people.
This is the dragon in the land.
It’s this we must eradicate,
not Jews.
It’s this we must show is wrong,
the essence of Jewish hatred,
the hidden core of their persecution.
We must not bury Jews
or destroy their peopleness.
They are a tower and a might,
and oh we need the Jews.
Can you sink them?
Are you rubbin’ elbows with those who’ve tried?
I think you need new friends.
Even in hell Jews triumphed.
They fight differently than most men.
They fight with their brains.
You’re gonna do them in?
We count on you
to show Israel its humanity.
You are the problem they cannot solve.
Their brains can’t grasp this:
there were a people on their land they took,
and now they must oppress them.
Victim turned victimizer once again,
we can’t see this as human frailty
common to everyone.
So what can you do to Israel that Israel needs to see?
You are a fine people
together in your lot.
You take hardship and spit out pearls.
You sacrifice for those around you.
You take your humanity
and circle the wagons with it.
It’s the way you meet oppression:
you are a noble people,
and therefore hard to abuse.
How would this act
when faced with aggression?
You kill the combatants
to defend yourselves,
and there you’ll win the respect of every nation
and show the world who’s wrong.
I think we complete this
in the issues of the night.
Glory hallelujah it’s dawn.
I thought I’d made you up.
This is a little spark of God in life.
You’ve pointed out the errors
in human ways.
A call to arms,
humanity’s arms,
wow you have children there.
Well spoken said.
Oh statute of limitations,
it’s just a matter of time
the Palestinian cross.
You’re kidding me—
the Palestinian blues.
Those are Greek and Roman myths
made real by human suffering.
It’s a Dispatches’ record
my hullabaloo.
Now they can be up there.
Give me a credit.
I’m pickin’ up the pace.
Gloria in Excelsis Deo. [line heard sung, from “Angels We Have Heard on High”]
Just put boiled rice,
I just put boiled rice.
What did you put in the blue container?
I’m all here bitches, shoot me.
I don’t think you understand the situation.
You’re gonna have to get bigger than you are.
It’s not gonna work killin’ people.
You have to show Israel who’s the human being.
Is your culture up to that,
to self-develop?
You just continue
life along the shores of persecution,
so you can stop its history on you.
This is done slowly.
Every man, woman, and child
must agree to band together
and be good to one another.
This is the team roll.
This is how you begin.
You’ll be working with each other’s subconscious, that’s for sure.
Study your dreams that will help you out here.
You have to learn not to react,
and you have to learn not to be mean.
It’s a process
doable.
It will improve conditions right away.
You’re gettin’ ready to love.
You’re gettin’ ready to be a balanced people.
This is not wishy-washy handshake bullshit.
You do things for one another.
You don’t slap, hit, or cuss out.
You keep hatred out of your voice.
You be the real thing to each other.
You be a friend.
It’s all over your face
when you are.
The Israeli settler
or the Israeli enforcer
will see you a human being,
not a rock throwing mob,
and they will act accordingly,
when they’re embarrassed by their own actions.
You don’t know the bone of contention here.
Will the real humanity please stand up?
You stand up and show Israeli yours.
Obviously if they’re shooting you you can’t,
but barring that.
I’m not talking lambs to the slaughter.
You never surrender your dignity.
You just comply with regulations
a noble human being.
Show them who’s boss,
and it’s not the Jews.
It’s our heartfelt humanity.
It’s our great get along.
I’m liberty speaking,
and you’re looking for that equipment.
I’ve spoken enough to Israel
in a book I’ve left on Amazon—
definite flavor
reconciliation.
It’s not your own state you want.
It’s that:
to live at peace among the Jews equal citizens.
That’s the example Earth needs
to keep our world from blowing each other up.
Can you do that Arab citizen,
Palestinians of Israel,
Palestinians held hostage by Israel,
Palestinians in the land of Israel?
Under the Israeli banner
so bigger
than for Jews and Jews alone,
Palestinians can be free again.
If you look at the roads there’s no other way.
Between Jerusalem I’m Sorry
will point out the crossroads.
It’s a matter of seeing them
and not do anything shameful.
Love towards Israel,
can you fit this into your schedule?
If you’ll be one nation you must.
Put this in your resettlement plan.
Now Palestinian refugee,
give resettlement a chance,
cause there’s a secret ingredient to Israel.
It comes
if we labor together
for a common goal.
The secret ingredient is floating off the top of my head,
and it’s called the home for the human being.
Enough of religious politics.
God is not the wrathful, bigoted, murderer you all suppose.
Find God and see.
It will revolutionize your life,
and you’ll be kind to your fellow man.
Jews will not be the inescapable people,
Muslims will not be the only ones on earth worth.
You have to integrate.
You have to learn to live together.
This is your mandate to each other.
Not big enough
to be only kingpins
Mr. and Ms. Jew.
You have to concede their plight,
so they can see yours.
A resettled human being
has that in their plan:
keeping humanity safe.
You give it
to everybody around you:
safe passage from point A to point B,
and let’s go from there.
One key thing
rule book the exercise
of your warm humanity.
I know this sounds very arranged.
You keep time
I’ll give you something.
I would just love to.
That’s an Israeli learning what it means to be Israel:
really going to court
to learn our humanity.
It’s like you’re free there.
The Mother told them to do that.
That’s hope.
Photo by Douglas, celebrating my latest (62nd) birthday with him, Mithun, and Nithish
Evil our times.
It’s all our jail. [vision accompanying first two lines of one of the questions on the Together We Served Service Reflections interview I just re-posted on their site, as if this was an edit for the beginning of the answer, which one I don’t remember]
I said it right on Amazon.
He’d like to name you a place
where we could find ourselves.
It’s growin’ to war.
Delete that.
Don’t stick your fingers into your reflections.
They’re good.
They’re history,
of your own personal.
You just need them read.
Well let’s see how big men are,
how soft
on the board counts.
Life is a divine work until it’s finished.
It’s great in jars.
How much pepper spray?
We get lost here.
It’s not a divine moment
in everybody’s underwear.
And you said it:
we have to hate sex.
No, one just talkin’ while we stab each other with it,
or a hole grabs us and leaves.
You take care of man.
We beat each other with it,
but that’s not my lifelong toy.
I play with myself because of it—
some child grabbed his gun.
Now, if we’re just a folded joy,
we can get along better in the streets.
We can cash in on tomorrow.
We need to get rid of sex—
I think the mature person said this
about who they have become.
Do we get rid of it?
It’s just a football field.
We learn to outgrow it.
We put it down.
We do not condemn it.
It’s a mature decision we make.
We expect no one to follow us but us.
Well I think I’ve sowed my wild oats.
No one’s ever blocked sex from me.
I’ve had partners all my life.
I went from childhood memories
about our lust room
we had fun in
to a teenager doin’ it right.
I was a young adult party sex.
No one stopped me.
I never got punished for it.
I’m clear and easy on sex.
It’s not a hole in the ground.
It laughs in the breeze,
and it really feels good, you know?
We take it off now.
What am I, 30?
You’re not a kid anymore.
You’re at that mature age where life makes sense.
You don’t go screamin’ down the street if you cut your finger.
You’re not a nightclub in the kitchen anymore.
You’re free
from have to be with your buddies.
You’re doin’ sadhana.
It’s become the aim of life
God realization.
This is not boring, religious, clap trap.
You get long lasting ecstasies
in your body at times.
You’re inner life has opened to the Infinite.
You see visions
that represent things
that you need to grow.
The inner voice has taking you by the hand
and introduced you to life
where God leads it.
It’s an offer I gave you a wall but nobody’s comin’.
Your mind can stay silent sometimes,
and you love the world.
It bothers you less and less,
other people’s behavior.
Even your mistakes
are no cause for alarm.
Patience is painting your room,
and kindness drapes your social interaction.
You’re a strong person
that knows how to look at things.
You’re gettin’ trapped by sex now.
It’s spills you.
It does not hold your hand.
It’s a life force squeeze.
You’re tired of its pursuit.
How did we come here?
From all walks of life.
It’s an everybody does,
when they get old enough
to only pursue God.
This changes society.
Nay, this reinvents society.
We are bigger than machines.
We know how to handle ourselves even in love.
We’ve grown oceans bigger
than anything we look at.
The world is ready to evolve.
We can do this.
We can be free from sex,
if we know when the time has come to do so.
No premature ejaculation.
It has to be the right time.
It has to be real.
It has to be what we’re doin’ in life
to find God,
and you will hear it in your soul to give it up now.
You are the soul of society.
They’re uneducated,
anybody who denies this.
They don’t know what’s goin’ on.
They just want to stay kid.
How do we handle this with them?
With patience and honesty.
We don’t force them to comply.
World force does that,
as the soul force it truly is.
We’ve got such a long way to go
to reach our evolutionary path
mountaintop,
millennia,
and I’ve just given you a key ingredient
to get that done.
It’s wonderful you know?
free from sex.
You’re unhampered by life
in its sticky points.
You stand tall, proud, and free,
and you know the other half
and don’t have to mate with it anymore.
You are as much male as you are female
in the essence of yourself,
as you meet the world.
The gender of the body leads you,
but it doesn’t rule.
You’ve achieved balance in time.
This is cool.
You’re Hercules
and Diana.
You are fit do some dangerous big knife
or stay at home
and take care of the kids.
Now can I counsel you further?
Oh I’m around,
even in narrow we meet.
Come to my other business runners,
how the tackle game
plays with children,
or how dogs become human,
or how enlightenment speaks.
Join me will you,
on some other poem
battles down life
to a node.
They got a skinny little net,
the literary art house,
so you won’t find me there.
I’m on blogs and such
in my room
right here in front of humanity.
Let’s see this through:
no sex
when we get old enough to drop it.
Asses the future risk of poetry.
It will just sink.
It won’t even cut corners.
It will just sit there unread.
It’s just a bunch of words in a blender.
I don’t know what he’s talking about.
And now we’re in our teens.
It’s not innocent here.
They do it
despite we want them to stop.
It unbalances them.
Makes them crow.
It changes their minds.
It gives them a safe outlet
for their demands.
Now we’d need to stop pregnancy and disease,
not have them harm one another,
make it slightly difficult to get to
but not prevented or prohibited.
What have I said?
Teen sex.
We’d account for this
by all the kid sex they had,
where they’d learned to take turns
and be nice to one another,
before their genitals became armed.
Now I’m a roll in a hat.
End sexual hangups please.
In all this here we do that,
got it figured,
got it right.
Now you’ll blast me
with everything you can throw at me.
Now hear me out.
I’m in wisdom’s barn,
but I’m not settin’ down rules.
I’m understandin’ the animal we are
and seeing how we get beyond it.
You got it all wrong.
It’s not hide the genitals.
Let them play,
where appropriate does its measure
in the right age group,
where we are not keen on sex;
we just wanna feel down there
and have fun
with ourself or with friends.
We grow out of it you know.
You’ve seen it in this poem.
Has it terrified you?
Has it done anything at all but look at you?
Can we get over it.
Can we just make sex the plaything it was
before don’t do that got ahold of it
and put it down
when we’ve gotten bigger than ourselves?
Now test me please.
See how this works in public.
Under the right conditions
we are healthy human beings.
Some people are still reading this.
Some people have thrown it away.
Are you just afraid it’s a masturbate cushion?
If we stop right now
we’re at the end of the poem.
A risk teenager said.
Is it better to freeze?
We’re gonna try
hoppin’ a poem on Earth’s wheels.
The SF engineered
a better to see me with
well together we served.
Let’s see.
A military airlift,
hands brought me the breeze.
That’s the shot fired.
The bulwark of the law
has to undergo a transformation
in order to fit this into place.
Can you imagine the changes involved?
They’re bigger than sin.
They make us right
in our social relations
where we see attraction laid eyes
and mounted genitals and hands.
It changes us at the core
of our manipulable social relations.
We’re there
stuck at a roadblock,
women screamin’.
men peein’,
and everybody mad at one another.
Can you see that?
It’s right there in front of you
on communication.com,
on the nightly news.
It grabs the literary page
and hits up movie after movie
and theater television.
It’s a regular guest
on sope operas.
It’s everywhere we look
anywhere we got eyes
on the society of us.
it’s too tiring to see,
and we still keep it up.
Can we take it down,
when we get back to our old self
that has other gauges for life than sexual sin?
Pretty much all about Eve
is a sexual trauma notebook.
i don’t think this is smart land,
and here we go again another scandal in the news
this present poet creates.
I could’ve just stayed offline,
not bothered with dense matter,
and do my thing.
Am I stupid?
I’m not dumb.
Transparency
is the easiest way
to finish the world
a miracle on earth
enlighten us.
Martin Luther King Jr. at the Controls by Donny Lee Duke
The three best ways to keep a lovin’ song down:
keep it under wraps;
tear it apart;
or get it morally censored.
What will happen to this song?
Change the world
in person.
Chronos’ fuckin’ with ‘im.
What do we do with inner process?
Figure it out?
It’s discrepancy,
and I’m tired of it.
I can’t see anything straight.
What do I do?
Move off campus.
You mean not listen to You?
Don’t dwell on thought.
Don’t just sit there and think.
Try something different.
Image real to yourself.
Play with your thoughts as reality in front of your face.
You’re lookin’ at the world
you’re lookin’ at your thought.
Try this at home.
Image reality to yourself
where people really get your goat
they know you so well.
Try not to open the door with thought.
Be a blank mind.
Stretch this
to infinity.
Don’t stop tryin’.
Your effort is your sadhana.
This is not success or fail.
This is do.
You savvy sweetheart?
I wil try.
As I was sayin’:
I don’t trust inner process
to tell me what to do
in that moment in life.
Otherwise make it happen
to change the world,
and you know it can.
Why resist?
That little boy,
this goes deep,
the relationship I’m having with him.
It’s complicated in poetry.
Our lives are in sync.
We share thoughts and boundaries.
Our inner lives are in sync.
We temple together.
There’s a line of his muse
in my poetry
when he didn’t see it in my poetry.
I hear this and celebrate
close ties,
eyes that join
in inner vision.
Is this too much for him?
He’s just a kid.
I’m glad you asked.
You’re the engineer.
The little boy spills all in front of you.
You teach him how to handle himself,
play poetry,
what his nature house.
I never gave him the thought.
It just occurred
when the Mother,
the Mother and Sri Aurobindo,
they took that boy by the hand.
He became Their disciple.
Would you believe a bolt of lightning hit him in the chest
standing before Their last darshan couch
Supermental Day last?
That’s how it started.
The opening came then.
I was there to facilitate it,
to open him to God.
I am his sadhana master,
and that’s the basis of our relationship.
There’s no monkeys in the house.
I don’t cancel him down.
She’s had the dog
in her parents' room,
when they abuse
where the line are.
When it’s my turn
to be his parental figure,
I’m very careful with those lines.
I know he’s angry
about getting slapped and beat,
threatened with death.
Ice cream
I buy for him every day
in my care.
We talked about that.
We called it moral-minded.
I thought you understood
you don’t raise a kid with rules.
You can,
if you want a kid bound by rules.
I’m the horse guy look at me.
Put it right in your phone,
desire coming up.
Don’t put a hold on it.
Be free and easy with it.
Don’t stay there.
What’ll I do with it?
Put it in the iTunes Store,
avoid that button.
Just sit with it clear and easy.
Don’t let it push you.
Don’t give in to it.
Don’t even tickle your fancy with it.
We don’t beat it.
We sit it out,
wait it out.
It’s not wrong it’s just there.
It’s a smelling salts for reality.
It’s unique to you,
why would you say that?
Everybody has to deal with this.
We regulate it
with a host of laws and penalties
as if they work.
We do not let it be an excuse
for behavior.
Freewill comes into play
we are told.
We disclose it to each other.
We are ashamed by it.
We have children,
we block this sight from our own view.
We don’t see it
in our hands as we wash them,
in our eyes
as we see them so fabulously naked.
It’s there,
and time will show it to you,
if you look.
We run with this?
We don’t eat kids.
They’re special.
They are in the room
when we see it
in ourselves,
when desire comes up.
Desire comes and goes.
It’s in everybody’s life.
It has to be handled.
It has to be seen,
seen real.
We don’t play with it
around our children,
if we can help it.
That leads to dead ends,
and children get spanked and smacked on
and get molested.
You know this is true.
Don’t let it entertain your monkey.
I’ve given other examples
the right way sex can be with kids
in “The Use of Animal Freedom”.
Hear that one,
where sex and kids meet wrong today.
To Rumble’s house
farther to go.
Tamil Nadu,
a door of a red handle,
punch out man.
Tamil Nadu,
stay away from the red door.
Don’t beat your children,
slap them,
punch them around.
They’re precious to you.
Do you hear them scream?
I think this is written all over your paper.
Children don’t have it easy with you.
They suffer.
You don’t know this.
You can’t see your own hands
Mr. and Mrs. Abuse Children.
I call this up from the deeps.
It was that way with me
when I was little.
Now my kid has made me mad,
done something wrong,
or just bothered me.
Then it all comes up again,
my unhappy kid-dom,
and I operate on program.
I don’t care the position he’s in.
I just start slappin’.
I don’t know this hurts him
in his developmental function.
I have that right.
I’m his parent.
Thank you God.
What’s happening here?
Desire has found its home
in a socially approved response mechanism.
It’s condemned on TV.
The presenters themselves
wack their kids
off camera.
I can compare this to touching a vagina
in a little girl’s life,
but you don’t know this is more harmful,
hitting them in the head.
I’m sorry I’ve made you mad.
You don’t know the power of violence over children’s lives.
You don’t know the power of sex over children’s lives.
Both harm.
One gets out the shotgun.
A sexual cannon no.
Mr. and Mrs. Abuse-Their-Kids,
pay attention please.
Where thoughts occur,
it’s not a bright and shiny place,
is laced with uncertainty.
It’s all on holdin’ the world wrong.
You see this you look.
The Whole looks at us.
The fragment looks back.
We are separate beings in time,
an erroneous vision.
Whatta we say about thought?
It arises.
It comes.
It’s there.
And a tenebrous unknown
has the thinker’s brow.
What gulfs lit the night
when we looked at the world for the first time
in the handicap of thought.
It pressurizes time.
It makes of us mincemeat.
It will not stop even for death,
what narrow bridge that is.
You seen it?
How special thought is
to make sense of the world,
to help us help or slay one another,
to give us more feeding room,
to come up with plans,
to turn around and change the world.
It hammers nails
on the fence of time,
held apart in yummy synchronicity,
modes of thought,
and get some answers—
quite the hero.
Do you get me?
I get yah dog.
Put your blue down it doesn’t stink.
It just sits in the powder.
These are the conditions.
You’re talkin’ about that boy, ain’t yah?
Don’t worry,
I have the edification.
I’m gonna spell it out to you.
We have a different choice.
You’re not gonna bust us up.
You’re not gonna hurt him
or me.
You’re not gonna regulate our relationship.
You’re gonna leave us alone.
Humanity needs this vision.
We play the game.
We don’t commode.
We be convenient.
We are open to you.
Two seers in time
startle vision.
We're not gonna compromise vision.
We’re going to remain loyal and true
to our seership.
That boy,
a man he will become.
Housed under my roof?
And in line with his truth.
You can use another poet
who can bring down Earth
on the stars of Heaven,
let them know our plight
and our road beyond them.
Here we’re playin’
some Krishna tune.
We are a bright and shiny love in the wells of time.
We do not make you stink.
We are Heaven and Earth together,
and we are seers of the Sun of Truth.
Throw all that over here,
everything we need to survive,
a protected house
and a place for our dogs.
We need your help.
Without your protection
we get violated
Auroville Media Ashram.
You know we’re your entity,
and we see the master plan as one future Auroville.
It’s up to you.
It’s your movie.
We are the inner you were built on,
5th army,
and we’re here to see the Sun.
There’s no stopping us,
unless you throw away reason
and pin us to the ground.
We’re your seers Auroville,
he and I,
the little boy and me.
Stick with the plan:
Auroville becomes divinized,
and the Yoga works.
Great the visions lay, huh?
Hey, you give thirsty a drink,
and you feed us with your vision.
Okay poets,
do your thing.
It will be misunderstood.
Can a kid change parents if they’re not happy?
What would address the soul need?
Would the parents have a right to say no
if his soul wanted him to leave,
if that were God’s will,
if that’s what the Mother wanted?
I ask you that.
How do you tell that?
First we establish that art,
and art alone,
will show that child’s soul
and the divine will operating in his life,
that art inspired by inner voice and vision.
Can I show it to you?
My grandson wants to live with me.
My little student wants to be near his master.
A seer-poet in training
wants to learn the inner craft.
This is soul arranged,
and I’ll prove it
with poetry written from the inner voice,
the boy’s poetry,
set in a video the boy filmed
just being a kid.
You will see inner process
amazingly match the outside world.
The two are in sync.
I have other prizes to show you,
but this one is the crown achievement today:
“Menu of the Gods”.
Now go
and see this video.
[hover over the last three lines and click]
a man wearing a red suit and sunglasses standing in a grassy area, photo by Simeon Asenov, Lightning, photo by Mélody P, both on Unsplash, image Gimped by Donny.
Indian spirituality,
can you turn on the lights?
Can you be exhausted?
You are there for the world.
You’re everything,
not just a lonely mountain.
You encompass the world.
It gets bigger in you.
It tells us how to deal with consciousness,
and very few Indians know this.
It’s not their religion I’m talking about.
It’s not the worship of some deity in a temple.
It’s bigger than Hinduism.
It’s much bigger than nationalism.
Sri Aurobindo yoked this to the world,
unfortunately.
An occupied country had him in bounds.
He shed this yoke
Supermind
and love his nation.
Can we falter?
In the spirit of nationalism we can.
Bombs away.
Okay now we have to deal with humanity.
It’s tangible it’s real.
It’s not just an idea;
we’re all here.
It’s not bound by nation or creed.
It’s how we gather ourselves
to do good on earth.
It’s not the soul.
It does not encompass God.
It’s where we begin
to save our planet,
to survive.
Think about it:
you as important as me
in the nation roll call.
Why can’t this happen?
No spiritual vision.
You have to go deep inside yourself to see it,
beyond ego.
It’s not just believed in.
That falters.
You have to experience this.
You have to get there.
How many do?
A handful on the planet,
not enough yet to guide the others,
not enough yet to change
from nationalistic vision,
not enough yet to see us.
You don’t know the value of this vision
of the whole.
I say humanity but dogs are included.
The whole damn world’s there.
You feel fish.
You identify with everything.
You suffer for this.
You can’t live in society
around other people.
They expect you to adopt their enemies.
They expect you to be mean.
A terrible noise
someone sees you with a prostitute.
They think you’re buying her services.
You make no distinction between people.
They all need help.
You can’t grasp this.
It’s too foreign to your concepts
of how to behave in the world.
You give everybody equal time?
You fool.
Oh you have your attractions,
your preferences your paint,
if you’ve seen humanity
in spiritual vision,
and you’ve not yet shed ego.
Hello everybody,
that’s me.
Those preferences,
I don’t just use them.
I don’t just foster them.
They can be used by the grand Creatrix to do Her work,
if you know how to wrap your life around Her,
around the divine mother.
Look I’m Indian
in my questions and answers.
An American said that.
Sri Aurobindo
gives me tools
so I can climb mountains
and give you the word.
We all sit in the lap of the Mother.
This is all play out
dynamic duo.
It makes sense, doesn’t it?
We can put together the world that way.
It comes in spiritual vision.
I’m Indian
in the truth of things,
American
as I handle the world.
See all this word?
It’s not narrow-minded.
It’s not even George.
Gender fluid this is.
Okay I’m feminine here,
masculine there.
I don’t think we understand gender fluidity.
It’s a consequence of spiritual process.
You give birth to your feminine
if you’re masculine
and vice versa.
No genital has to be removed.
No surgery called for.
You are a man
and a woman
in the essence of yourself,
in your ground zero.
I hold this in spiritual hands.
I’ve gotten down to that core
in a rising sea of inner process
and dreamwork.
I didn’t just adopt a belief.
I’m dual,
but it’s okay to be man in my pull.
I am a man
as the world sees things.
Let me fight this
because I identify as a woman?
I don’t think you understand spiritual process.
It goes that deep.
You’re okay in whatever skin you wear,
but it’s taken years to put this on,
no quick fix.
How do you open the inner consciousness?
How to you grow a tree?
You must become conscious of inner process
and dream is just the beginning,
but it’s a way station.
It will get you there
if you keep going.
Lots of hard work and inner concentration.
Your world will suffer some,
your outer being.
To find the balance takes years.
You see the problem:
how hard this is.
Enter the inner teacher.
Who puts together your dreams?
You’re gonna find out.
You’re gonna see deity at play,
your soul,
a world arising,
the thoughts and intentions of others,
a demonic voice and presence,
and all the things that make you tick.
Now the inner teacher is all that and more.
It orchestrates things
to put you in touch with yourself.
It’s inexplicably large.
It sees past, present, and future.
It’s personal to you.
It’s the inner guide.
It’s there all the time,
buried under layers of you.
You gotta get to it.
It’s there.
So this is not a machine,
a spinning matrix of unconscious doing.
It’s not automatic.
How do you find it?
Continue looking
until it dawns on you it’s there.
You savvy?
You hear me?
Let’s keep going.
Let’s not stop.
How can you trust your inner guide?
It’s infallible.
It’s larger than time.
It don’t leave you alone.
It wants the welfare of everyone.
It doesn’t stop at nothing
to get you right.
It’s very beautiful.
It manifests art.
I’m showin’ you what it looks like
when it’s on loudspeakers.
Inner process guide,
you’re hearin’ it.
It will bottom you
all the way to the top.
It will hold your hand all the way to the top.
Can you see it now?
I’m showin’ it to yah,
years of inner process.
You gonna stab me for it?
You gonna do me in?
I did follow him.
I’m all over him.
Something happened.
People are coming in on me.
Are they gonna interrupt?
I can’t do anything.
I’m a sitting duck.
Humanity it’s up to you,
but how do we call your name?
You’ll just delete
everything online
powers that be.
என்னடா?
So vulnerable.
Donny you’re tumble.
What are you gonna do?
You’re just right here for the job.
All this gate,
you think we’re gonna shut it?
Why wouldn’t he inspire?
Yeah sit down I see the world.
You see the world?
12:30 [vision of this on a digital clock]
Yes?
You have to start looking,
all of you.
It’s gonna go through this.
That’s inevitable,
whether you like it or not.
No, not what I was hopin’.
I recorded news.
It’s like this:
objectional voices included.
You’ll see how I got here.
All that big TV,
what’s happened?
You want this term to end.
He’s the man of the hour.
Who is he?
I want you castrated.
By the time he gets at that computer
it won’t be castration that you’re worried about.
Bragg at war,
you know it’s at war.
They handle you.
You keep doin’ what you’re doin’.
You’re not in trouble.
Don’t dally.
Come on,
poet’s progress.
I mean we can’t have you
knowledge just sitting there.
Alright,
I have a solution.
Turn your switch on. [vision of someone holding my laptop a little askew and turning on a switch on it]
That means keep typing.
Okay guitar, [spoken in Douglas’s voice]
it’s just a Mac,
a close-up of syrup.
You are actually good.
It’s time for the bulletin board.
Give this wings.
It’s off the top of my head,
rough note.
I was in school.
What did actually camouflage?
I was blocked in America.
We were told to run,
as the Green Berets had gotten our medal.[1]
No but they threaten you.
We’ll see what they do.
Okay get this classroom online.
The figure we cast in time.
What's your new ID?
I fence towards the One.
The precise figure we cast in time.
August 2023 Military Memories Competition (on the internet site Together We Served)
Which song do you connect most to your time in military service? What specific memories does this song bring back for you?:
Aug 17, 2023, 3:43 AM
The Eye of the Tiger
It was a hot June afternoon at Camp Mackall, North Carolina, and we shuffled off the buses amid the yelling of NCO instructors shouting for us to line up shoulder to shoulder, our bags at our feet. It was a scurry; it was a hustle; we were hassled. There were over two hundred of us, not enough room for the place inside the gate we were, and so the line was a long L shape. I could feel my heart in my throat. This was it, what I’d been waiting for since I was seven and saw John Wayne in The Green Berets at a local drive-in. The Duke looked like a giant on that big screen, his green beret the headgear of a hero. At that moment, 1968, the Vietnam War was a nightly feature on the six o’clock News, small clips of U. S. soldiers at rest and in misery a staple of my childhood. At the movies it was just my dad and I, as this was a man-thing between us, and you must pardon me for such a masculine pronoun. He had wanted to join SF when it was being formed, or somewhere around that time, but he had decided not to reenlist.
The aspiration came to me. Sitting there absorbing every minute of that movie, it hit me like a self-realization: this was what I wanted to be. I don’t think he realized the weight of that in my consciousness because, when I told him, he looked down at me—we were in the front seat of a 1965 Mustang—and he smiled that patronizing smile adults give little kids when they are so earnest at being ridiculous. I was pigeon-toed and had asthma, a very small, little thing of a boy. “You know son, they select only the best for that.” He tried not to let on that he thought I was a weakling, but it came through in his incredulous smile. It didn’t matter. I knew I would be selected because I was the best. Of course I was. After all, I was the center of the world. At least that’s what my eyes and ears told me, seating my vision and hearing in the dead center of everything; smell, touch and taste put me there too, not to mention my thoughts, as you only hear your own. Those cheats—it’s a big and very disappointing fact of childhood that you discover your senses have been cheating you; you are not the center of the world, or, to put it more how it is: everybody else thinks they’re the center too.
One SF instructor was coming down one side of the L, and another was coming down another. They would stand in front of the SF candidate (we have to get one thing straight: the term Green Beret is for Hollywood; it’s called Special Forces, SF for short, and no, Rangers are not Special Forces). He would look you up and down and move on. The one that stood in front of me began to laugh. I became indignant, but of course I couldn’t show that. He said something like, “You, you want to be SF?!” I heard some splashes of laugher down the ranks. I burned inside. I think I said, “Yes sergeant!” but I don’t remember. It happened that I no longer had asthma, but I was super skinny and was still pigeon-toed, which really showed when I ran, and we’d had to run to get in line. I wasn’t the smallest in the class, but almost. The smallest guy had made the mistake of getting the SF patch tattooed on his arm before starting the Q course, and folks, you just don’t do something like that. He was hounded by the instructors until he quit, which did take awhile. I think he got to Phase II, as I remember him being hounded on a ruck march on Smoke Bomb Hill back at Bragg. At any rate, I don’t remember anyone standing in front of him and laughing on that fateful day (they hadn’t seen his tattoo, I gather), a day I’d be grateful for. It gave me the gumption to keep going. I had something to prove.
Enter “The Eye of the Tiger” by Survivor. It was 1982, and that song was at the top of the charts. Cliché today, back then that song was real. Incidentally, that was also the year the movie First Blood came out, and I saw it in a theater full of SFers, SF candidates and paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne. When the line in the film was spoken, “Those Green Berets, they’re real bad asses,” the theater erupted in the spurious noise of young men trying to sound like beasts. You know, that never sounds right. Anyway, right there in that line of men, just inside the gates of the greatest challenge in my young life so far, to win the green beret, I started singing that song in my mind. It was the part, “rising up to the challenge of our rival,” that really got me motivated. I have to explain here a little of the layered workings of our minds, specifically that mechanical part that just starts repeating things in the background of our conscious mind, especially songs, in odd moments. If you take the time to consider the moment, chances are it’ll be one that relates to that song, not in every instance, but in many I’ve found. Anyway, [1] it set a president. Anytime I got into trouble or wanted to quit, which was damn near every day, I either played that song in my heart and mind, or it just rose up in my mechanical mind playing on queue. I let it move me. It gave me strength; it gave me hope. I rose to that challenge with the help of that popular tune. I became a Green Beret, and you’ll have to pardon me for sounding Hollywood. It sounds so much better now than SFer in the early evening of my life.
It did fail me once though. I was in Robin Sage, Phase III. The G chief had given me the task of doing a recon before a body snatch mission, and that means kidnapping someone. I was a Sergeant E-5, an 11B2P, airborne infantry, and I was supposed to have a lot of experience in the field in my m.o.s. I had very little. I’d spent a year in the Horse Cavalry Platoon at Ft. Hood (now called the Horse Detachment), and other than being on a runaway wagon an hour before the Inaugural Parade for Ronald Regan, in Washington, D.C. in 1980, I hadn’t really gotten my juices going, and after that I spent about a year in a Pathfinder section doing mostly static line parachute demonstrations for Ft. Hood, never going to Pathfinder school, with very little actual field duty. As an SF candidate on a mock A team, composed of 12 people, I was in charge of half of the team. I was to lead my half on the body snatch mission, and so I had to go and get eyes on the target, alone and in the dark. That usually wasn’t a problem for me, like it was for many of the candidates. We as a species are so herd sour it’s not even funny. My dad had made me walk alone in the woods at night, or ride a horse alone for miles in the darkness, and if I didn’t do it, he’d threaten to whip me with the belt he had in his hand, not the best way to overcome fear, but I did get used to being alone in the woods at night. It’s off target, but he also made a slide for life over the pond we swam in (I was 10), so to get me to overcome my fear of heights. He was a serious man-maker, and I don’t cuss him for it, but, like I said, it wasn’t the best way to overcome fear, using the fear of a whipping to get me to face my fears. When he whipped me, he left welts on my legs and butt, and a bucking horse, the dark, or a high place were preferable to that.
So normally I would’ve been fine, but this time it was different. There was a Christian militia out there beating up SF candidates and taking their weapons. That news had sent a shiver of fear through our Robin Sage. I dreaded going out there on that recon, some several klicks from the G base. It was a mostly follow the railroad tracks sort of journey, and I arrived quite easily at the road the jeep was to be going down carrying the person we had to snatch, which was to be at 9 o’clock the next night. I hid in the bushes and mixed coco beverage powder, milk powder, and a couple of sugar packets together, making a Ranger pudding. It was my favorite thing to make out of a C ration, a comfort food that didn’t give me the comfort I wanted in that instance. I tried to shake off my fear, but then I heard men running on the tracks, and I looked, and sure enough, there were two men hightailing it down the tracks from the direction I’d come. It was the Christian militia looking for me. They must’ve seen me somehow. “The Eye of the Tiger” played in my mind, and whether I actually played it or it just played in my mechanical mind I don’t remember, but whatever the case it didn’t work, and I ditched the song in my thoughts, replacing it with, “Oh my God they’re after me!” And I got the fluff out of there, after a little wait to make sure they were far enough away. I think it was about 8:30, just a half hour before the scheduled jeep. I arrived at camp sometime later, relieved I’d made it, and I went to report to the G chief the militia were in the area. He wasn’t there, but one of his assistants was. “You idiot! That was the G chief going to town.” He had gone on a pogey bait run with an assistant. “You mean it wasn’t the Christian militia?”
It bears mentioning that, under interrogation by the local Sheriff, the SF candidate that had started the whole Christian militia thing had confessed he’d made it up to cover up having his weapon stolen from a wall locker in the 82nd Airborne barracks. He’d left Robin Sage and gone to meet some friends in the 82nd, to have a night on the town, stowing his M-16 in his friend’s wall locker. Big mistake. Someone stole it. After an initial, “What the hell do I do” moment, he concocted the plan, or that was how it was told to me. It’s amazing how such fine details go through the ranks. He had his friends rough him up some so to look like he’d been beaten up, and he went back to Robin Sage and told the G chief and his team leader, a captain, the big lie. Officers had recently started going though the Q Course with the enlisted, to make it harder for officers, who had up to that time gone through what was termed ‘The Gentlemen’s Course’. All this happened because a female captain had passed the course, and in those days, that was not to be, and they ended up failing her on a technicality after the fact. (For the record, I think she earned the beret.) I never learned what happened to that poor fool who just had to go party with the paratroopers. (82nd infantrymen were our OpFor during Robin Sage.) He did not become an SFer I’m pretty sure. What a gust of fear he stirred up, as I wasn’t the only SF candidate to swallow it, but I might admit I swallowed hard. Yeah, fake news is dangerous.
Hands down, the most poignant and pressing moment when “The Eye of the Tiger” saved my ass was back at Camp Mackall, at the end of the course, negotiating the infamous SF obstacle course. I swear to God, I heard a man break his thigh on the Dirty Name two events from there. The snap sound was sickening. My biggest moment of truth of the whole six months of SF training was a piece of cake to many if not most other candidates. You had to crawl 10 or 20 meters (it was miles to my mind) through a culvert that was about a meter underground, and it was full of SF candidates moving very slowly. I was so claustrophobic I could hardly ride an elevator without panic rising. I had a terror of tight places. There was an instructor at the top of the pit that led down to the entrance to the tunnel, and there wasn’t one at most of the other events. It seems I wasn’t the only claustrophobic candidate. I went down and looked into the tunnel and saw the men on their hands and knees moving slowly in it, just enough to make me hop back out of the pit and beg the instructor to let me skip it. He told me if I didn’t go in I didn’t pass, and here we were at the end of the course, and did I want to fail now? He wasn’t a jerk. Well, the only thing to do was play the song, this being the rival of rivals, and I made a conscious decision to play it in my mind; it didn’t just suddenly start playing in the mechanical mind. After a moment or so of letting that song motivate me, I jumped down there and went into the tunnel. About halfway I panicked, just went berserk, the men behind me groaning and complaining, as I’d come to a complete halt, but in my thrashing around, not going forward at all, I hit my head on the concrete above, and that snapped me out of it, and I made it through that tunnel. Everyone behind me was relieved. The feel of the open air after that battle, it did not smell like horse dung or the fear of night, let me tell you.
Our class was 6-82, the numbers designating the date, month and year, of that class of the Special Forces Qualification Course. When we came to attention as a class, we yelled, “6-82 WETSU!” the acronym meaning we eat this shit up, and I really did eat that shit up. When we first started the course, we were taken to an auditorium at the JFK Special Warfare Center. Some field grade officer stood at the mic on stage and told us to look at the man to our right and left. He said at the end of the course they wouldn’t be there. Sure enough, when we graduated, they marched us back into that auditorium, and two thirds of us were missing. I got a big surprise and made the Commandant’s List; the top 15% of the class. It happened too that I was called upon the stage to receive an ARCOM for becoming the Soldier of the Year of III Corps and Ft. Hood. I was so embarrassed, and the surprise on my fellow classmates’ faces, well, it didn’t say I was the best among them. The center of the world thing, it had vanished a long time ago. Every single day through that course I was sure I’d fail. I just racked up a lot of points. When others were kicked back in their tent during land navigation, let’s say, where we lost most of the class, I was out there doing it, every practice run. Pardon me if tears are welling up writing this. I am very proud to have won the green beret.
You know how it is as you get old. You look back on your life a lot. If I could pick a time to return to in my life, it would be to be back in the Q Course. That was the time of my life, and I only knew at the time it was tough, and I couldn’t wait for it to end. Isn’t that just so human? I’m listening to “The Eye of the Tiger” now, my headphones on as I write this. I’m in that tiger’s eye once again at 62. I’ve just published three books on most of the major e-book sites on the net, and I’ve stood up and spoken my own personal truth, with courage and sincerity, without hatred and anger, but I have little doubt most of you will not think me the best among us, but it’s in self-sacrifice that we are at our best. I’ve been seeking spiritual enlightenment for these past 30 years, and that’s not something you get to by rules and regulations, or even the one, two, and three of steps. You wing it in such a way you win it. Life is so short to live in line. You must understand that Green Berets aren’t soldiers who always go by the book. We are unconventional, and that means thinking and living outside of the box. SF, please don’t ever forget that. In any event, you can read my military memoir here, which is patterned after the service reflections of Together We Served, called An American Story: https://harms-end.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/an-amercan-story-3.pdf
[1] I’ve edited the story since the competition, from “I have to explain here…” to the word “Anyway,” and in the three other places the mechanical mind is mentioned in the story, the first later in the same paragraph and in the 6th and 8th paragraphs.
And anything like that means human.
No problem,
Lisa is fine.
Look out,
are you prepared to see a human dog?
What he told you:
Lisa is out and about;
her human hand
gave Mugu a lift.
This is extraordinary.
If we just
could accept this as true,
it would mean so much to us
magnificent.
Oh I get it.
We’ve brought humanity to bear,
and this has made it so much brighter.
This has raised its stakes.
We mean more because of this
monumental.
Well I’ll be damned.
Lisa’s got the world in her paws,
and she’s making it a safer place,
and she’s helping it survive.
Who would’ve thought of it?
Mugu
is A-okay.
She’s rescued him.
Can you believe it?
She’s rescued him,
and I’m happy now.
You’re good to go
Mugu.
You’re safe now.
Your journey up has begun.
You’re on your way.
The world’s a deeper place because of this.
This is computer heaven.
This is wonderful news.
We will celebrate this
as a milestone
when we are ourselves again
together on high,
as nothing goes unnoticed,
and what happens between two people can save the world.
I’ve recorded this.
Wait and see.
Oh my God it’s real.
It’s really real.
It makes you dizzy
just to think about it.
Can you grasp this?
She’s wonderful.
She’s there.
She’s a human dog,
and she’s got Mugu safe and sound.
How incredible is that?
Let’s see her come in
and show me where she’s at,
so I can love on her,
and we don’t
traffic our problems.
Lisa’s on the case
right here at the house.
She’s our guard dog,
so human she can help us with our human problems.
On our side
we have so much love and hope.
You don’t understand what hope means.
It’s what gets us through.
Reset boundaries
to enlightenment
and reset myself there.
That’s comin’ up the road.
Are we ready children?
We can almost see it now.
It’s right there in front of us,
and how wonderful is that?
I can’t get drunk.
Lonely can.
I can’t do anything but sit here and cry.
I’m devastated.
Help me please.
You’ve got response.
Listen to me Mugu.
The Mother’s your electricity,
And she’s right there with you.
Hold her hand.
Just try.
I’m on your side.
It’s my job to get you outta there.
I need you to trust me Mugu.
Go ahead and move around.
It’s living space.
I don’t know where you’ll find other people but they’re there.
You’re in Nature.
It’s just spilled over into death.
No, you didn’t die before your time.
You’re in the appointment with death.
It’s time for you to move on.
I’m here to help you.
Just keep going.
Feel my breath upon your shoulder.
Let’s get you outta there.
Don’t falter.
Your attitude determines your state.
Don’t call things with your mind.
Bad things will come.
They manifest early there.
Think as high as you can
and keep going.
Lessen your state,
the heaviness of it,
the pain.
Just reach out your hand
and hold the Mother’s.
Hold it tightly.
She’s there.
I put your will in her,
and I’m here too.
I’m not leavin’
until you’re safe.
I’m really here.
Don’t doubt that.
The thoughts you are getting are from me.
I’m pressing in on your thoughts.
I hear you suffer,
and I’m here to help.
I love you Mugu,
and I have the knowledge and the power
to put you on my shoulders
and get you outta there.
Come, let’s go.
Let’s get you a horse.
That’s a moment Lisa.
Call her name.
It will take some time but she will come.
She’s ready for you.
She’s learned so much since her death.
Look for her now.
That Rottweiler will find you.
Just call her name.
Can you do that?
That’s a good purpose.
It will make you shine.
It will ground you,
and you’re well on your way to better.
Now go.
There you are mountain
In just a few steps.
Not protected
suffering so.
Come out of your grief
before the monsters come.
You will call them with your grief.
Lift your head up.
Shake it off
and start your journey.
This is happening to you now.
There are brighter days ahead,
but you have to will them.
Things manifest there,
like I said,
directly from your thoughts.
You’re not on Earth anymore.
You’re in some in-between place,
and it’s time to get movin’.
Let’s go.
Did he mess up?
Wants to Asiya.
He wants to break that guy’s neck.
Held obstacles,
and how could you not want revenge
murdered by someone.
Two live buttons:
Lisa and the Mother.
Mugu, 24, my adopted son (unofficially), was killed around 3 in the morning August 14th. He was murdered, stabbed in the heart with a knife, and there were multiple stabs wounds. He was trying to help in a domestic dispute, protecting the woman, and the man killed him. It was really a revenge killing, as Mugu had married the girl Asiya had wanted to marry, some three years ago. He had threatened to kill Mugu many times. I’m sorry to say that Asiya is also my adopted son. He’s now in jail. It’s more ironic than that. When Asiya was seven, his father murdered his mother and spent several years in prison. We unofficially adopted him when he was 10, as his family was going to send him to a hostel for the mentally ill, as he hardly spoke. That changed when he came to live with us, and he became a normal, sweet kid. It was a late puberty that saw the violence rise, and we didn’t even know it was there, but he still got all the way to his third year in art college before it defeated him. It happened that he threatened to hit a professor and was kicked out. He went downhill from there, all the way to murdering his brother. They grew up together, their latter childhood years at least. It’s all such a tragedy.
The poem above is a representation of a real conversation I had with Mugu on the other side, me in my bed in trance picking up on his thoughts, my muse putting them in its words, and me sending him the thoughts the of the poem. They probably came into his mind in Tamil and disguised as his own thoughts, but different ones than the ones that he was having, and there would be something about them that would make him question if there were not from me, or at least not his own, someone trying to help. In his abject despair, it would be hard for him to believe that. I will keep trying. The poem resulted from me sitting next to his body for about an hour, clearing my mind and letting him in. Earlier, a couple of hours after his death, right at the beginning of dawn, I had a very quick vision of him sitting in some small space, hidden from the large warehouse-like room it was a part of, with his knees drawn up to his chest, his face down on his knees. He was in shock. I only had time to say, “There you are!” before the dream vision ended.
I can only tell you that it doesn’t matter what you believe, when we die only our body does, and we pass into the city of the dead. Especially right after death, before and during the funeral, as was the case here, the veil is the thinnest between the living and the dead, but, as time passes, the dead ‘see’ here less and less. I am sorry to tell you there are no instructions when we die, no guidebook, and if you have no real faith in the divine or a divine, or in a larger reality, you’re just lost for some time, unable to see the help ready at hand because you don’t believe it’s there. Eventually, you get your feet under you again so to speak, and rise towards paradise, soul home, and another life, but you have to admit the spiritual and soul reality.
One paragraph can’t possibly account for the variety of death in human experience. And I cannot tell you if the moment of death is a beatific experience for all or most, a joyfully going into a bright light or what have you. I’m speaking in this post of the arrival on the death plane, where you end up after dying. Of course a violent death, especially being murdered suddenly, would put you in a darker place, at least initially. It might take some time for you to go to where your development would put you, speaking in terms of soul development, but you’d go there. Mugu wasn’t a person of either soul development or faith I should add, but he wasn’t a degenerate by any means. He had a good heart and an innocence about him. He didn’t deserve to die. It bears mentioning that it doesn’t so much matter what your outer or surface person believes or has faith in, in regards to a higher power, but what your inner being does. It’s much vaster and is what we are when we dream, and if you do a lot of experimentation with lucid dreaming, you discover there is a difference between the inner and outer being, and it’s the inner being that determines the outer and not the other way around. With those of us largely unconscious of our inner being, things take longer to manifest into the outer, any faith in a higher power the inner might have for example, which would come into play upon death, since you are on the inner plane and hence are your inner self. So you might think you’re an atheist or agnostic, but, upon dying, you find out you really aren’t, and hence you’re not as lost.
Who stays close to skyscrapers?
A digital bureaucracy
won’t look at my poetry.
I don’t know what it means.
Man’s critical college parallel universe was
thrown into poetry.
I don’t think no one reads him,
even though it was a parallel universe.
Did I just say that?
You like mules
that have no meaning behind them
when they’re pullin’ a plough.
You don’t like to figure out stuff.
I don’t think you like meaning.
It’s read it’s bread.
Stop and take a look no way.
How do we bring down poetry into the universe?
My God the spheres here.
I can make up a poem to please yah.
See Dick run after Jane?
Okay get out of the knob Joe.
Meaning is paradise.
It’s not your guttural wear.
The random nonsense of meaning words,
did I just say paradise?
I’m at a loss for words.
Nobody understands me.
Critical Hank,
is that self-meaning or self-pity?
What do you see in an enemy?
A reader.
I’m all out of poems,
and they just comin’.
I’m really not doin’ this.
Poetry has grabbed my testicles and is squeezing them.
In silence no one can hear you scream.
That’s what my mind dirts,
when poetry comes in my window.
I’m liftin’ silence to read it.
It gets you all trashed
in dirt modules,
the mind’s interference,
and unfortunately the more trashed the more you like it.
I hear the mind there
all readable by rationality.
The mind likes symmetry.
I put a poem in pieces
where silence holds my poem.
I’m tryin’ to say this pure verse,
really, really from the silence,
unadulterated
by anything mind can give.
Do you see me there?
I’m listenin’ hard.
Like I say I come in pieces.
How do you value a poem?
It’s meaningful to you.
I don’t think you’re concerned with the silence.
The root of poetry has no meaning
to someone who looks at stuff all the time.
Pure abstractness’s not what I’m talkin’ about.
If you let it happen,
meaning would come in time
personal to you.
It would hit you on the nose
a vehicle trip.
I can't get at this abstraction.
Well can you let poetry breathe,
take off your thinking cap a moment?
You’re gonna be taken for a ride kid
in the hit you of your stuff,
in the node of your surround things.
Poetry will take you somewhere
out of yourself
in the larger spheres.
It has meaning
all wrapped up in purpose,
and we clear here.
Poetry is a vehicle of meaning
that will look at you in your underwear.
Are you desnudo?
Wow, amazing,
can you come read your poetry?
Can we understand your poetry together with silence?
I think the reader’s talking to me again.
Okay let’s say some hard words.
I’m a stallion in Paris.
When I look through my radar I see you.
I’ve opened my first book.
It’s just terrible.
It’s just terrible.
We can reader handle a book,
shall we?
You pronounce it better,
that publication.
They say I’m crazy.
And a book shall lead them,
trusting you.
You’re open.
You can definitely see the Sun.
Get out of the way,
and it will rain down upon us
how to do poetry,
be happy with what you make in a better way.
Tall recognition
of you’ve got some answers,
the answer,
despite failure.
I put failure in.
You got the Sun in your eyes.
You can check and see if it’s there.
Read this one.
You’re having a beautiful Yahtzee surprise.
Sit Sharma you have done.
A poet has his word out.
Shoulder gets a new test.
Oh, this is getting down to me,
the purport of poetry:
be meaning and don’t expect anything in return.
I think we just said the universe.
How do we do that,
get we and put it in a higher position?
Yeah, okay, struggle to survive.
Why am I gaslighting this?
I broke through the crowd and I silenced the sound.
They wondered if I was to blame
for Mary. [This two above lines heard sung by Bob Ayala, “The Song of Joseph”]
Into the divine,
can I take you?
There’s no struggling with,
there’s no struggling with another person.
Goddamn dude,
it was nothing but
I wonder why the U. S. has so many problems controllin’ that track right there. [line spoken at the end of a dream, a question I asked, a Green Beret in the dream, seeing a heavily armed train belonging to the Taliban insurgents, the track being representative of the field of Afghanistan while the U. S. was still there]
Hey come here—
wastin’ time. [heard sung by Dobie Gray, “Drift Away”]
Just don’t bombard me okay?
Go and see that
as a blockbuster. [vision of having gone to the ocean floor to see the wreck of the Titanic]
Harry Potter,
you’re tryin’ to swim
unlimited.
We’ll be right back.
That must be the phone.
Now bring meaning down to time.
I’m every bit in your skyscraper.
Bring me down-to-earth, will yah?
Get me outta here,
a lonely meaning in time.
I’m all about your reveille post.
Open up to the meanings you have missed.
I’m only there.
I should explain that this poem was posted for just a few moments on Oct. 26, 2022 and then reverted to draft so to submit to Poetry Magazine, and it took eight months for them to reply. Here is their email in regards to this poem, dated May 18, 2023:
Dear Donny Duke,
Thank you for sending your work to POETRY magazine—and thank you, too, for your patience as you waited for our response.
We won’t be publishing anything from your submission, but we wish you the best of luck in publishing it elsewhere and appreciate you sending it our way.
Thanks so much for your support of the magazine. We hope you are as safe and well as can be.
Noah Pozner, 6, photo taken on Nov. 13, 2012 and provided by the family via The Washington Post
It’s a helicopter.
The issues are hands.
Listen to these.
It’s in the papers now:
how do we gather our children
and they’re all around us dead?
I see the faces now,
captured on camera
of a parent’s woe.
A little first grader,
I gave him a bath in the sink.
He was so little.
My God he was adorable.
I washed him clean.
The towel had so much laughter on it,
and I held my little boy dry to sleep.
What a memory gun,
someone took it and cut me up with it.
Alex Jones bled conspiracy.
Oh they love their guns.
Gets children murdered,
and slaps us with their memory.
Is this right?
Oh I love you momma.
Close the door you silly thing,
and go to school.
I love you too falls on my lips
every time I turn around.
Did I tell you that my sweet little boy?
Good God it hurts.
The world was smashed in my mirror.
I don’t trust it now.
It’s got sinister eyes.
I pound my head against the wall.
I don’t know how to fight this.
I don’t know what to do.
The tears still come so easily.
Can you see me son?
Will you be with me again?
This is terrible live action.
We call it Sandy Hook.
It will never end.
That hook rends my heart,
but it’s made of sand and I cannot grasp it out.
Oh the meaning in names.
Have you ever looked at that?
Yes, yes there’s a conspiracy,
in the very ground of reality itself.
I don’t know what’s going on.
This is just too much for me.
They love their guns more than murdered children.
I don’t understand this game.
Can we get at reality,
and put it in front of our faces,
so we see what’s going on?
Does this all have to be about your rights?
Look, Sandy Hook happened.
I was there—
and this is humanity please;
my heart was shot that day.
Can you tell a parent in a room their child didn’t die,
and that room is their child’s,
and all the dead child’s things stare back at them,
and they feel like killing themselves?
Would you feel that?
I would like to show you something.
It’s a horror show.
The worst reality in the world
opened fire on our children,
a little bit of hell in the room.
Can you feel their fear,
their fright?
Can hear their cries,
their oh my God their screams?
Can you hold their hand?
That’s what we’re here for.
Can you?
I want you to be there
in your mind’s eye,
in your heart’s chamber,
when you salute our flag.
Oh I’m not asking this every time,
just enough to matter,
just enough for a better America,
where we’ll be safe again
from a defeated imagination
that sees a conspiracy behind every bush
that get us all to hate.
Oh special interests groups I’m sorry,
you’re just special interest groups.
Love America, you know?
And that’s not a flag,
a founding father,
this political party or that.
It’s not even a revolution.
It’s us you and me,
Americans.
You heard the Sandy Hook massacre.
Whatever.
At the flywheel
of another one's comin',
and everybody knows that for sure.
What can we do?
I can stick out hate
and identify the root of the problem,
the hate that's out there mixin' with everybody,
and who would believe me?
Who would even see its massive spread among us
in every room in humanity?
This is my business,
takin' your hatred and showin' it to yah.
You hate me more than serial killers.
In America no one is hated more.
Jesus Christ, the pedophile.
Now on earth hello.
Harm's End 